FUTURAMA Season 8, Episode 9: THE PRINCE AND THE PRODUCT

Written By:

Sol Harris

by Sol Harris

Season 8 of Futurama has been a curious thing. With only one further episode left to go, there’s an argument that it’s been the most consistent season of the show since the original Fox run. Even big fans of the Comedy Central years will readily admit that they were hit and miss. Season 8 hasn’t really had any major misses to date, but it’s also lacking a real hit – an episode that justifies them coming back from the beautiful finale that was Meanwhile. There’s a lot of weight riding on next week’s season finale, All the Way Down, because this week’s The Prince and the Product certainly isn’t it.

While it can be said that season 8 doesn’t really have any major misses, that was only true up until now. The Prince and the Product is a somewhat baffling entry for Futurama that stands as one of the worst episodes of the show to date. The series has always had a strange love for the traditional three-part cartoon anthology format pioneered by The Simpsons’ annual Treehouse of Horror episodes. They produced two Anthology of Interest episodes in the Fox run, in which characters would ask questions to The What If Machine, an invention The Professor made that can show you any hypothetical scenario imaginable.

When the show was revived on Comedy Central, people thought Anthology of Interest III was a given, but the writers instead opted to come up with a brand new anthology premise every broadcast season, with season six containing both the wonderful “Reincarnation” (in which the show is reimagined in three different animation styles) and The Futurama Holiday Spectacular (which was received so poorly, it’s almost as though the episode was bad on purpose as an intentional tip of the hat to The Star Wars Holiday Special). Season 7 continued the trend with Naturama and the unfairly maligned Saturday Morning Fun Pit.

Given that the batting average of these anthology episodes is quite low, with all of the revival’s entries except for Reincarnation frequently being named in conversations about the show’s worst episode, when it was announced that this revival would consist of 10-episode seasons, most people assumed anthology episodes would become a thing of the past. It seems almost wasteful to spend an entire 10% of each new season on a throwaway concept that could easily be seen as filler and, based on the show’s past performances, has an extremely high chance of not going down well.

But the show has stuck to its guns, and this week’s new episode is The Prince and the Product, featuring a strangely avant-garde format with a conventional episode being interrupted by extensive commercials featuring the show’s characters reimagined as toys. While it’s nice to see the return of an extensive wraparound sequence in an episode like this (no doubt the result of the slightly longer runtime now that the show is on Hulu), it leads to one of the biggest issues with the episode, which is that there’s absolutely no thematic link between anything happening in the commercials and the main show. One of the reasons that Reincarnation worked so beautifully is how each segment thematically tied together by having the story climax with something that couldn’t be depicted in that particular animation style. The events of these sequences are completely and utterly arbitrary by comparison.

In fact, they’re worse than arbitrary. Very little in the storylines actually makes any significant use of the fact that the characters are now toys. The Round Wheels segment forgets that the characters have been reimagined as toy cars almost immediately so that they can do a 20-years-too-late parody of The Ring with the cars all watching a cursed videotape. And if that sounds bad, wait until you try to unpack the logistics of the twist-reveal that the killer was actually Zoidberg, upset that the rest of the crew was repeatedly leaving him out. That part vaguely adds up, but how did he produce a short film, generate the word of mouth of it being cursed to the point that it’s played on the news and then phone all of the characters using a female voice in a way that brainwashes them and causes them to drive to their doom. Or here’s another question: why make the film and the phone calls in the first place if he can just brainwash people? If it sounds lazy or completely and utterly half-baked, that’s because it’s a fair description of this episode in general.

The wraparound sequence might have been fun, but the characters behave completely and utterly out of character in a way that’s so world-breaking that the end of the episode tries to write it off as the result of a magic spell. The entire thing is handled so poorly that you question whether the final moments that serve no purpose other than to establish that even the wraparound is non-canon were a hasty addition to effectively undo the episode.

Even those who hate Futurama‘s anthology episodes generally sit in agreement that they typically offer a wonderful showcase of the show’s visuals. Reincarnation features some of Futurama‘s most beautiful animation to date, and even something like Naturama is filled to the brim with fantastic, inventive new character designs. The Prince and the Product feels weirdly visually stilted. The direction and staging are, at best, awkward, and a great deal of the animation looks unusually low-grade. The vast ocean sequences in the Rubber Ducks segment look utterly bland in a way that goes far beyond the joke of the scene, and many of the new character designs (particularly those in the first segment, Windos) are downright hideous.

Still, this is Futurama, and even at its worst, the show is entertaining while managing to elicit a few chuckles. The episode isn’t (quite) the worst episode of Futurama ever made, and, unlike, say, The Simpsons, Futurama still maintains an excellent quality whereby even the worst episode is better than 90% of television out there.

This won’t be the last anthology episode of Futurama. Next year’s season 9 is set to feature The Futurama Mystery Liberry, which – based on the title – seems almost certain to see the characters reimagined in three famous detective novels via the long-awaited return of the Brain Spawn (who trapped the characters inside fictional worlds from novels in a previous, canon episode). Here’s hoping they learn from their mistakes here and ensure that one lives up to its potential.