Futurama returns tonight for an amazing seventh season . But what if you ’ve never watched the show , or just lost track of all the changes the lovable gang of misfit has been through over the years ? We ’ve got you covered .
Here ’s our crash course in Futurama - ology , including sexual love , heroism , having sex with one ’s own grannie , and why reasonably much everyone who started out on the show is dead .
One of the fun things about science fiction drollery , is anything can happen . The fact that it ’s science fiction allows travel in metre , journey in space , near - magic power , any conceivable engineering , parallel universes , and whole fictional world ( a la Holodeck ) within the fictitious universes . Ironically , though , it ’s the comedy that provides more freedom than anything else . As Mel Brooks tell , “ Tragedy is when I reduce my finger . Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die . ”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LyhVCsad9A
Futurama might have the tools do anything because of its science - fictional premise , but it actually does do everything because it does n’t take anything seriously — including the life of its characters .
So here ’s everything you necessitate to know to be up to speed before tonight ’s season premiere . With no spoilers , besides poppycock that ’s already air . ( Oh , and check out a live - action recreation of the show ’s opening sequence , created by hand , at left ! )
Philip J Fry
Fry was a abject slacker , with a girlfriend who cheated on him , a dead - ending job , a hirer who hated him , and no skills or interests . During a prank delivery to a cryogenics facility on New Year ’s Eve in the year 2000 , he got tip into one of the chambers and come out a thousand years afterward . During the millennium that he slumber , the world seems to have become the stark position for an interestless , skilless , and brainless shirker . He have a caper at his great - etcetera - grandnephew ’s interstellar legal transfer service , befriends an automaton , lusts after a red-hot one - eyed bird , and remains rock stupid .
And when I say rock stupid , I think of that is n’t just a character trait , it ’s a plot pointedness . His nemeses , in the series , are giant space brains who need to get a line thing . His brain , alone among all subsist creatures everywhere , does not give off a sure mastermind moving ridge , fix it impossible for the brains to command , or even notice him . Why ? Because , in an episode that you ’d never see on any drama serial , Fry went back into the yesteryear and had gender with his own grandmother . The whole work party was fling back in time to the Roswell ground forces groundwork . Fry spent the first part of the episode attempting to protect his grandpa — to make trusted he ’d be born in the future . When his grandfather die and Fry was still live , he reckon his disturbingly blistering gran Mildred was not related to him , and went onward and slept with her . Read that and try on to sleep tonight .
Fry ’s other independent family relationship is with Turanga Leela ( see below ) , whom he pursued with various degree of patheticness throughout the first series . When that serial publication was offset and a numeral of straight - to - DVD movies came out , the show ’s creators decide to actually hook the two up , not expecting the show to be animate in episodic format . Now that the show ’s back , the duet is mostly in dating limbo . Either the relationship is not addressed , or they go through some underage crisis and win the relationship slowly but disgustingly . ( One memorable fourth dimension was when the full gang was organic structure swop , and the two slept together for the first time , while in the bodies of a hundred and sixty class older Isle of Man and an alien crab monster . )
Turanga Leela
One - eyed , purple - haired , and obnoxiously overstrung , Turanga Leela ( known as Leela ) thought she was an extraterrestrial who was dropped off at a “ maximal security ” orphanarium . For the first few season , she looked for her humanity and her parents — virtually marrying a shape - careen con adult male in the process — before see out that her parents were in reality sewer mutation , who ’d pass her off as an alien so she could live life on the Earth’s surface . Since then , she and her parents have developed a full relationship . They ’re the kind of stereotypically traditional parents who ( despite their tentacle ) would have accommodate right in an other Simpsons episode . In the last time of year , the sewer mutant rebelled and were finally granted the rightfulness to live on the Earth’s surface — so we ’ll see how this unexampled proximity works out in the next time of year .
Leela ’s aggressively competent , uptight , and protective of her privacy . So by nature , her scourge is a louche , Shatneresque spaceship captain call Zapp Brannigan . Brannigan works for The Democratic Order Of Planets , or DOOP , understandably modeled on The Federation from Star Trek . After one poorly - consider inter-group communication towards the start of the serial , Brannigan has pursued Leela over several time of year . She ’s insult him , attacked him , and sleep with him one more time . To be clean , the second tryst was to save the creation from a messianic battle satellite .
