Thoughts on 6ACV09 - A Clockwork Origin - SPOILERS

[Reply #80 on:]

The evolution plot was stellar!  The rivalry between Farnsworth and Dr. Banjo about the 'missing link' was funny!  The spaghetti monster thing reminded me of South Park's Go God Go episodes!  The subplot between Zoidberg and Cubert was funny, too!  Especially that painting!  The whole robot evolution scene was awesome, how they evolved so fast within days.  Fry getting attacked and Leela and Amy being wives was really cool!  the whole courtroom scene where Bender was a cross between Matlock and Charles Darwin was excellent beyond words!  Was Dr. Banjo tailored after Dr. Zaius of Planet of the Apes I wonder?  Another awesome episode!  5/5!  

[Reply #81 on:]

And so it begins. *sigh*

You said this twice about this thread now.  But where is the drama?!

[Reply #82 on:]

You know I completely forgot about that. Maybe I'm just amazed that it hasn't actually happened yet.

[Reply #83 on:]

This one felt good but not great.

One thing that surprised me was that, in spite of expectations, it turns out that the combination of robots and dinosaurs didn't feel as cool as it should have been, i.e. Robosaurs < Robots + Dinosaurs.

"Well, digital photographs don't lie."

And finally the truth comes out about that most heinous of pizza toppings, pineapple.   

[Reply #84 on:]

I totally thought of Gorky when they told the pineapple joke.  She likes pineapples on her pizza.  What the...

[Reply #85 on:]

... but... I like pineapples on my pizza...

[Reply #86 on:]

I'm pretty sure pineapple is good on just about anything.

I don't get the religion v. science discussion at all.

Neither do I.  As far as I can tell it's just certain people on both sides with an animus against either science or religion trying to create conflict where there really is none.

the whole courtroom scene where Bender was a cross between Matlock and Charles Darwin was excellent beyond words!

You mean a cross between Matlock and Clarence Darrow.  Possibly with some Atticus Finch thrown in there somewhere.

Was Dr. Banjo tailored after Dr. Zaius of Planet of the Apes I wonder?

Ya think?

[Reply #87 on:]

Pineapple on pizza isn't horrible, but neither is it desirable.

[Reply #88 on:]

I wasn't tryin to stir the pot. I think there is room for both religion and science.

[Reply #89 on:]

Awesome episode.  Loved the whole Creationism vs. Evolution being satirized.  Also the floating spaghetti monster was a reference to South Park.  Really funny.  Also, I love pineapple on pizza.  Is pineapple poisonous in the future?  I did like the Cubert and Zoidberg scenes.  I like how they added an emotional thing out of it, instead of just straight up funny.

[Reply #90 on:]

It wasn't a reference to South Park, it was a reference to Pastafarianism. The same thing that South Park was referencing.

[Reply #91 on:]

I love pineapple on pizza too!

[Reply #92 on:]

Ewww...Pineapples... Also, to stay relevant, it seems to me that Futurama is getting better each episode, some more noticible than others.

[Reply #93 on:]

Pineapple on pizza isn't horrible, but neither is it desirable.

I hate pineapple on pizza. I can totally relate to the pineapple pizza joke in this episode; I would rather throw the pizza away than pick them off and endure the pineapple's contamination.

This reminds me of a comedian's joke about pineapple pizza. He used it as an allusion to sex. It was something like: "There's a reason why they put pineapple on pizza. It's not because it's delicious -- it's just a little different." I thought that joke was hilarious.

[Reply #94 on:]

You know what'd be a great pizza topping?

Pickles.

[Reply #95 on:]

I love   Pineapples on my pizza! in fact i sometimes order one with only pineapple! 

[Reply #96 on:]

Being a jerk is considered cool on the internet, so I'm going to make fun of FutureJan's lack of capitalization on the letter "i".

But seriously, I was wondering if when they woke up after the trial, the robot world would've followed the same path as the organic one in The Late Phillip J. Fry. It didn't. That would've been cool, though.

[Reply #97 on:]

I work at a Pizza Parlor and pineapple is one of our most popular toppings.  Funny story about that too (okay not THAT funny but...) we had a problem with people taking the orders wrong for a while because when you write down the orders for pizza, you write down the first letter of each topping usually unless they're the same letter.  Some of the newer people would mix up Pepperoni (P) with Pineapple (Pin) They'd just write P and people would call back and say they ordered pineapple and not pepperoni.  I jokingly suggested years ago to use Q for pineapple... and they actually started doing it and it stuck all these years XD

One of the managers was training in a new person tonight and I heard her saying "P is pepperoni, S is sausage, Q is pineapple."

