2ACV13: Bender Gets Made First UK airing: Sky One, 7:00pm, 25-6-00 "Zubans? Those are the finest cigars in the universe! I can stink up a whole maternity ward with one of those things!" I just got next month's issue of Cable Guide. Good old Sky -- just when you think they can't possibly wind you up any more, they surprise you once again. With only three more episodes left in this season of Futurama, Mr Murdoch's British outpost has decided to pre-empt next week's episode ('Mother's Day') with a special concert by 5ive. 5ive, for fuck's sake! If they're not familiar to those outside the UK, just imagine the Backstreet Boys, only sucking even worse. Let's see, they could have pre-empted a repeat of Voyager, two repeats of The Simpsons or a repeat of Buffy, but no, the obvious thing to do is kick off the brand-new episodes of Futurama and Third Rock. Assholes. If not for the fact that the only TV shows I currently watch are actually all on Sky (and in fact all on Sunday) I'd be tempted to cancel my subscription... But anyway, this week's episode awaits. For some reason, I'd got it into my head that the plot of this episode would see Bender forced to whack, as it were, Elzar, so the hijacking of the Planet Express ship came as a pleasant plot surprise. I like the idea of inaccurate spoilers, actually, since it makes the real episodes so much more entertaining when they go in an unexpected direction. Unexpected directions, to be honest, would have been welcomed. In keeping with most of the last several episodes, 'Bender Gets Made' was a middling story, with a few genuinely funny jokes attached to an unremarkable plot and a bunch of predictable gags that don't really go anywhere. Has Futurama passed its peak already? I certainly hope not -- what would I do without this simple prop to occupy my time? The thing is that animated mafia spoofing has already been done -- pretty damn well -- by The Simpsons in the various appearances of Fat Tony and his goons, and the main problem with 'Bender Gets Made' is that it seems content to cover familiar ground with only minor advantage taken of the opportunities for sci-fi comedic twists. Add to this the fact that (in the UK, at least) the whole idea of a robot Godfather spoof was done 20 years ago (sweet zombie Jesus, was it that long? I feel really old) in the 'Day Of The Droids' story in 2000AD's Robohunter comic strip, and the whole episode felt rather dated. Godfather pisstakes are ten a penny by now, so if you're going to do a new one you need to add a new twist -- and surprisingly, the whole robot angle wasn't strong enough to pay off. And then the end arrives. Well, it's not so much an end, more of a stop. The show reaches the 20 minute mark, realises that it's out of time, and hurriedly swats at the reset button in true Star Trek fashion to bring things to a sudden close. Apart from the hilariously cruel joke of Bender kicking away Tinny Tim's crutch, the whole ending had a rather cobbled-together feel and was somewhat lacking in laughs. Even Elzar, who in the past has been quite amusing (but when -- and why -- did his catchphrase change from 'kick' to 'knock'?), soon wore thin because he suffered from Zapp syndrome -- overplay a one-joke character and they rapidly become annoying. The Planet Express gang (except maybe Hermes, as I said a couple of reviews back) have been given enough depth and personality by now that they can be dropped into any situation and get laughs from the way they respond because we know them, but giving undeveloped characters too much screen time seems to be Futurama's recurring weakness. There were some decent jokes, like "Is there any meat this man can't jerk?" (fnarr fnarr), Nibbler's zoo excursion, Leela's makeup, the grovelling supplicant being filled full of holes and Hermes' ever-growing hatred of Dr Zoidberg (proving once again that Billy West is the only one of the three leads who can cry convincingly -- and with different characters!). But against that, as well as the seen-it vibe of the whole Godfather spoof, was a fair amount of recycled material like the Spice Weasel and overplaying of not especially awesome jokes. How many clamps can one episode take? The main problem with the episode -- and, now that I think about it, nearly all of Futurama's less-successful stories -- is that it had a plot rather than a situation, if you get my drift. At the most basic level, Futurama is a situation comedy -- 22 minutes isn't enough time to set up all the necessary elements of a plot in the hour-show or movie sense. When it tries, the plot takes away valuable time from the jokes. This was what almost killed Red Dwarf -- Futurama has avoided the worst of the pitfalls, but shows like this, 'Garbage' and 'Slurm Factory', by setting out to tell a traditional story rather than put our heroes into a situation and let them get on with the business of making us laugh, don't have enough room or time to match the very best episodes. That's my theory, anyway. If you don't like it, set up your own website. With blackjack. And hookers. In fact, forget the website... Rating: BTW, I just saw the episode listing for season 3 (thanks to Futurama Chronicles) and one of the episodes -- 'Parasites Lost' -- has almost exactly the same plot as a story I was working on for my next comic strip. Damn! In my version, Fry's body was colonised by intelligent alien lice, who use it as a staging post to wage war on humanity, resulting in Fry being targetted by DOOP as a "military installation". Not much point drawing it up now, but I wonder whether this will be anything like the final episode?