I Polish My Rocket Every Day

[vovat]

Futurama is back! As much as I love The Simpsons, I felt that Futurama spoke more to my individual interests. I'm a nerdy guy interested in space travel, even if I wouldn't ever want to do it myself. Okay, maybe I'd do it in the Futurama universe, in which you can cross galaxies in mere minutes.

Anyway, tonight's premiere featured two new episodes. The first was a direct follow-up to Into the Wild Green Yonder, explaining what happened to the characters after entering the wormhole at the end, and restoring the status quo. Not a whole lot really happened, but it was a good reintroduction, and had a lot of good jokes. The ending was a neat twist, too. They might have overdone the Professor's contradictory dialogue a bit, but that's okay.

Since the Eden episode also had a twist ending that explained how much of what preceded was a fake-out, I have to question why they chose to show these two in succession. I think my favorite part might have been the framing sequences with Zapp Brannigan's dreams. I remember reading somewhere that a TV show featuring Zapp was originally supposed to exist within the Futurama universe, but the writers never managed to work it in. I guess they incorporated some of their ideas for it into the dream scenes. As for the plot, while we've seen Earth threatened in a whole bunch of other episodes, I liked the idea of the censoring space probe. Oddly, while I've seen a lot of the Star Trek movies, I never actually saw the first one, but I'm pretty sure that's what V-Giny was referencing. One thing I have to wonder is how, if it's now supposed to be 3010 or so in the show's timeline, Nixon is still President. Not that I want them to get rid of him, just that I hope they eventually explain how he managed to remain in the position for more than two extra terms.


By the way, although I've put some movie reviews up on WordPress, I think I'm going to keep TV reviews here on LiveJournal. Not a slight against television, but most of my comments on TV shows aren't really proper reviews, so I see them as more personal than topical. Any opinions on that?

Comments

[revme.livejournal.com]

He's NIXON. He's got his ways.

I really liked the new eps, better than the movies. The movies were pretty good, but Futurama's best when it's a normal 22 minutes. Just because of the pacing, really. I also like that there's been a real media blitz. Yesterday there were like, 5 new interviews with David X. Cohen, and I think 4 of those mentioned that in an episode coming up, they ACTUALLY PROVE A THEOREM FOR REALS in an episode. That's AWESOME.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think the pacing is definitely better for the individual episodes, although I also feel that the movies have gotten me to expect the stories to go on for longer. They just can't win, I suppose. {g}