1ACV03: I, Roommate First UK airing: Sky One, 8:00pm, 5-10-99 (my birthday!) "You call that an antenna?" Who would have thought it? An episode that actually makes Bender into a sympathetic character! Obviously robots are people too. 'Roommate' did what many of my personal favourite Simpsons episodes do -- take an everyday situation, and spin it into something extraordinary. The simple act of Fry looking for an apartment generated some truly outstanding jokes, and even as a non-American I completely got the one about New Jersey. But while on the surface it might look like Fry's episode, it's Bender who gets to develop as a personality rather than just a series of booze and theft jokes. While comedies can't generally let their characters change, since that would screw up the premise, the best ones do allow us to see other sides of the people in them. Thinking about it, my favourite Simpson is probably Lisa, because she's the one who has the most going on inside and doesn't necessarily behave in the obvious way in a given situation. However, most people seem to prefer the 'Homer becomes a [X]' episodes. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I don't know whether that says more about me or 'most people'. What this episode shows is that while on the surface they're fairly callous (which, let's face it, makes for better comedy), the Planet Express crew actually do care about each other underneath. Futurama, even at this early stage in its life, proved that it had the right balance -- too much bonding and it's off into mushiness territory, but too little and you end up like Veronica's Closet or Just Shoot Me or any number of other middle-of-the-road sitcoms, where you wonder why the hell these people stay together at all. Bender's descent into non-alcoholism was brilliantly done (the Lost Weekend-inspired neon signs were superb), and I genuinely didn't think he'd go through with snipping off 'Little Bender' just to stay with Fry. Of course it didn't matter, since, as Fry would later observe, in television everything's back to normal by the end of the episode. Still, it gave Bender an extra dimension -- or, since the best he can ever hope for is to be two-dimensional, half of one at least. The only downside of the episode was the overplaying of the 'All My Circuits' gag. Yes, we know that daytime soaps are mindless and full of ludicrous plot twists, but these jokes were done to death on Soap 20 years ago, and more recently got a thorough exhumation in the 'Dr Drake Ramore' episodes of Friends. And now I find out that Calculon and co are set to return in season two. D', and indeed, oh. Rating: Footnote: There's an episode of Space: 1999 ('Brian The Brain') which also features a robot with a very strong attachment to his 'antenna', something that gains an amusing new twist after watching 1ACV03. Probably a coincidence, but I thought I'd mention it.