[Reply #98 on:]

You didn't get the "then who's the missing link between those two" jokes, did you?

I did.  I just didn't interpret the "joke" the same way you did.  You saw it as a lampoon on evolutionists who ignore the multi-missing link problem.  I saw it as a lampoon on Creationists who are ridiculed for pointing out the problem.

It's also an illustration of why you can never really prove, for instance, that B follows from A. The standard way to do this is to assume A, show that C happens, and that B follows from C. But now the skeptic wants to know why C is a consequence of A, and the prover says that C is a consequence of D, which is a consequence of A. And so on.

Actually, it's a good thing that Farnsworth didn't try to pass off Piltdown Man as a missing link: the Piltdown skull is a fake (chimpanzee jaw and a human skull), although no one has ever figured out who exactly put it together.

And Manfred Mann, for those of you who are too young, was a singing group from the 1960s. Mann was the keyboard player, and he looked like a beatnik.

EDIT: moved the [ /quote ] tag.

[Reply #99 on:]

Given that robots are not the progeny of their pevious generation, how would robotic beings be able to 'evolve'?

[Reply #100 on:]

The missing link run was as I understood it partly a joke against creationists wanting proof after proof while their only argument is "I believe so", but it was more a joke on the fact that you can never prove anything, and some people just won't believe that. In science, one can never prove for example that water is liquid in 33 degrees. One can only test it and claim "all the times we tested, it was liquid".

[Reply #101 on:]

Absolutely hilarious. By far my fave episode of season 6 for so many reasons. The jokes all through the episode were hilarious and the topic at hand fits Futurama perfectly. Farnsworth was at his best in this one!

And for the record, I also love pineapple on pizza!

[Reply #102 on:]

Given that robots are not the progeny of their pevious generation, how would robotic beings be able to 'evolve'?

They could be self-replicating bots.

[Reply #103 on:]

Absolutely hilarious. By far my fave episode of season 6 for so many reasons. The jokes all through the episode were hilarious and the topic at hand fits Futurama perfectly. Farnsworth was at his best in this one!

Above The Late Philip J. Fry?

[Reply #104 on:]

I thought The Late Philip J. Fry was only a small notch under average. TLPJF is not even in my top 5 of this season.

[Reply #105 on:]

I see.

[Reply #106 on:]

Given that robots are not the progeny of their pevious generation, how would robotic beings be able to 'evolve'?

Nanobots are self-replicating robots by nature. Presumably they were programmed to make improvements to their replicated robots as they saw fit which would indeed cause a sort of robot evolution.

[Reply #107 on:]

I liked the episode, for me on par with the original run.

My favorite scene was definetively the reference to Jurassic Bark, when Dr. Zoidberg found the dog and just said that it seems to be another dog of Fry and put it to the "soup". That really made me laugh hard.

[Reply #108 on:]

That was Hermes. But yeah, I loved it too, especially Fry's innocent, unknowing look

[Reply #109 on:]

I thought The Late Philip J. Fry was only a small notch under average. TLPJF is not even in my top 5 of this season.

lol

Whatever floats your boat.

[Reply #110 on:]

I'm surprised this ep is getting rated as well as it is.  I thought it was sorta mediocre.  I gave it a 6. 

[Reply #111 on:]

I totally thought of Gorky when they told the pineapple joke.  She likes pineapples on her pizza.  What the...

Indeed I do like pineapples on my pizza. I do feel bad that thoughts of me momentarily interrupted your viewing experience, though--no one wants that.

Anyway, review time: I thought this was an average-for-Futurama episode. It was like "Mother's Day", kind of: funny and clever and full of fun sci-fi robots. I liked the utilization of the whole crew (though they've done that several times this season, and I'm kind of starting to miss those episodes that are specifically about, say, Fry or Leela or Bender), and the Zoidberg/Cubert subplot was pretty good (though the ending seemed kind of crass and lazy). I'm liking these new pairings of characters (Hermes/Bender, Amy/Nibbler)--though, like I said, I am sort of longing for an old-school episode that more or less revolves around a single character. Call me old-fashioned.

