Worst 7B episode

[Reply #40 on:]

SMFP probably would have tied with Leadbelly for me if it weren't for the G.I. Zapp segment. While the first two segments of SMFP were terrible, G.I. Zapp might have been one of my favourite moments of the season. Meanwhile, I don't think I laughed once during Leadbelly.

I completely agree with you. The episode was OK, but that G.I. Zapp part made the episode for me.

EDIT: First TOTP 

[Reply #41 on:]

Except the "I must get my hands on those healthy purple berries!" gag. That made me laugh harder each time it was repeated.

Allow me to elaborate on this:

Show spoiler

[Reply #42 on:]

The line itself was great, though the fact that he never left the damn balcony just became funnier and funnier the more times they cut to him.

[Reply #43 on:]

SMFP probably would have tied with Leadbelly for me if it weren't for the G.I. Zapp segment. While the first two segments of SMFP were terrible, G.I. Zapp might have been one of my favourite moments of the season. Meanwhile, I don't think I laughed once during Leadbelly.

I completely agree with you. The episode was OK, but that G.I. Zapp part made the episode for me.

G.I. Zapp was quite possibly one of my favourite Nixon appearances. And it's looking like it will have been the last appearance of both Nixon and Zapp.   Unless they show up in "Meanwhile," which I could see happening, since they were both in TDHAIP and ITWGY. 

[Reply #44 on:]

So, is there going to be a thread about most mediocre episode of season 7B, too?

For me, SMFP wasn't very good at all, but TTT was even worse, it was... stupid.

[Reply #45 on:]

T: The Terrestrial has become somewhat of a "guilty pleasure" episode for me. Yeah, it's stupid, but it's also pretty damn funny. Saturday Morning Fun Pit was both stupid AND unfunny. Much more of failure in my opinion.

[Reply #46 on:]

The worst episode for me was 'Forty Percent Leadbelly'. but I didn't see it listed when I voted, so I chose 'T: The Terrestrial' instead, which was rather bland but far from terrible.

I liked 'Saturday Morning Fun Pit'. The Scooby Doo and GI Joe segment were quite funny, although the Strawberry Shortycake segment was dull as dishwater. A lot of the complaints about the Scooby Doo parody are that it had been done better by other cartoons.  That may be true, but I haven't seen any of those other parodies, the Futurama version was fresh to me.  And taken on its own, it's definitely funny.

[Reply #47 on:]

I accidentally voted for "2-D Blacktop" when I meant "Forty Percent Leadbelly" (don't ask me why, I just did). I don't hate the latter but it is easily the worst of the season.

Although I have only viewed "Saturday Morning Fun Pit" once, I enjoyed it immensely. It's not the most inventive or well-plotted episode ever, but it is hilarious. My opinion may differ over time but at this moment, it is definitely the funniest of the season.

[Reply #48 on:]

The only one that was new to me was the hallway-of-doors gag, which I thought was absolutely brilliant, but that's still not enough to warrant the segment's existence.

Seriously? Of the Scooby Doo parodies I've seen, they've ALL made fun of the hallway bit - not to mention countless other things that aren't even direct Scooby Doo parodies. It's the one joke I've seen a trillion times before.

I suppose the whole pot-smoking hippies angle has been done a lot as well, but everything else from the episode seemed fairly unique to me.

Things like grubby animation cels and Larry Bird's answering message on the other hand weren't like jokes I've seen in any other Scooby Doo spoofs (and I've seen quite a few) and were very funny.

[Reply #49 on:]

People really voted for T: The Terrestrial?

I'm disappointed in all of you.

[Reply #50 on:]

Even though I really disliked the episode overall, I will say the animation cels in Bender-Boo and Nixon's dub of G.I Zapp (Yay, I caught it!) were chuckle-worthy.

[Reply #51 on:]

T the Terrestrial is third?

Yeah, Forty Percent Leadbelly for me too. It's just lame. Fun Pit and Assie Come Home aren't too far behind, though.

[Reply #52 on:]

After re-watching 7B, my least favourite is "Calculon 2.0". By quite a long stretch, to be honest.

The plot is just so dull. It's like "A Leela of Her Own" all over again, except that the jokes aren't nearly good enough. I mean, "A Leela of Her Own" wasn't amazingly funny, but it had original-run quality gags. It was consistent. "Calculon 2.0" has a few good gags, but for the most part, it's just a bore-fest.

