Season 2, Episode 7, "Put Your Head on My Shoulders" (B+)

If I ever get lonely, I can just look over at this disfiguring scar, and think of you.

Valentine’s Day! For many, the most romantic day of the year. A time to exchange gifts and do something special with the one you love - or at least someone you really enjoy having sex with. For the beast of American commercialism, it’s a blessed lift in the midst of the long, post-holiday slump, as would-be romantics stock up on chocolates, diamonds, stuffed bears, and cards. Yet for many of us -- especially, perhaps, those of us who would indulge in long-form reviews of TV shows long cancelled -- Valentine’s Day is a miserable reminder of loneliness, desperation, and poverty.

Well, if any show can grok how you feel, it’s Futurama, which delivers one of the best sitcom Valentine’s Days I’ve seen, linking the holiday to prostitution, blatant rip-offs and emotional manipulation, self-molestation, and catastrophic ass failure. What slight glimmer of romantic redemption the episode offers is immediately undercut at the end by the crew concluding that Valentine’s Day is really all about “Corralling a bunch of stiffs at the bus station and pocketing someone else’s money,” and, of course, the aforementioned catastrophic ass failure.

The episode actually feels fairly dense in terms of action, in part by starting up a second plotline, which merges with the “A” plot in the third act. There’s a wide array of action and sets, from a hover-car dealership, to two interplanetary excursions, to the climactic dinner at Elzar’s. This is usually a good sign in a Futurama episode, because when pushed to a frantic pace, there’s little time to linger on the occasional duds, and even less time to run a good joke into the ground.

That’s for the best here, because many of the jokes in the “A”-plot fall into predictable “battle of the sexes” humor, with Amy and Fry showing off some of the worst stereotypical traits of women and men, respectively. Now, I’ve complained before that sometimes, this early on in the show, the series does a disservice to Leela, and sometimes seems unaware of suffering the same male-dominated perspective of the genre it’s parodying. But saddling Amy with certain “stereotypical” traits, like cluelessness about cars or pretending to take forever to get ready, isn’t nearly as problematic as attaching negative female stereotypes to Leela.

This is in part because Amy is presented, in this episode, as being much closer to Fry’s level in terms of emotional depth and maturity, to say nothing of smarts. This helps the early jokes at the car dealership play more as “dumb rich person” jokes than as “dumb rich girl” jokes. It’s also counterbalanced by witnessing how easily Fry is manipulated into wanting a Thundercougarfalconbird, by preying on his masculine insecurities. Amy’s youth and general flirtiness also help soften any discomfort one might have about her using makeup compact (which looks and sounds like a Star Trek communicator!) before making an emergency call. We’ve already seen that Amy is well aware, and more than a little proud of, her cuteness. It’s in character that she’d primp before calling the Astro-Afro-Antarctico-Amer-Asian Auto Association (Septuple-A).

What’s even more in character is Bender’s intense desire to profit off of the desperate loneliness of others. Of course, his first idea doesn’t quite pan out, as it’s neither original or legal, but it does result in one of the most brilliant comedic smash-cuts in history:



Bender’s move into the matchmaking services game constitutes the “B”-plot, as both Fry and Leela (and a few others) fork over their hard-earned Gores to him to find a Valentine’s date. The one big catch here is that as of the end of the second act, Fry is… Well, without a body. The occasionally competent (and, we learn here for the first time, desperately poor) Doctor Zoidberg performs some emergency surgery to save Fry’s head by sewing it on to Amy’s shoulder. It really couldn’t have come at a worse time, as Fry was just in the process of breaking up with Amy because of the stereotypical male defect of being terrified of being “tied down”.

So in the end, everyone winds up at Elzar’s, where Amy’s head and half of her body have a fantastic date with a handsome banking regulator Gary, and Fry’s head and half of Amy’s body desperately try to avoid embarrassment by feigning interest in toothless, chronic gambler and Nutley, NJ resident Petunia. Petunia, like Leela’s date, and seemingly everyone else’s, was rounded up at the bus station by Bender, with predictably horrible results. Fortunately for Fry, before Gary can close the deal, there’s a mass exodus for Nutley, leaving Leela free to come to his rescue by asking probing questions about the many different regulatory traditions underlying Gary’s work.

The small sliver of romantic redemption comes from this moment, and leads Leela to admit that she actually enjoyed hanging out with Fry (whether that’s simply because he compares favorably to Sal is another matter). It’s a nice little circle the episode draws there, having started with Leela angrily rejecting Fry’s date proposal because he assumed she wouldn’t already have one. Her contempt for Fry, and the sappy, PDA-intensive relationship he and Amy briefly have, is fun to watch in the background, and makes it just a little bit touching when their camaraderie eventually overcomes the bitterness.

So that’s a Futurama Valentine’s Day. No one got lucky, one crew member got a disfiguring scar, and while Bender winds up with a chest cavity full of scrilla, he also winds up paying the price for refusing to get shock absorbers for his shiny metal ass. So next time you’re facing another Valentine’s day alone and miserable, just remember how much worse it could be!



Grade:B+[/b]

This Week’s Opening Title Subtitle:

Not based on the novel by James Fenimore Cooper

This Week In Futurama Signage:



Bender’s Computer Dating Service: Discreet and Discrete

Stray Observations:

• “Amy’s rich… She probably has other qualities” - Bender really knows what’s important about a person!
  
  
• I love that the monolith from 2001 is shown as “Out of Order”.

• I also like the fact that Amy is, whatever else she does in this episode, sweet and kind. Considering the way Fry dumped her, and then makes things miserable for her as an extra head on her body, she would have been entitled to be a real b-word to him. Instead, she’s sweet and accommodating, and has the wonderful closing line of “If I ever get lonely, I can just look over at this disfiguring scar, and think of you.” Fuck you, Bender. Amy’s rich, and she’s a good person.
  
  
• Even if she does make her date wait twenty minutes in spite of already being ready.
  
  
• On the other hand, “And if you were the Pope they'd be all, "Straighten your Pope hat," and, "Put on your good vestments."
  
  
• Am I the only one who’s slightly creeped out by Fry’s head’s constant use of Amy’s arm to feel her boobs? 
  
  
• A favorite running gag in this episode is Fry and Amy’s equal cluelessness about their opportunities to bone. Or, maybe not. There’s not exactly any passion or romance in their attraction, and having sex seems to be more something they do to alleviate boredom, like playing cards or juggling. Even so, I’ll always get a kick out of “Hey… Why aren’t we making out?”