As far as the humor in this episode goes, it was not the funniest of the season (that distinction goes to either "In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela" or "Lethal Inspection"), but it was plenty funny (I loved Leela comparing killing the robo-dinosaur with killing the pigeon on her balcony, and Fry's fan dance). I thought it did that whole topical/controversial issue thing better than "Proposition Infinity", maybe because it didn't demonize either side (though, granted, being a homophobe is a lot easier to demonize than being a religious person who happens to believe in intelligent design) and arrived at a conclusion that was just wishy-washy enough to work. (For what it's worth, though I'm an agnostic, I do like the idea of some intelligent  being setting evolution in motion--and I think that's probably the way most of our secular society sees the whole debate, anyway.)

My only gripe about this episode is that Farnsworth so readily decides to leave Earth once his theory is called into question--it's overly-dramatic and contrived, and I get that it's a joke, but it still bugs just a bit. That it is later mirrored in the third act by the naturalist robot was funny, though.

So, yeah. This was an enjoyable, middle-of-the-road episode. Better than last week's, at any rate.

7/10

[Reply #112 on:]

I too miss episodes that would just focus on Fry, Leela, and Bender.

[Reply #113 on:]

Not funny.
Rubbish main plot with a predictable conclusion.
Dull subplot with a nonsensical conclusion.
Bad characterization.
No development.

And then there's all the cheap tactics that certain lesser animated shows employ. "Let's go find the missing link!"....yeah, sure. Let's just do that, out of nowhere, because it's convenient to the plot. And let's destroy the dynamic and in-show world we spent 5 seasons creating while we're at it.

"Didn't we used to be a delivery company?" Yeah, but that's ok, you've acknowledged that you've flushed the show's premise down the toilet in an ironic fashion so that makes it fine.

There's no interplay between the core characters anymore. They don't feel real. It's all so stilted and forced. There's no 'Leela says this, and then Fry would say that'. It all seems to be 'if Bender says that we can get to that joke, and then the Professor can do that bit of exposition, and then there's a robot dinosaur'. In other words, it's Simpsons syndrome.

So far this season I've kinda liked 2 episodes. Poor hit rate for me.

[Reply #114 on:]

Yeah, fuck us for bringing the show back.

[Reply #115 on:]

it's Simpsons syndrome.

So far this season I've kinda liked 2 episodes. Poor hit rate for me.

And yet you've watched them all. Seriously, if you dislike it, don't watch it. I found myself disliking several episodes of the Simpsons... and I've not watched it for the last few years. Never felt the need to join a Simpsons forum just to announce that, either

[Reply #116 on:]

Yeah, fuck us for bringing the show back.

Do you mind explaining that remark? Isn't it possible to try and bring something back because you love what it used to be, and yet be disappointed if it's return does not live up to expectations? Is it allowed for me to have an opinion different than yours, or are you just so mind-blowingly uptight that you can't allow that to pass?

it's Simpsons syndrome.

So far this season I've kinda liked 2 episodes. Poor hit rate for me.

And yet you've watched them all. Seriously, if you dislike it, don't watch it. I found myself disliking several episodes of the Simpsons... and I've not watched it for the last few years. Never felt the need to join a Simpsons forum just to announce that, either

I can't know whether I'll like an episode or not if I don't watch it, smart boy. Based on the proportion of episodes I've liked in the past, I've kept watching. Is that allowed, my liege? Do I have to ask for your permission? And FYI I've been a member of this forum for 7 years and will post my opinions as and when I like.

I'm sick of ridiculous fanboys who can't stomach any criticism of a show, even when it's clearly expressed and explained. Isn't this thread for episode discussion? If some sort of brown-nosing only policy has been employed, I must have missed the PM.

Thanks both of you, for your fascinating counter arguments to my points about the episode.

[Reply #117 on:]

Thanks both of you, for your fascinating counter arguments to my points about the episode.

Oh, you want counter-arguments instead of a summary? Well, you asked... Here goes...

Not funny.

I had a couple of laughs out of it, a couple of chuckles, and at least one snigger. Sure, it was cooler and cleverer than it was funny, but that's one thing that appeals to most of us nerds. Not funny is really not a very good criticism of a show like Futurama.

Rubbish main plot with a predictable conclusion.

Rubbish? I thought robot evolution was a neat idea. Predictable conclusion? That's what TV audiences want, that's what Futurama aims to deliver. See WAA and Fry's speech to the PX crew.

Dull subplot with a nonsensical conclusion.
Bad characterization.

These two sorta dovetail, so I'll address them both at once. Zoidberg is highly mercurial, Cubert is a brat. Those two things have never changed. Zoidberg tried to earn Cubert's respect. Cubert finally learned to respect Zoidberg. Cubert got on Zoidberg's tits. What's nonsensical about that?