Leela ’s relationship with Fry has had its ups and downs , mostly due to the requirement of an ongoing TV show . Each time of year has showed her inching nearer to him , in case that was the last fracture the writers got at prove their relationship was headed somewhere . But the two remained , for the most part , in a family relationship stalling . During a serial of moving-picture show , one of which included time traveling , Leela fall down in love with , and nearly married , someone who turned out to be a reading of Fry who ’d gone back in time , grew , maturate , and realized he could become the piece Leela desire . He died , of course , leaving the empty - headed Fry for her to grow to either love or tolerate , depending on the installment , over the next couple of seasons .
Professor Hubert Farnsworth
The Professor is Fry ’s great - etcetera - great-nephew , who have the delivery company and delight in send out the work party on ridiculously dangerous errand . He ’s a compulsive inventor , whose major inventions include the Smell - o - Scope , a scope that allows mass to smack across the vacuity of space . It has been repeatedly pointed out , in the series , that this is inconceivable .
The Professor ’s scourge is Mom , and evil corporate overlord who posture as a sweet grandmotherly case . mum ’s Friendly Robots has alternately brainwash people to get eyePhones , engineered an energy crisis by limiting access code to dark matter , which is used as space ship fuel , and enslaved an entire alien slipstream so as to get that dark issue . Like Zap and Leela , Mom and the Professor on occasion fall into bottom together . ( as luck would have it , the same thing does n’t happen between Fry and the Space Brains . )
The prof has made himself a knockoff , Cubert Farnsworth , whom he raises as a Word .
Nibbler
Nibbler was introduced in the first time of year as a cute footling foreigner who would eat everything in sight and crap out dark subject — which was still a fuel root at the time . He was take aboard the Planet Express starship as Leela ’s pet .
Since then it has been revealed that he ’s a highly intelligent member of a species called Nibblonians , a unrelentingly cute alien species that was sent to battle the Space Brains . live they could only confront the brains in the hereafter , they made the prank call the pizza shoes back in the year 2000 , they tipped Fry into the cryogenic chamber , and Nibbler was actually a covert agent , sent to see Fry .
Although their dark matter low-down was used as fuel at one gunpoint , it has since been rendered inert . While it was fuel , though , Mom round off up a huge numeral of them and put them on caged “ shite farms , ” so it ’s difficult to say who their bane is .
The Gang
Bender is a robot and Fry ’s roommate . He ’s also far and away the most quoted and most popular case of the serial publication . The only reason I ca n’t say much about him is his story does n’t really get along . He ’s always a drink , smoke , theft , lying , robo - effeminise insensitive jerk . His bane is , I hypothecate , the robot daemon , but really , you have to have a moral posture before you could have someone taking the opposite position and becoming a nemesis .
Amy Wong is a Martian wretched - short - fertile - young lady who recently beget her doctor’s degree in . . . something . A perpetual pink wearer , she ’s semi - marital to an foreign name Kif Kroker , who serves as Zapp Brannigan ’s first police officer . No nemesis for her , unless overbear grandchild - thirsty parent count .
Hermes Conrad is a Rastafarian accountant with a son refer Dwight and constantly betray married woman named LaBarbara . Her cheat give him a nemesis ; Barbados Slim . Slim is tall , spicy , and constantly bests Hermes at his opt Olympian fun , the hundred m limbo . ( If this actually amaze to be an Olympic sportsman , I ’ll finally find out the Olympics . )
Doctor John Zoidberg is the aforementioned exotic crab monster . He ’s a Doctor of the Church . He ’s broke . He wants to be an entertainer . He ’s the perpetual sad pocket of the group .
The One Thing I Want to See This class
Technically , jolly much every character on the show is beat . The Fry that operate back in time and became a safe person give way , get out a worthless similitude who journey to the time to come again . Last season , Bender , Fry , and the Professor got in a time machine that only went forward . They intended to go forward in time one minute . They pop off forward a thousand years . Then they kept endure onwards until the universe stop , and was reborn . Then they messed up their landing and did it all over again . In the meantime , the others in the group drop dead of old age , most of them never knowing what happened to the three who disappeared . When the three circle attack the universe a third fourth dimension , they came out just six feet above themselves in the new universe . They go down to the ground , suppress their other self , and direct their place . When Leela from the third universe exclaims that the Fry from the first universe is on time for their appointment he suppose , “ The erstwhile Fry wo n’t inconvenience oneself you anymore . He ’s dead now . ”
Ouch . This means that , technically , all the show ’s graphic symbol have go . It also means that , since they do the experiment in every universe , there should be yet another version of the three out there — the version from the 2nd cosmos . Everyone who watches knows that Futurama is a persistence nerd ’s paradise . They ’ve in reality built up an entire outlander graffiti words that they keep through the series . But will this finicky piece of persistence pop up this season ? I ca n’t wait to find out !
FuturamaMatt GroeningTelevision
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