Season 2, Episode 1, "I Second That Emotion" (B)

Have you seen my sombrero?

Thanks to FOX’s abusive scheduling practices, the casual viewer would have been hard pressed to tell that this is the episode that kicked off the second production season. It neatly dropped in after four holdovers from the first production season. There’s a little more casual usage of 3D, and the voice cast have clearly found their groove, and instead of a cold open, we have an advertisement for Glagnar’s Human Rinds, but it’s a testament to how fully-formed the show was that there’s so little to distinguish between the first two seasons.

What really stands out instead is the development of Leela as a character. Looking ahead at the season’s episode listing, it’s easy to see “I Second That Emotion” as the start of an effort to fill in Leela’s character and move her from a one-note supporting player to a true co-star. I mentioned several times in reviewing the first season that Leela often seems in danger of falling into the typical sitcom trap of women being forced into the “straight man” role, merely reacting to the wackiness the male characters get up to. That’s still the case here, but it’s Leela’s first starring role since “Love’s Labours Lost In Space”, and the show uses the opportunity, at least, to build sympathy for Leela, and render deeper connections between her and the other principals.

The story starts off with a fairly straightforward conflict between Bender (always a reliable antagonist) and Leela -- specifically, over Leela’s pet, Nibbler. Bender hates Nibbler necessitating a huge can opener in the Planet Express breakroom, he hates Nibbler eating his monumental cake, and most of all, he hates Nibbler stealing the spotlight from him. So he flushes Nibbler down the toilet. Problem solved.

Except, of course, that doing so reduces Leela to a weepy, bloodshot mess, and gives the Planet Express crew a chance to try out the Professor’s latest ethical minefield of an experiment a try, installing a chip that forces Bender to experience Leela’s emotions in real-time.

So this may not be the most authentic or direct way of exploring Leela as a character, but it’s certainly a clever one for an audience that’s seen all but a single show so far built around Fry and/or Bender. Bender cycling through Leela’s emotions, particularly when he’s at home with Fry and Leela is out at a bar with Amy, feels like it should play as too blunt and uncreative -- but the cast’s performances sell it and then some. It helps that the script doesn’t pin Leela as just being some weepy, cyclopean cat lady, but someone with a healthy capacity for self-satisfaction, jealousy, and acute loneliness.

I wrote back at the start of this series that it’s precisely that deep loneliness that provides Futurama’s emotional core. Its central characters are all orphans of a sort. Fry, stranded by the passage of time, Bender by losing the very purpose for which he ostensibly exists, and Leela by being the only one of her kind. Bender compensates with criminal enterprises and outrageous, attention-grabbing behavior (hence his upset when he can’t be the star of Nibbler’s birthday party), and Leela copes with a combination of devotion to her job and, at least as of episode four, her pet. Fry, however, tries to build a place for himself by making a family out of his fellow outcasts.

We saw Fry develop a close relationship with Bender in the first season, and this episode marks the start of Leela taking her place alongside them. I wish it might have been done more subtly, but there’s no denying that seeing Leela and Bender simulcast their disdain for Fry’s idiocy, and Leela closing out the episode with a Bender-esque “So long, jerkwads!” mark an important inflection point in the series. Back in “My Three Suns”, Leela might have admitted that she likes Bender’s “in-your-face attitude”, but seeing the two most outwardly different characters find a common wavelength, even for a few moments, provides a nice emotional core on which to string the episode’s jokes.

The episodes jokes land well, but I was rather surprised by the relative dearth of quotable stand-alone lines in the episode. Almost all of the best verbal gags are reactions or exchanges -- this isn’t a bad thing, but it is a bit of a departure. In fact, I’d argue the episode’s single funniest line isn’t even a line, but rather a non-verbal gesture, when the Professor responds to Fry asking, “Is this gonna be another crazy experiment that crosses a line Man was not meant to cross,” with a sheepish grin as he draws his thumb and forefinger together in the universal sign for “a little bit.”

The adventure into the sewers, and the crew’s encounter with the Mutants works well also. Unlike in some first-season episodes, even the background “aliens” appear well-developed and unique, and are given memorable, character-shaping voices. I’m not sure I’d want to spend a whole episode with her, but Vyolet’s casual grunt as she explains to Fry that worshipping the unexploded nuclear bomb (big Beneath the Planet of the Apes reference) is, “Mainly a Christmas and Easter thing,” you get the feeling she’s got a pretty well-fleshed out life going on down there.

The weakest element of the episode, in fact, is the climax, as El Chupanibre’s King Kong homage turns into a cartoonish fight with Bender’s disembodied arms, while the emotional key of the episode is hammered and dumbed down to “Leela needs to be more like Bender”. I’m sure I can’t be the only one who found something slightly off in the ever-professional and hard-assed Leela suddenly lacking emotional control and being overwhelmed by fear in a crisis.

But this slight misstep is (largely) redeemed by the ending, complete with a classic, “it was within you all along” red herring and Leela’s aforementioned sign-off. This is far from the funniest episode of Futurama, and it certainly isn’t the most emotionally resonant or eloquently told. But it’s an important episode that will pay significant dividends in both storytelling and Sewer Mutants, down the road.

GRADE: B


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This Week’s Opening Title Subtitle:

Made From Meat Byproducts

Stray Observations:

-Not sure which I love more: Bender’s “My God! I'm overcome with ... feelings. I'm experiencing a powerful yearning to ... to cram my gullet full of mackerel heads,” or Zoidberg’s delivery of, “That’s me, baby!”

-Alligators in the sewers? Nah. Those are crocodiles.

-”It’s a widely believed fact!” should be appended as a disclaimer to every statement on Fox News.

-Foreshadowing! Bender whistles “Sweet Georgia Brown” while rolling and juggling his head like a Harlem Globetrotter.

-”Your entire family died when a plane piloted by your fiancée crashed into your uninsured home. And you have inoperable cancer.” Bet you didn’t see that one coming!