.jpg?q=50&fit=crop&w=1100&h=618&dpr=1.5)
By and large, shows that try to predict what the future will look like fail quite spectacularly. Either they overestimate how far technology will have progressed, or they're a depressing look at how humans could destroy the world. What makes Futurama so special is that, in a way, it does both.
Futurama's depiction of the year 3000 is filled with technology that seems like magic. The Earth is thriving, with humans spread across the entire universe. However, it has been injected with a hefty dose of cynicism and showcases how little many of the world's fundamentals have changed. It gave it that anti-authoritative stance that made The Simpsons so great, but they're able to turn it up to eleven thanks to the setting.
10 Time Keeps On Slippin' - Season 3 Episode 14
The whacky world of the future has a lot of fun to offer, but the one thing which will always be timeless is a good love story. Fry & Leela's relationship is the show's emotional core, and the writers were great at coming up with novel ways to examine it.
The episode sees time occasionally skip forward by undefined periods, with the characters having no memory of what they did during the skip. While solving this problem, Leela once again rejects Fry before time skips forward to their wedding. Neither knows what Fry did to get Leela to love him, and it's a touching moment when Fry realizes what it was but decides to let it go.
9 Reincarnation - Season 6 Episode 26
The show's later years saw them run a few experimental episodes. These took anthology form, much like a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode, and used different concepts to explore the characters. One sees the characters as different animals in nature documentaries, but this episode explores different animation styles.
The first segment uses 1930s Disney-style animation, with an overly cheery world. The second uses retro video-game graphics but doesn't do as much. The final segment is an over-the-top action anime, and it's a lot of fun. Unlike a lot of shows which can be meanspirited in their jokes about these styles, the jokes in this episode were written by people who love the respective formats.
8 The Luck of the Fryrish - Season 3 Episode 10
Fry's relationship with his family is something the show has explored sporadically. It isn't easy to do since his family is all back in 2000. Some episodes manage it through flashbacks or sci-fi shenanigans, but this is arguably the best version of it.
After a string of bad luck, Fry remembers the seven-leaf clover he had back in 2000. After going on a quest to find it, Fry discovers that his brother took his clover and his name following his disappearance. Jealous, he gets the clover from his grave, only to realize that it was his brother's son, who he named after Fry.
7 The Late Philip J Fry - Season 6 Episode 7
This episode is a fun time-travel romp, but it throws in some Fry & Leela relationship stuff for good measure. After being late for a date, Fry promises to make it up to Leela with another one. Unfortunately, the Professor gets Fry and Bender to test his new time machine, which only goes forward in time.
The trio ends up going further forward than intended, and the episode turns into a hilarious exploration of future time periods in the search for a backward time machine. Many years in the future, Leela eventually learns the cause of Fry's disappearance and writes an apology in a cave that Fry finds at the end of the Earth's lifespan. Thankfully, after watching the universe die, a new one starts that's identical to the old one, allowing the group to "go around again" to get home.
6 The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings - Season 4 Episode 18
The finale of Futurama's first run following its first cancellation, this episode pushes the boat out to finish with a bang. One of the show's best one-off characters returns in the Robot Devil (voiced by Dan Castellaneta, aka Homer Simpson) for a climactic performance where Fry finally gets the girl.
Fry trades his hands for the Robot Devil's to play the holophonor, a notoriously difficult instrument. Fry writes an opera based on Leela's life and his love for her, which Leela adores. After some trickery, the Devil gets his hands back, and Fry loses the ability to play. Everyone storms out of the opera, but Leela stays and asks him to keep playing. It's a low-key and charming way to end the series. Although, thankfully, it wasn't the end.
5 Three Hundred Big Boys - Season 4 Episode
This is the kind of light-hearted episode that is always worth a rewatch. Like The Simpsons' 22 Short Films episode, this one jumps around all of the characters quite quickly, showing us what shenanigans they get up to. The difference here is that all of these threads eventually pull together at the end.
In a tax refund, everyone gets $300 to spend however they want, and the episode has a blast seeing what they all do. Bender buys a cigar and looks to find the right time to smoke it, Amy gets a talking tattoo, and Kiff buys Amy a watch that he loses and has to track down. Undoubtedly the funniest is Fry, who looks to drink 100 cups of coffee, leading him to become increasingly jittery and erratic throughout the episode.
4 Fry and the Slurm Factory - Season 1 Episode 13
One of the most memorable episodes of the show's first season, which really put it on the map, this episode manages to be timeless by riffing on timeless source material. The story of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is one most people are familiar with, even today, making it perfect for satire.
It nails every element of the parody. From the search for the winning bottle cap to Slurms Mckenzie to the Grunka Lunkas, all of them are classic Futurama jokes. It manages to be a fun adventure episode, too. The prime trio of Fry, Leela, and Bender get themselves in trouble at the factory when they discover Slurm's true source and have to fight their way out.
3 Meanwhile - Season 7 Episode 26
In the actual final episode of the show, the concept of this episode seems quite grand but ends up quite a small-scale, personal story when it's all said and done. It perhaps isn't the grand final outing people might have hoped for, but it's a warm and intimate final story.
Once again focusing on Fry & Leela's relationship, Fry intends to propose to Leela. After he thinks Leela isn't coming, he throws himself off a skyscraper, only to realize on the way down that she's approaching. He uses a device to rewind time by 10 seconds, but when he goes back, he's still falling. Through frantic action from the rest of the gang, Fry is saved, but time becomes frozen for all but Fry & Leela, who live out an entire life with a world to themselves. The series ends with the Professor resetting the timeline, as the series officially loops around forever, never truly ending.
2 Jurassic Bark - Season 4 Episode 7
One of the show's most infamous episodes, this holds the show's biggest emotional gut-punch. In a museum featuring unearthed artifacts from 2000, Fry finds his old dog, Seymour, who was left behind when he traveled to the future.
The Professor believes he can use the DNA from the fossil to clone Seymour and bring him back to life. The cloning process is about to be complete when Fry suddenly shuts it down. After seeing Seymour live for 12 more years following his disappearance, he believes Seymour will have forgotten him. The episode then pulls its ace, showing a flashback of Seymour sitting outside the pizza shop for 12 years, hopelessly waiting for Fry to return. Cue tears and one of the show's best and saddest moments.
1 Bender's Big Score - Season 5 Episodes 1-4
Four years after the show's first cancellation, Futurama was revived in 2007...sort of. Four TV movies were commissioned by the network, all four episodes in length, which would be aired back to back. This would eventually lead to the show getting two more seasons, but not knowing that at the time, the team decided to fire on all cylinders.
The first, and by far the best, is Bender's Big Score. The plot is too vast and complicated to explain, but it encompasses everything the show was best at, at its peak. There's bombastic sci-fi action, clever mysteries and interweaving plot threads, and a whole heap of emotionality. Heck, there's even a couple of great songs thrown in there for good measure. It is the most Futurama episode of Futurama ever to be made and reinforced the show's status as a TV icon of the 2000s.