FUTURAMA Season 8, Episode 7: RAGE AGAINST THE VACCINE

Written By:

Sol Harris

by Sol Harris

Every revival of Futurama has been heavily criticised for turning the show’s attention to current events. The show has never shied away from using topical jumping off-points, but perhaps there’s so much distance now that we forget that episodes from the original run did this, too. I Dated a Robot was, in part, a Napster satire, while Three Hundred Big Boys was directly riffing on then-President George W. Bush’s (scuppered) plans to issue a $300 nationwide tax rebate. The show’s initial return in 2010 drew heavy ire for wading straight into topical waters, giving us Proposition Infinity (a Prop 8 satire) and Attack of the Killer App (their iPhone episode) straight out of the gate. It wasn’t helped that Attack of the Killer App was a strong contender for the worst episode of the show up until that point.

With the criticism Season 6 received, you might think that the writers would have opted to avoid topical episodes upon their return this time around, but so far, Season 8 has been rife with them. It suggests that this isn’t something the show does because it’s out of ideas and, more, that the writers start each revival by trying to catch up with all the ground they would have covered if they hadn’t been off the air for (in this case) over ten years. How the West Was 1010001 was a BitCoin satire; Related to Items You’ve Viewed is all about Amazon (well, Momazon), and even next week’s episode, Zapp Gets Canceled is set to be a direct take on cancel culture. The most egregious example of all has got to be this week’s episode, Rage Against the Vaccine, which, as the name suggests, is all about COVID.

It’s the title that had fans most worried before its release – and perhaps with good cause. Not only had Futurama already done a pandemic episode back in 2011’s Cold Warriors (where Fry inadvertently reintroduces the common cold into a future society that had eradicated it), but, with the exception of one of two pieces of media produced and released actually during the lockdowns as they happened, no one has really managed to do anything retrospective about COVID that’s remotely worthwhile yet.

Rage Against the Vaccine isn’t going to change any opinions on that front. An upsetting amount of the gags boil down to little more than reminding you that things exist (and, in this case, they’re mostly things we’d be happy to forget about). After the COVID (sorry, explovid) virus emerges from the mutant population in the sewers, causing characters to become uncontrollably irritable, we’re treated to scenes of our characters working from home via Zoom (sorry, Gloom) where The Professor accidentally engages a cat (sorry, teddybear) filter, as well as misinformation being spread on Facebook (sorry, Facebag) and characters wearing facemasks in ways that won’t offer them any actual protection (sorry… actually no, they just do this one as it is).

The episode attempts to pull off a sort of ensemble piece with numerous plot threads, but none of them really have enough weight or purpose to justify their existence. Leela gets the virus, and Fry cares for her. The Professor attempts to develop a vaccine, and Amy flitters back and forth between believing and poopooing misinformation based on what the scene needs her to do at the time. One subplot sees Lrrr (ruler of the Planet Omicron Persei 8) leading yet another Omicronian invasion against Earth and seems to exist purely to set up the show’s obligatory Omicron variant gag before being entirely dropped.

The episode’s saving grace comes in the form of Hermes’ plot. After deciding that the symptoms of explovid (irrational rage, spread through saliva, constant moaning) sound like a type of zombieism, he embarks on a quest to New New Orleans to get to the bottom of things and find a cure using voodoo. Hermes has always been something of a dark horse when it comes to his solo adventures. He’s not a character you’d really expect to be able to carry the show, and yet his episodes always seem to work remarkably well. New New Orleans is a fun, vibrant new location for us to see, with some fantastic animation and character design. It’s a shame the episode doesn’t spend more time there.

Especially as, when Rage Against the Vaccine isn’t doing lazy, one-to-one COVID spoof jokes, it’s actually quite funny. Bender joins a riot and attempts to “kill all humans” only to ask, “what virus?” when someone points out that robots shouldn’t affected by it. Another great laugh comes when we see Kif and Zapp manning their ship’s gun turrets in defence against the Omicronian invaders, only for the reveal that they’re trying to shoot each other, blind with rage, instead. The episode’s ending on an inverted Arthur C. Clarke quote is also a lovely touch.

After a string of episodes suggesting that the show was still on the ascent, it’s disheartening that Rage Against the Vaccine is undoubtedly one of the season’s weakest so far. And with only three episodes left this season – one of which is the aforementioned Zapp Gets Canceled and another being an anthology episode with the characters as toys – it’s starting to look like Season 8 won’t be providing us with a single all-time classic episode of the show at all. That said, if this is as bad as season 8, then that’s actually pretty amazing because none of these episodes have been truly bad. Rage Against the Vaccine might be lesser Futurama, but it’s still great television.