[Reply #53 on:]

2D Blacktop clinches it for me. I actually thought the "verbal abuse" thing was very funny (because I understood what they were making fun of), but the overall episode, while okay, is kind of all over the place and too unfocused. There are some decent jokes, but it feels like two or three different episodes that could have all been much better episodes individually had more time been spent on those story lines. It's a shame as the 2D angle was really clever, but it only lasts for three minutes or something. I think it's also just a bit hard to care about the Professor suddenly taking an interest in street racing. Might be in my bottom 10 or 15 even. I still don't get why Comedy Central thought to lead off with it.

Saturday Morning Fun Pit I quite enjoyed. In fact, the Scooby Doo segment is hysterical. The only issue I had with that segment was that the pot-smoking gag really has been done too many other times, but every other joke they did that I've seen before (e.g. the hallway doors thing) they did with enough of a clever spin that it was funny again. And the Purpleberries thing was also great, at least if you're familiar with just how truly godawful 80s cartoons really were. The only one that doesn't entirely work for me was G.I. Zapp; I thought the concept was funny, but I think it would have been better if the edits were closer to what you'd actually see on a cartoon from that time, without Nixon hastily talking over them. It just got tiring after a couple minutes of it. But even then, it was alright, just not very inspired.

Leadbelly is also funny. Not a classic, but like Beamer said, it's perfectly fine as far as inconsequential Bender episodes go. In fact, the 3D printer part kind of elevated it a little. That was a pretty clever twist.

For the most part, I really enjoyed all the rest of these.

[Reply #54 on:]

I like a lot about "2-D Blacktop", specifically the concept of the characters going to a two-dimensional world, but nothing about it really holds together, like you say.

I mean, the fact that they go into the two dimensional world from crashing a ship into another is just frigging stupid. It's vaguely implied that the Professor's dimensional drift had something to do with it, but not really. It would have been so easy to write a nice line of dialogue about how his dimensional drift engine had pulled them out of three dimensions and into two when they collided with the other ship or something, but no - as it is, it's just stupid and messy. But hey, it's less boring than "Calculon 2.0".

[Reply #55 on:]

I never had any logic problems with it per se. I mean, far weirder shit has happened on this show without much explanation, and honestly, I didn't care then either. Within the crazy sci-fi cartoon world of Futurama, the way they went to 2D was fine and pretty funny and clever.

It's more a story structure thing...the episode is really all over the place and not very focused. It's like the writers just sort of rambled a bunch of ideas on the page and then just stuck them together rather than developing any of them further. I don't think they go 2D until act three (maybe the end of act two); that's something that could be a whole episode, but as it stands it's kind of undercooked. In particular, if someone asked me what the core theme of the episode is, I couldn't really tell you. At first it seems like it's about the Professor being bored and wanting to do something exciting (street racing), but then the whole last third of the episode has nothing to do with that theme. Even something like Duh-Vinci Code, with all it's weirdness and changes between acts, sticks to a core theme for both the plot (exploring the real story of Davinci) and the character motivation (Fry wants people to consider him smart), right from act one all the way to the end. And even that's a pretty unmemorable episode, but that shows how unfocused and rambly 2D Blacktop is in comparison to really nearly all episodes of the show.

It's still pretty funny and I'd gladly watch it in repeats. Only a scant few episodes of the series are actually bad television to me. But, it isn't one of my favorites.

[Reply #56 on:]

The 2D world could've been better implemented into the story. It just kind of came and went in a flash without any time to flesh it out.

I actually love all the racing and stuff. For me it's a comparable episode to "The Thief of Baghead"; there's a lot of stuff I like but a couple of really dumb aspects of the story that drag it down a bit.

As for Calculon 2.0, I agree with cyber_turnip about it feeling pretty dull. That's just about all I can complain about, really. I probably would've preferred a more meaningful death from Calculon, but otherwise this was a relatively neutral episode that didn't feature a whole lot of good or bad.

[Reply #57 on:]

Calculon 2.0 is incredibly funny, though. One of the few episodes that had me laughing almost the entire way through the first time I saw it (eg. War is the H-Word, Spanish Fry, That Darn Katz - none of them were trying to do anything apart from be really, really funny).

2-D Blacktop kind of feels like two half-baked ideas forcibly crammed together. The professor's addiction to street racing would've made a perfectly good B-plot in another episode, and the 2D stuff really should've been more fleshed-out and then given its own episode.

[Reply #58 on:]

Calculon 2.0 is incredibly funny, though. One of the few episodes that had me laughing almost the entire way through the first time I saw it (eg. War is the H-Word, Spanish Fry, That Darn Katz - none of them were trying to do anything apart from be really, really funny).

I couldn't disagree more.

Whilst I didn't find it bad in the humour department, it was certainly one of 7B's less-funny episodes for me.

Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

[Reply #59 on:]

... PAUSE!!!

