Thoughts on Episode 8ACV01 – The Impossible Stream (SPOILERS)

[Reply #40 on:]

Ah, I hadn't even copped that Dwight and Cubert never aged in those CC seasons. They should have been around 20 if everyone was aging normally.
So I guess the characters never age like the Simpsons.

Strange, I thought I remember it being mentioned that Fry or Leela were in their thirties when BBS aired, must have imagined it.

[Reply #41 on:]

They'd be in their mid thirties by now, since they were twelve in 2001/2

[Reply #42 on:]

Strange, I thought I remember it being mentioned that Fry or Leela were in their thirties when BBS aired, must have imagined it.

I don’t think age was mentioned specifically but Leela straight up says to Fry that they met 8 years ago so you’re basically right

[Reply #43 on:]

Oh, to be clear, I’m going off a direct reference in “How the West Was 1010001” to Dwight’s age: unless I’m mistaken, he explicitly said he’s 12 years old.

Honestly I’m mostly fine with the characters staying the same age. Yes, I always sort of assumed the characters were aging normally during the original run—so Fry and Leela start at 25 and end at 29—but I don’t think there’s any direct evidence to support that since the only characters who celebrate birthdays in the first four seasons I think are Farnsworth and Nibbler (and I guess Amy and Zoidberg in TKOS…which just raises further questions about the effect of the various time skips/travels on everyone’s ages).

It’s conventional in long-running cartoons for the characters not to age, and I suppose that’s what’s going on here. Had Futurama had 9 seasons running consecutively from 1999 to 2008, it would’ve made sense for the characters to age in that (modest enough) time frame—but since those 9 seasons are spread across nearly 25 years, it would be a little strange and difficult purely from a storytelling perspective for the main characters to go from being young-ish slackers to middle-aged professionals, with the majority of that evolution/growth not even happening onscreen.

In any event, my apologies for derailing this review thread with my insignificant gripes.

[Reply #44 on:]

Late to the party, but here's my quick take (mostly parroted from everyone else in this thread)

The good:
- I loved the callbacks to previous episodes, especially when they were done in a more subtle context (e.g. Fry using 1077 as his PIN). Long-time fans like myself were very pleased.
- The voice actors are as good as ever, albeit you can definitely hear the signs of aging in their voices. Billy West's voice has definitely aged more prominently than the other actors', and his voice didn't take on that full "Fry" quality until the second or third, but he was making an honest effort and the enthusiasm was still there.
- I'm loving how detailed the backgrounds are, and how high-quality the animation is, without sacrificing the quality of other aspects such as the writing or Chris Tyng's awesome soundtrack.
- I like how they acknowledged "Meanwhile" without integrating it too intensively into the main plot. "Meanwhile" happened and it's time for a fresh start.
- Love the return of Robot Devil and Calculon.

The bad:
- Some of the meta humor and self-deprecating humor seemed somewhat forced and drawn-out. I did enjoy Bender shutting down as a gentle "take that!" against John Dimaggio almost not accepting the offer, but all of the cancellation and Hulu jokes got tiring after a while.
- Initially it seemed like a rehash of "Rebirth", and I wasn't too crazy about a mostly Fry-less episode.
- "Hulurama" was cute the first time but it was absolutely not necessary to incorporate it into the subsequent title sequences.

The elephant in the room:
- The writers should really address the age discrepancy in some future episode. Why were Cubert and Dwight still twelve if more than twelve years passed canonically? Shouldn't everyone be in their mid-forties to fifties instead of their twenties? Is the biological aging process slower than chronological aging? Did everyone go to the anti-aging spa for a youthasizing? I'm sure "a wizard did it" or "a wormhole did it" would be a perfectly reasonable explanation (and I did accept the explanation for the age discrepancies among Amy and Kif's offspring in episode 2), but please, writers, address it.

Overall: It's a step above CC, and I can tell they're making an honest effort to bring it back to its FOX roots, but they definitely need to find their stride again. With that said, it kept me hooked and is off to a very promising start. 7/10

[Reply #45 on:]

I wish they hadn't touched Meanwhile at all. I don't know exactly what they would have done instead but I didn't need or want the direct connection to one of the best episodes of the show. It felt as though it undermined that episode's conclusion somewhat.

I agree, but for different reasons. "Meanwhile" isn't one of my favorite episodes; mainly because I just don't think it's very funny. The second biggest problem I have with it is that I don't really understand the ending. Having the episode, and the series, end with Fry and Leela losing all of their memories is, frankly, terrible. It makes the episode meaningless, imo. I still think the episode is ok, simply because I enjoy spending time with these characters. Oh, and because I like the idea of the ten second time machine.

Which leads me to "The Impossible Stream." It doesn't answer my questions about "Meanwhile" and actually raises quite a few more. They don't answer any of those either. Do they remember the events of "Meanwhile"? Time seems to have passed normally for some characters, and not for others which makes no sense.

I think it would have been better to just leave most of the events of "Meanwhile" unmentioned. Just start the first episode with everything being like it usually is at Planet Express with the sole exception being that Fry and Leela are engaged.

As for the episode itself, I'd probably give it a 7/10. Not that many funny bits, but it still felt like Futurama. And, as I said, I just like spending time with these characters. Sometimes that's enough.