How Futurama Pulled Off An Impossibly Perfect Finale

Oh, Bender, I always thought me and her would grow old together

You gotta live in the moment, baby. Futurama is one of those shows that simply refuses to die

It's been canceled and renewed so many times that the series actually has four proper finales

with at least one more on the way. Whammy, wham, wham, wazzle! With the franchise's return to Hulu now imminent

it's time to take a look back at Futurama's fourth, and what was supposed to be final, series finale

and accept that it was the perfect end to this beloved sci-fi comedy

When animated sitcom royalty Matt Groening and David X. Cohen were tasked by Fox to create another cultural juggernaut

in the same vein as The Simpsons, they settled on a whip-smart sci-fi workplace comedy

and packed the writer's room with enough PhDs to staff the Academy of Inventors

The first episode of Futurama aired in March of 1999 and quickly found success due to its familiar retro-future aesthetic

cast of incredible characters voiced by superstar talent, commitment to its sci-fi premise

and its heart of gold under layers of biting satire. Bite my shiny metal ass

The show got shuffled around onto various networks through its 13 years of syndication

but would find itself on Comedy Central for the last two seasons of its lifespan

Good news, everyone! Those asinine morons who canceled us were themselves fired for incompetence

The fourth finale, season seven, episode 26, meanwhile, was intended to be the very last episode

after Comedy Central decided to cancel the show for largely unknown reasons

Writer Ken Keillor was battling against himself here. Having written all three of Futurama's

other fantastic finales, meanwhile, had a pretty high bar to live up to

The premise of the episode is pretty classic Futurama. After Leela suffers a near-death experience

Fry decides to propose because he can't live his life without her. After messing around with the professor's new

10-second time button invention all day, the button is broken, And thus the entire world is frozen except for Fry and Lila who decide to get married and travel the world together The episode ends with the professor showing up in a time tunnel to bring them back to before the time button was invented But with one caveat none of them will remember anything that happened

We get what might be the most heartfelt exchange in the entire show. What do you say

Want to go around again? And then we fade not to black, but to white

Laying it all out there like that might make the episode sound pretty unremarkable

Plenty of Futurama episodes have had more intriguing premises. Even some of the finales are arguably more interesting plot-wise

But the robot devil is in the details. Oh, what an appallingly ironic outcome

To understand what makes Meanwhile so incredibly good, we have to understand what makes for a solid TV show finale in general

Most people would agree that the end of a series should include a tying up of loose ends

the resolution to important plot elements, and a proper emotional send-off for characters that fans have grown to love and care for

bonus points for any not obtuse callbacks to previous episodes or fandom in-jokes and more

ambiguously a finale should stir up some kind of emotions in its audience by the time the credits

start rolling all of these goals can only be achieved through a thorough understanding of the

tv show in question the substance of the show is intrinsically linked to what kind of finale is

expected it would have been really weird if say breaking bad ended its run with a feel-good montage

of heartwarming moments between Walt and his family, or if Adventure Time decided to end with the destruction of OO

without some wistful positivity to bring things back around. Futurama is, at its core, a winking science fiction comedy

with an emotional throughline full of love, loss, and found family, and it deserved to end in a way that honored its legacy

Luckily, Keillor's grasp of the fundamentals of the show and what makes for good TV viewing overall

resulted in not only one of the greatest episodes of Futurama ever created

but one of the most memorable finales of any television show ever put to screen

Beginning with the very first scene where the Planet Express crew go to the moon and Fry remarks Yeah but it also where we came on our very first delivery together We know we in for a love letter to the franchise We see side characters from previous episodes

and one of them even serves to aid in the plot when Craterface makes a balloon Leela

which she later uses to save her own life in space. And that sets up the rest of the episode, as well as the emotional crux it hinges on

We get a perfectly in-character Fry moment later on, when he leaps to his doom after Lila fails to show up to the Vampire State building on time

But it turns out that Lila was actually on her way and she was on time. Fry's watch was running

fast from all his messing around with the time button earlier that day. This is such a great

example of the writer's understanding of the show's characters and allowing them to drive

the plot forward in a natural way for the finale. Often when writers and showrunners have a particular

ending in mind, it can be tempting to alter a character's motivations, or even their whole

personality, to get them to that final destination. Futurama's Fry, on the other hand, has always been

a bit of a bumbling, if not well-meaning idiot. Pizza delivery for, uh, icy wiener? Oh, crud

He makes little mistakes all the time, so it makes sense for him to have gotten the time wrong

and landed himself in this predicament during Meanwhile's runtime. But where Meanwhile really

shines is after that time button breaks, leaving Fry and Leela alone in the universe. The montage

audiences are treated to is equal parts heartwarming, satisfying, and hilarious as the

couple drags their frozen friends and family into a church to witness their wedding, visit fan-favorite

side characters and locations, and grow old together with smiles on their faces. Montages

like this aren't easy to pull off. Plenty of TV shows have fallen on the trope of literally

replaying clips of old episodes during their finales as a lazy way to hearken back to the

good old days. Futurama's meanwhile avoids this problem by literally walking us through little pastiches

fans may or may not remember. If you do recognize a particular character or location then it enhances the experience If you don nothing is lost It a fresh and elegant approach to a familiar idea It all brilliant But that final moment

when the professor turns up, the full reset of the universe is the apotheosis of Futurama

an incredibly intelligent, fully self-aware science fiction comedy, ending its run by using

a sci-fi staple concept like time travel to not only give its audience an emotional catharsis

through Fry and Leela's relationship, but simultaneously allow the series to narratively

loop and leave it open for continuation when it would inevitably be picked back up again

is just, well, it's funny, it's smart, it's tonally consistent, and it's the reason why

Futurama's finale is absolutely perfect. That loop is perhaps the best invention of Ken Keeler

While he absolutely knocked it out of the park with his other finales, particularly the Devil's

hands are idle playthings, the way he managed to both wrap up and informally continue Futurama

with Meanwhile's ending is unmatched. The only thing fans could really have asked for more was

more involvement from the rest of the core cast, but the role they do play is so quintessentially

in-character that it's hard to be mad at how they were used, and seeing them all frozen in joy at

Fry and Leela's wedding was, once again, absolutely perfect. It's clear that after a decade with this world and characters

the creators and writers of Futurama had a firm hold on what made the show special in the first place

Unlike a lot of other TV show finales, meanwhile hit all the beats the audience expected

in really rewarding ways. By the time those credits roll, you'd have to be a monster from the planet Omicron per CIA

to not feel something. Surely it says love. No, Wav! This concept of Wav confuses and infuriates us

Even if that's something, it's just the compulsion to start the series over again

So, with Hulu's revival coming up fast, we just have one last question for you

Wanna go around again? I do. I do