[Reply #60 on:]

See, I found the "pause" gags to be incredibly predictable and laboured. They were the sort of joke I'd expect to find in Saturday Morning a kids' show.

Almost all of the jokes in that episode felt cheap or laboured, to be honest. That or they just rehashed old gags such as the stuff with the Execubots - and they weren't exactly a laugh riot the first time that we saw them.

It's the weak humour combined with the dull plot that makes me not like it, whereas I find "Saturday Morning Fun Pit" reasonably amusing for the most part in spite of its irrelevant plot and lazy premise. Ironic really given that I was just comparing "Calculon 2.0" to Saturday Morning cartoons as a slight against it.

Also, I disagree about "War is the H-Word" having no goal beyond being funny. It's one of the more dramatic storylines that the show had had up until that point, in my opinion. You've got some of the earliest Fry/Leela stuff and the stakes are higher than usual because they're at war and, in theory, anyone could be killed.

[Reply #61 on:]

Oh, I saw the "PAUSE" punchline coming a mile away every time. But the delivery - coupled with the timing - was utterly perfect, so I still laughed out loud every time.

As for the argument that War is the H-Word had a dramatic storyline, it's not exactly like the show ever had any stakes that would make you fear for the character's lives. Certainly not in an episode that began with ham-flavoured bubblegum and was full of ball jokes, anyway. I love that episode, it's one of my favourites, but it only engages me on a comedic level. You'd never rank the plot alongside, say, Time Keeps on Slippin' or The Luck of the Fryrish.

[Reply #62 on:]

I agree with DotheBartman about 2-D Blacktop. That's exactly what made episode worse, it was too complicated with something like 3 plots and overall confusing and not well paced. It actually reminds me of some 7A episodes with too much plot in one episode. I really liked that 2D-world part and how it was tied to the race. It could have been a lot better.

Calculon 2.0 wasn't very funny and not impressive in any way, but it was constantly good episode, serving as The Thief of Baghead 2 (which I seem to like more than others). Its lack of jokes wasn't a problem at all, it was still funny and enjoyable, with thorough one storyline.

[Reply #63 on:]

I hated "The Thief of Baghead" if that's relevant.

[Reply #64 on:]

I was so-so on Baghead; some parts were good, such as the Calculon's suicide scenes, but other parts, like the Ego-dog-thing, were kind of 'eh' worthy.

[Reply #65 on:]

I happen to like TTOBH a fair bit. The ending is stupid though.

[Reply #66 on:]

I love Calculon 2.0. It's one of my favourite episodes that doesn't star one of the PE crew. It's very well paced, satisfying, and while I don't find any joke amazingly funny, there aren't any bad jokes. It makes up for the lame TToBH, in my opinion.

[Reply #67 on:]

I hated The Thief of Baghead first-time-around but now I think it's great. Yeah, the deflated bodies of the PE crew was a bit much, but other than that, there's really nothing wrong with the episode.

Plus, the image of that Tyrannosaurus Rex struggling to keep afloat in the aquarium is quite possibly the biggest laugh the show's ever given me.

[Reply #68 on:]

SMFP probably would have tied with Leadbelly for me if it weren't for the G.I. Zapp segment. While the first two segments of SMFP were terrible, G.I. Zapp might have been one of my favourite moments of the season. Meanwhile, I don't think I laughed once during Leadbelly.

I completely agree with you. The episode was OK, but that G.I. Zapp part made the episode for me.

EDIT: First TOTP 

At first, I actually thought that she had faked a heart attack hoping to make Bender look bad. She may be evil enough to break Bender's legs, but she's not evil enough to fake a "cute little heart attack" (I think that's what they called it).

[Reply #69 on:]

I didnt hate this episode, I actully liked it,but the way it ended made it the worst of the season
Calculon 2.0
Plus it premiered on my birthday
This season had some bad episode but nothing awful I feel some if them are "there" episodes

[Reply #70 on:]

Calculon is like Futurama. He died, came back to life, and died again way too soon.

[Reply #71 on:]

I thought this season had some really good episodes. While it had some pretty meh-fest episodes.

The only episode I didn't like, was T and Genestalk.

I dunno why, but I really grown to dislike Genestalk. I don't hate it like I hate T, but it's just pretty meh, and would need alot of improvement. And pretty forgettable overall. It's kind of like how Overclockwise was for me. In the beginning I loved it. Once I watched it a few times, I was embarrassed to even call that a finale. It was a pretty good ep, but NOT a good finale.

T had so many things wrong with it. They made Hermes look like the typical Jamaican pothead, Leela and others look extremely stupid, and dumbed Fry down quite a bit. Not to mention that the jokes were cheap, and had a really stupid ending.

