3ACV16: A Leela Of Her Own First UK airing: Sky One, 7:00pm, 19-5-02 "Professor, please! Society's never going to make any progress until we all pretend to like each other." Baseball. It is boring, isn't it? Admittedly not as dull as cricket, but I can easily understand Fry's delight at finding out in 'Fear Of A Bot Planet' that it'd been jazzed-up. Pity it wasn't here, though. The madness of blernsball seen in 1ACV05 has been reduced to basically 'baseball on a string', and like 'Future Stock' last week, this could have been a Simpsons episode -- all it needed was to swap Leela for Marge (or Lisa, if they wanted to make it Little League). There was a definite 'seen it before' feeling to the story, which wasn't helped by the fact that the whole business with the Cygnoids was extremely reminiscent of the Babu Bhat episode of Seinfeld (the one where Jerry tries to offer helpful advice to a Pakistani immigrant about his new restaurant, with disastrous results). Strike one! Not helping matters was the over-abundance of references to American sport. Referring back to Seinfeld, it came as a great surprise to me when I found out that George Steinbrenner was a real person, so the more involved jokes travelled about as well as all those gags about Slurms McKenzie. So the Mets are crap. That's as may be, but the only person in Britain I know is a Mets fan is pop impresario Jonathan King (who is somehow to blame for 'Who Let The Dogs Out?', I understand), and as he recently got sent to prison for child molestation I doubt he would have seen the show to get the joke. Strike two! Finally, while there was the odd good joke (the black bar generator, Leela's fans asking to have their autographs made out to 'eBay') they were few and far between. Even some of what would normally be snappy sight gags (the bees, the Frisbee spaceship) seemed dwelled on for too long, leaving potential laughs trailing off into a vaguely embarrassed silence. In all, very much a minor league episode. Sterrrrike three! You're out! Rating: