SPACE PILOT 3000
Season 1, episode 1
Wri. David X. Cohen and Matt Groening, Dir. Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo
It’s not easy to imagine all the responsabilities a TV pilot has. Think about it : you gotta introduce characters, a whole universe surrounding them, an overall story, you gotta choose what the tone of the story and the style are gonna be like… while still doing an episode that is able to stand on its own two feet. It’s difficult for a pilot to give a clear preview of what the show it introduces is going to be like.
Space Pilot 3000 is one of those that do it perfectly. Especially since above being a great introduction to the show, to me, it’s a great introduction to the character all of this revolves around : good ol’ Philip J. Fry.
The prologue already gives us what we need to know first. We get that Fry is a loser of a young adult, with an ungratifying job and a girlfriend who dumps him, and who gets zero respect. The main things are here, but they’re not without their subtleties. The first shot, without even visually introducing Fry, suggests a character who dreams of places elsewhere, absorbed in the imaginarium of pop-culture, before his virtual spaceship is destroyed. Boom. Back to reality with a kid calling him a loser, and our first view on how the character looks like. It’s New Year’s Eve. Not an ordinary New Year’s Eve, the one that precedes the year 2000. For the majority of people, a new millennium seems to be the sign of big things to come in their lives. As for Fry, it’s gonna be another lousy millennium in his life, which gives us what we need to understand about Fry’s current life and how he feels about it. Jumping to the future, however, he thinks about the door opened towards a new life for him, believing that he lost nothing behind him (for now, but we’re not there yet).
In less than 3 minutes, we already have a great introduction to a great character. To me, it’s the heart of this episode. Of course, it doesn’t stop itself to introduce a new universe as well, a universe that allows a lot of creativity. Groening and X. Cohen cleverly use the clichés established by Star Trek and other kinds of films, series, books and everything else with a futuristic set-up, all the better to dismantle them, hitting us in the face with their wacky ideas like the Star Trek-like door hitting Fry’s face (or like the policemen beating the crap out of him with lightsabers). Fry’s first contact with something that really feels like sci-fi is Leela, a cyclop, a surnatural creature, and yet, she’s doing a ungratifying job just like Fry before he was cryogenized. The chemistry is already established, Fry is performing all the formalities while dreaming about the possibilities of the future, before realizing that even though he made a thousand year jump to the future, his past chases him : he’s gonna be a delivery boy, he can’t be anything else.
Fry flees the office and finally enters that fantasised future, filled with unbridled creativity, and with Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo having fun displaying all this. The usual clichés like those gool ol’ flying cars go alongside signs of a more disillusioned vision of the future, such as the infamous suicide booth, with a somewhat long waiting line to go in. Imagine what we would have lost without those suicide booths, since Fox wasn’t much into these. Plus, it’s Fry’s first contact with another iconic character : Bending Bending Rodriguez aka Bender. There are better places for a first encounter, but once again, there is good chemistry. Note that the series was seemingly trying to find its groove regarding that character, which already displays signs of a pretty screwed personality (suicidal, greedy, alcoholic), but has yet to become the psychopath we fully know and love. The reason he wanted to kill himself ? He realized he was working on suicide booths. Usually, the pain of others makes him laugh (« kill all humans », says he two episodes later), but even he, apparently, didn’t take the fact he contributes to many people’s suicide very well. Fry’s personality, on the other hand, is more and more tweaked along the episode, as we realize how much of a kindhearted guy he his. It’s what saves Bender from commiting suicide (because he wants to be his friend), and Leela from a thousand year cryopreservation. Those small gestures are precursors of the (sort of) friendship between those characters.
Leela by the way, personifying Fry’s past chasing him, finds him, and he runs off to a head museum. The opportunity to display the famous – albeit existing way before the show – concept of heads preserved in a jar, and to have fun with some celebrities, like Leonard Nimoy, symbol of Fry’s pop-culture knowledge and symbol of his vision of the future through his role of Spock, which is promptly undignified while eating like a fish in a bowl. Also the opportunity to make fun of Richard Nixon, the first of many times they do this. Our fugitive redhead also gives back to Bender a meaning in his life, bending things, which he was programmed for, but bending what (and who) he wants, which goes against what he was programmed for. The same way than the appearance of the policemen and Leela, all of this is important to go against what is this future’s motto : « you gotta do what you gotta do ». Leela herself is going to realize she’s tired of following that stupid law while Fry and Bender are getting to the sewers where the former discovers an important part of the lore of this universe : the ruins of the old New York. By the way, small regret, the hall of criminals being this underused, not even used for a joke except that it looks like a prison cell.
The discovery of the old New York this early is important not only for the lore, but also because of what it adds to Fry. As soon as he realized he is in the future, Fry was happy leaving his past behind him, since he thought he lost nothing. But with this scene, Fry realizes that he did lose some things in the process, all the people he knew, all the people he cared about. This scene makes Fry’s characterization all the more three-dimensional, and all the more endearing. It’s the ideal place for him to confront Leela once again, while he’s just accepting his programmed destiny, thinking that he doesn’t have more opportunities and that this thousand year jump just made him lose his friends and family, his world. I love how much they made this story about a guy not wanting to be a delivery boy dramatic, and it works. All this makes Leela closer to Fry, while she reveals she is alone to (the only cyclop on Earth, abandoned by her parents when she was a child), and ends up deciding to quit her job, realizing what meeting Fry brought to her. But the episode can’t end now with the three of them being job deserters. Fortunately, Fry still has a part of his family in the future, his great-[...]-great nephew, prof. Hubert Farnsworth.
I love his introduction scene, where he looks and acts just like a typical senile old man, and the way the reveal of the famous Planet Express ship is directed, while he’s focusing on things that fascinate him more like wires of different lengths, and while he casually reveals he designed it himself. The characters try to flee the policemen chasing them, during a wonderful scene which mirrors the scene with the countdown to 2000. I love the difference between Fry unenthusiastically blowing into a party horn and Fry enthusiastically saying "blast off". Fry is starting this new millennium, his new life, with a bang. The climax is short but it didn’t need to be longer, it’s creative enough and allows Leela to display another part of her personality, which will naturally lead her to become the captain of the crew. Speaking of which. The professor somewhat dismantles his established senile old man personality by adding a more twisted side to it when he talks about his old crew (while doing some foreshadowing for
The Sting, three seasons before it comes up), while he offers Fry, Leela and Bender the chance of being his new crew. Fry, therefore, finally gets a job : he’s a delivery boy, again. But this time, he’s happy about it, since he has the choice and realizes the opportunity the future does have for him now. I also like that the final scene is the only one that happens in space, the pilot being pretty down to earth relatively speaking, this scene opens new horizons that the following episodes will explore with pleasure.
There aren’t many series as far as I know that started out with one of their best episodes, but Futurama did. This episode is an excellent blueprint while focusing on the essential stuff, creating the basic pieces of a hilarious universe lampooning the common clichés, with a neat direction courtesy of Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo (I really like the way some visual jokes are directed, like Bender picking up his arms on the ground), and above everything else, creating a genuine protagonist, as fun as he’s endearing, whose complexity is already very well established. A lot of things that makes Futurama such a great show is here, even though there are still things that the following episodes will tell us about it. Obviously, it’s gonna get a
5/5 from me.
(PS. I doubt next reviews are going to be as long as this one. I wanted to do my best so this project starts out with a bang.)