Calculon 2.0, Leadbelly, and 2D Blacktop are episodes I didn't really care for. They all had a unique quality to make me enjoy some aspects of the episode, but all suffer pretty big issues.

Calculon 2.0 is just another version of Lobstertainment and Bender Should not Be Allowed of Television. They reused just about everything from those episodes. There were nice jokes/gags here and there, but it was the first episode I could say was lazily written.

Leadbelly had a pretty damn good story, but absolutely no jokes whatsoever, let alone an ending that barely made any sense. They should have saved the rap song for the credits, like they did for "Free Will Hunting". Then the ending would have been better, and made sense. I don't see how this was rated the worst episode though. It was actually pretty decent.

2D Blacktop was a pretty good episode. But some of the jokes were kind of cheap and not-so-good though (Abusive Dad jokes were terrible), let alone the stupid, awful ending.

Episodes I didn't mention, were all genuinely good in their own way. I appreciate them lots, and think they're perfectly structured for Final Season episodes.

[Reply #72 on:]

2D Blacktop was a pretty good episode. But some of the jokes were kind of cheap and not-so-good though (Abusive Dad jokes were terrible), let alone the stupid, awful ending.

You mean unspoken verbal abuse.

[Reply #73 on:]

Leadbelly was by far the worst I think. To me, it was completely unfunny, and the Bender-becomes-a-folk singer angle was very uninteresting.

I actually liked most of 2-D Blacktop, but the abuse jokes were so terrible, they managed to drag down the rest of the episode for me. I can't think of any other episode that's had the problem of a recurring joke damage my enjoyment of the entire episode, so that was a uniquely obnoxious aspect of 2DB.

T.:The Terrestrial was just stupid, and not in a way that was at all amusing, in my opinion. I think it's the worst movie parody Futurama has done by a long shot, and the ending in particular was terrible.

[Reply #74 on:]

I can't decide whether I dislike Saturday Morning Fun Pit of Forty Percent Leadnelly more. SMFP had a few redeemable qualities, such as the G.I. Zapp segment, while Leadbelly, in my opinion had none. Leadbelly had a much better story than SMFP, however. Without looking too far into it, I'd say SMFP is my least favorite, but I'm still not entirely sure.

[Reply #75 on:]

I don't really get the hate SMFP gets, honestly. Same with Leadbelly (well, I can kind of see the hate that one gets, BUT it was still better than a few other eps from this season).

I'd say the worst is obviously T, as stated above. It's just......ugh.

[Reply #76 on:]

Aww, I really liked "40% Leadbelly." I won't rehash my review of it in its defense, though. Rather I'll focus on the episode I liked least: "2-D Blacktop." We've already seen 2-D rendered on the series and it was about 78% funnier when it was done on "Reincarnation." Sure, they were in a video-game setting, but the characters bumping into each other because of the flat plane showed the lack of a third dimension as far as I'm concerned. That one had a 2-D Professor easily chugging beers as his sorrowmeter rose and his digestive system seemed fine then. I don't find racing games amusing so the whole racing plotline didn't do anything for me. It was all "meh" for me.

[Reply #77 on:]

I think 'Blacktop' could've been much better than it ended up being myself. Although itm had been done, the 2D dimension could've worked in it's own episode, and with a few rewrites, the Farnsworth storyline could've worked as one too. The ultimate thing that makes me dislike this one is the stupid as hell 'Abuse' joke. It wasn't funny the first time, second time, third time, and so forth.

[Reply #78 on:]

Sure, they were in a video-game setting, but the characters bumping into each other because of the flat plane showed the lack of a third dimension as far as I'm concerned. That one had a 2-D Professor easily chugging beers as his sorrowmeter rose and his digestive system seemed fine then.

I wouldn't say it's same as it was more like 3D represented in 2D and it was essentially just the video game mechanics rather than restrictions of dimensions. In 2-D Blacktop they really went into flatland with partially different problems than with video game and it's especially from different point of view. However, I can see that jokes seem repeated. (It doesn't bother me as they are approached from different point of view.)

[Reply #79 on:]

I think 'Blacktop' could've been much better than it ended up being myself. Although itm had been done, the 2D dimension could've worked in it's own episode, and with a few rewrites, the Farnsworth storyline could've worked as one too. The ultimate thing that makes me dislike this one is the stupid as hell 'Abuse' joke. It wasn't funny the first time, second time, third time, and so forth.

Agreed. The Farnsworth racing storyline would've been funny as a B-plot in another episode, and the 2nd Dimension idea should've been the primary focus for this one. That episode had a few laughs here and there, but overall it was an absolute mess.