Rent Futurama: Series 2 (2000)

Futurama: Series 2 review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

The second season of Futurama is where the series finally started hitting its stride. It found the right balance of powerful satire and silly sci-fi shenanigans. The jokes were punchier, the animation pristine, and the concepts deliciously dark. The show also expands on its wild lore that carries throughout the series, creating a brilliant essence of serialization. Here are some of the best episodes of the season.

"A Head in the Polls" is a classic stab at the nature of politics while also being a rogue body part story. Bender pawns his body for money and soon finds Richard Nixon, having been preserved for centuries, using his body to run for office. There are some easy gags on Nixon given Billy West’s brilliant parody of the voice as well as some jabs at the blandness of candidates and the lack of interest in politics.

"Xmas Story" is perhaps the darkest story of the season by its very concept. In the first Christmas episode of the show, the myth of Santa Claus has mutated the holiday into one of terror, as a murderous robot sends bombs and wreaks havoc on Christmas Eve. With John Goodman voicing the evil Santa robot, the concept is ripe with chaos and creates a weird sense of togetherness through survival instinct that is just weird enough to work for Futurama.

"A Bicyclops Built for Two" finds Leela searching for answers about her mysterious race of which she has met none. She believes the answer may lie on another planet but she is fooled by a shape-shifting alien. This episode plays a Star Trek story with its fantastical planet of danger under the surface as well as being a great parody of Married With Children, the show where Katey Segal became better known as Peg.

"A Clone of My Own" introduces the recurring character of Kubert, a cloned kid from Professor Farnsworth’s DNA. There’s some clever dialogue about the worth in life and pursuit of the future as well as a thrilling starship rescue from a robotic retirement facility. "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back" is just a fun adventure of Hermes in the dry world of governmental forms and bureaucracy. There’s so much fun to be added in the satirical mockery of such a boring job that harkens back to the dry and wry comedy of the early years of The Simpsons. It also has a pretty slamming musical climax.

"Anthology of Interest I" is essentially the Treehouse of Horror episode, despite not actually being Halloween-themed. Various stories that tinker further with Futurama where characters can die or mutate are indulged in this wonderfully comedic trilogy. The highlight story is by far The Un-Freeze of a Lifetime, where Fry imagines a timeline where he didn’t go forward in time. His removal from the chamber creates a singularity which attracts the attention of guest stars Nichelle Nichols, Gary Gygax, and Steven Hawking.

"War Is the H-Word" is the episode where Earth goes to war with another planet as a distraction while Leela pretends to be a man so she can enlist. While that latter part may make this episode seem like a Mulan parody, it actually has closer ties to Starship Troopers in how it showcases the invading humans as the true enemies working for an inept military.

Not all the episodes are winners. There are some standard plots of evil twins, mafia dealings, and a weirdly romantic take on The Thing With Two Heads. But the season as a whole has some of the funniest episodes of the series as well as some of the most clever of satires. It should also be mentioned that there’s an astounding amount of intelligence placed within the writing where there’s more cleverness amid the silliness. That’s a stellar trait that Futurama has held onto and what makes it one of the funniest geek comedies ever made.