3ACV14: Time Keeps On Slippin' First UK airing: Sky One, 7:00pm, 13-5-01 "...no."* *The funniest line of the show -- but it only works in context. Go on, watch the episode -- you'll know it when Amy says it! Fry got the best position in that naked conga line, didn't he? Lucky bastard! Over on The Hip Joint message board, there's been a thread running about which writers produce the best Futurama episodes, based on cumulative ratings. After all, detailed statistical analysis proves that something's funny! But what I worked out from the ratings I've given to episodes is that the 'best' Futurama writer is Ken Keeler, author of most of my favourite episodes. Bad news, everyone! 3ACV14 brings down Ken's average. Despite a Fry/Leela romance subplot, despite seeing new functions of the ship, and despite the undoubted appeal of gratuitous Amy nudity not once but twice, 'Time Keeps On Slippin'' fell short of the mark for one very simple reason. Gueststaritis! Worse yet, gueststaritis without even having the real guest stars, if the end credits were to be believed! (I didn't notice anybody called Ethan 'Bubblegum' Tate in there, for a start...) Where the hell did this whole thing with the Harlem Globetrotters come from? And more importantly, how did it manage to take up half of the episode when there were more interesting plots that could have been done? There was that whole Fry/Leela marriage thing, for starters... Nope, this episode just didn't work for me. It could be argued that because I'm British I don't fully appreciate the comedy value of the Harlem Globetrotters, but that never stopped me picking up on America-only pop culture references in the past. I think my main problem was the way certain jokes were repeated over and over to hammer the point home. Bubblegum Tate -- he's a basketball player who's also an alien! And he's a physics professor! And he's a physics professor! And he's a physics professor! LAUGH, IT'S FUNNY! Bender's whole 'I wanna be a Globetrotter' routine also got tiresome very quickly, since it was just his worship of Elzar with a bit of cut-and-paste on the names. Besides, Bender is funky enough to be a Globetrotter (as seen in 2ACV01) -- let's see Bubblegum do that trick! I won't even start on the plot-propelling technobabble, which actually did sound like your average episode of Voyager... This should have been a Fry episode, but so much time was spent with the Globetrotters and wittering on about chronotons (damn you to hell, Andre Bormanis!) that it wasn't really anybody's episode. Which was a real shame, because if Fry and Leela had been given all the screen time of Bubblegum Tate after the timeslips started, this could have turned out as good an episode as 'Parasites Lost'. Instead, because Fry's realisation of what he'd really done for Leela was crammed in right at the end, it lacked the impact of his sacrifice in 'Parasites'. Anyway, there is something that Fry can do to make Leela love him again. All he has to do is start wolfing down more truck stop sandwiches... BTW, something I've now spotted in two episodes (the other was 'Xmas Story') but nobody ever seems to have commented on -- there seems to be a new land mass in the middle of the Atlantic! The Professor's globe in 'Xmas' showed it, and now so did the Earth-patterned basketball in this show. Maybe Atlantis is right next door to Atlanta! Rating: BTW: Just a thought -- this episode clearly establishes that it's now 3002, but thanks to Fox's censors, Xmas 3001 'never happened'! Does this mean that if and when 'A Tale Of Two Santas' finally gets shown, the show will have gone back in time, or will 3ACV03 now 'officially' be Xmas 3002? (Hey, maybe now they can get John Goodman back in to do the voice of Santa after all!)