No development.

You're right there. Nothing developed whatsoever. Certainly not the Professor's relationship with his creations, nor his animosity/amiability towards those who disagree with him, neither the attitude of Bender towards his own existance and the future of robotkind. No subtleties there. Nuances were clearly ignored.[/end Sarcasm]

And then there's all the cheap tactics that certain lesser animated shows employ. "Let's go find the missing link!"....yeah, sure. Let's just do that, out of nowhere, because it's convenient to the plot. And let's destroy the dynamic and in-show world we spent 5 seasons creating while we're at it.

They've never dropped everything just to explore some precept or point that one of the crew wanted to find out more about? ABBFT must've been from a different show then. So must COTH, WTBR, and AFTR.

"Didn't we used to be a delivery company?" Yeah, but that's ok, you've acknowledged that you've flushed the show's premise down the toilet in an ironic fashion so that makes it fine.

See above. Neither the dynamic, the world, nor the premise have been harmed. AWITM, BL, LI, and TL, to name just a few examples have also had crew members run off on non-delivery adventures, and a couple of those actually deepened the dynamics, explored the world, and finally returned to the premise.

There's no interplay between the core characters anymore.

So the entire crew trapped on a planet of evolving robots is not "interplay between the core characters?" Did I miss a memo?

They don't feel real. It's all so stilted and forced. There's no 'Leela says this, and then Fry would say that'. It all seems to be 'if Bender says that we can get to that joke, and then the Professor can do that bit of exposition, and then there's a robot dinosaur'. In other words, it's Simpsons syndrome.

Very few Bender jokes in this episode. Perhaps you'd have laughed more at it if there had been though... the Bender jokes kinda cater to the juvenile and idiotic amongst the audience. I see nothing Simpsons-esque about the way the episode was handled.

I can't know whether I'll like an episode or not if I don't watch it, smart boy.

Aww. Did somebody forget to activate your psychic downlink? Seriously, if you're not happy with it after 9 episodes which seem to have recaptured the flavour of the original run amazingly well, it's a safe enough bet to say that you're not going to enjoy the remaining 3 of this broadcast run.

Based on the proportion of episodes I've liked in the past, I've kept watching. Is that allowed, my liege? Do I have to ask for your permission? And FYI I've been a member of this forum for 7 years and will post my opinions as and when I like.

It's allowed, just don't complain about it. Nobody's forcing you to watch. Asking my permission would be a step in the right direction though. Asking my permission for just about anything is never a bad idea. And seven years later, you're still a crustacean. Jeez. You're clearly a massive fan and a hugely active member. I totally retract my statement.

I'm sick of ridiculous fanboys who can't stomach any criticism of a show, even when it's clearly expressed and explained. Isn't this thread for episode discussion? If some sort of brown-nosing only policy has been employed, I must have missed the PM.

No brown-nosing required, but you and I obviously have differences of opinion regarding what constitues "clearly explained". Perhaps you should express yourself in a more suitable arena, such as a Simpsons forum?

[Reply #118 on:]

Thanks, you've told me alright. I'll certainly think twice before saying what I think of an episode in an episode thread ever again. I didn't think the episode was funny or enjoyable. You did, so clearly my opinion is meaningless and only of value if expressed on a Simpsons forum.

Yes, still a crustacean. Jeez! And yet you, honored Doop Secretary, seem to still have trouble with the concept of episode discussion threads allowing free expression of opinion on the episode in question. "Nobody's forcing you to watch" so "don't complain about it". In other words, if you didn't like it, shut up. Great basis for episode discussion. But apparently I'm juvenile and idiotic, so what do I know.

Oh well.

[Reply #119 on:]

Discussion is fine. Great fun, even. But you weren't discussing so much as outright trashing the episode, and the series itself. Besides which, I've noticed that many people abuse the right to express their opinions by having retarded opinions in the firsat place. It's much better for everybody that I get on their case about it, rather than allow them to continue living with the delusion that their opinions are of any value.

Glad to hear that you've realised your opinion is worthless, btw! Welcome to PEEL, you should enjoy it here!

But seriously, if you didn't like it, say why. Don't just say "rubbish plot, not funny". Have a proper gripe instead of posting something so terse and vague. I mean, it seems so much like trolling when you do it your way.

Still, I'm sure that your "review" style is appreciated on Spongebob and Kim Possible forums.