Season 1, Episode 4 "Love's Labours Lost In Space" (A-)

Idiotking’s reviews are like idiotking’s love… Hard, and fast.

Poor Leela. Underneath her hard, professional exterior is a woman who wants to find someone to love. But if it’s not her cyclopean visage that scares off potential suitors, it’s her intelligent, non-nonsense demeanor.

Well, either that or she’s too picky.

It’s unfortunate that this episode, which brings some depth to Leela’s character, also positions her firmly as the straight man (or cyclops) to a parade of freaks, her own idiotic colleagues, and one of the most outrageous recurring guest characters ever to grace a prime-time sitcom: THE Zapp Brannigan.

While it could be seen as progressive that the one character in the main cast who’s mentally competent is a woman, this is hardly an innovation. To some degree it’s a professional variation on the long-suffering sitcom wife, forced to serve as the calm counterpoint to the goofy men and boys who not only burden her, but also generate most of the laughs. Whether this is a feature or a bug is up to the individual viewer - or perhaps a Women’s Studies major. In a show like Futurama, it’s important to have a character the audience can trust, and relate to. It may be a relatively thankless role in a comedy, but it’s also an essential one, without which we’d be unable to ascertain whether other characters are truly being absurd, or just acting logically within the show’s universe.

The cold open (a device used much of the first season, and rarely thereafter) shows Leela on a date that appears to be going well. She remarks on the date’s open-mindedness about her unusual, alien eye configuration… Right before being disgusted by his equally bizarre lizard tongue. Fry tells her, “If you rule out every guy with a lizard tongue, or low IQ, or an explosive, violent temper, of course you’re going to be lonely!” That’s a rather grim thought, though Leela manages to find a few more things to rule out when Amy takes the crew out to The Hip Joint to find her a date. Everyone leaves with someone, except Bender, who gets to go see a saucy puppet show, and Leela, who’s left sulking as the janitor reminds her that she’s a very attractive woman -- except for the huge, hideous eye in the middle of her face.

What Leela clearly needs is a man who openly wonders if, in the end, making it with a hot alien babe is what man has dreamt of since he first looked up at the stars.

But before we get to that man, I want to pause to take note of Bender in this episode. For the first time, we catch a glimpse of what would become an increasingly important, and endearing, element of Bender’s character: a childishness that manifests itself in a sense of mischief lacking in malice, and an utter lack of shame or cynicism. There’s an amazing run of jokes that, to me, first shows us the “lovable scamp” side of him that manages to excuse his more heinous crimes and insults later on. While he deploys an actual “gay-dar” to screen Leela’s dates, it isn’t until Fry whispers in his ear that he even understands why they need to rescue two of every doomed animal from Vergon 6 in order to save the species. His excited giggle as he realizes it’s because of S-E-X is priceless, and would not be unfamiliar to a sixth grade geography teacher who just told his class about Lake Titicaca.

When, in the next act, Bender suggests Leela save time on finding a good one-eyed man by finding a good two-eyed man and poking an eye out, it seals the deal. He’s utterly innocent in his suggestion of causing painful and grievous bodily injury. He even offers her use of his fork! At that point, Bender’s apparent modesty, wrapping himself with a towel when he and Fry accidentally convert their jail cell into a steam room, is just icing on the cake.

But even Bender’s performance in this episode is no match for the bombastic, self-absorbed, utterly moronic, and supremely confident Zapp Brannigan. Originally intended for Phil Hartman (and it’s easy to see what a fantastic time he’d have in this most Troy McClure of roles), Zapp is William Shatner as an actual starship captain, all clueless ego and self-regard. Billy West plays him with the voice of, as fellow actor John DiMaggio put it, “A radio deejay in love with the sound of his own voice.” He’s a veritable treasure trove of inanity, mixed metaphors, machisimo and mispronunciations, loathed by the men he’ll eagerly send to their deaths in wave after wave, and loathed even more by his first officer, Kif Kroker.

The original idea behind Kif stemmed from creator Groening wondering what Mr. Spock would have felt towards Captain Kirk - if he had the emotion (or the writing) to react to being second in command to an incompetent blowhard. In this early episode, it’s all loathing, lacking the sense of puppy-like devotion that would later be added to the character, but it’s all hilarious. Maurice LaMarche’s delivery of Kif’s exasperated sighs, and shudder of disgust as he gets an accidental upskirt view of his commander are perfect comedic punctuations to every fresh atrocity of Zapp’s.

Speaking of Zapp’s atrocities, Futurama’s first great set-as-gag has to be the Captain’s Quarters, or “Lovenasium”, as Zapp prefers to call it. It’s a tacky, over-sexualized catastrophe of self-love, done up in the most nausea-inducing shades of Valentine’s Day. An oversized portrait, modeled on the presidential portrait of JFK that hands in the White House, hangs in a gilded frame over his pillow-laden, heart-shaped, hovering bed. Marble statues of his exaggeratedly muscled torso stand on plinths, while pictures of himself compete with candles and velour-covered pillows for space throughout the rest. It’s the visual equivalent of Zapp loudly, and very un-erotically shouting “EROTIC! EROTIC! EROTIC!” when Leela fails to understand his attempt to whisper it.

Faced with Leela’s disgust, Zapp quickly turns pathetic, crying in the most highly theatrical way that he’s, “So lonely,” finally preying on Leela’s innate care for pathetic, lonely things, to make it with her.

Poor Leela.

Oh, also, Nibbler is introduced. Did I mention something about that? I’m almost certain I did, oh yes.

GRADE: A-

This Week’s Opening:

“Available In Brain Control [ BC ] Where Available”

Stray Observations:

- This review was running long already. There’s simply so much fantastic material in this episode, I’ll leave it to you guys to share your favorite Zapp quotes.

- Since I did not, in fact, mention Nibbler, I’ll make the obligatory point that he’s voiced by Frank Welker, one of the most talented voice actors ever, when it comes to making animal noises. Elvis himself used to press Welker into making dog noises for his amusement.

-Speaking of talented voice actors, it seems impossible to believe, but Billy West voiced energy being M-5438 (from a “Dimension big on musical theater,” according to Bender) without any effects being used.

- Places to find a hot date:

• The Federal Sex Bureau
• A saucy puppet show
• The rotting carcass of a whale

- If your gaydar ever fails, you can always blame it on interference from a gay weather balloon

- Hey! It’s the 21st Century! Remember when those cyborgs enslaved humanity?

- According to the Professor, every pound of dark matter weighs one thousand pounds. Mind. Blown.

- The bed of the future hovers! As long as it’s plugged in.

- One of the animals on the list to be rescued from Vergon 6 should inspire the next “Sharknado” sequel: “Sharktopus”. (EDIT: I have been alerted that, in fact, "Sharktopus" was produced in 2008. Futurama once again predicts the future accurately!)

- Zapp Brannigan’s Big Book Of War bears a remarkable similarity to the anthology of 20th Century cartoonist Matt Groening’s “Life In Hell” comics, The Big Book Of Hell.

- The creatures of Vergon 6 that don’t get their own shot seem remarkably under-done and crude compared to the detail and creativity the show has displayed elsewhere.