‘Futurama’ Season 14 Premiere Review: Nostalgia and New Adventures
Futurama simply refuses to leave our lives, and that’s very good news. As a fan of this show, with every new season, I feel like I’m still visiting a place that somehow continues existing regardless of how much the world around it changes. With Futurama season 14, as with previous seasons, Fry is still looking at the future through the eyes of someone who, no matter how long he lives there, will always belong partly to the past. As for the rest of the characters, even though they constantly evolve, they are still the same ones we have loved since the very first episodes.
Futurama is a story about tomorrow and not knowing what it will bring. But many of its greatest stories have actually been about facing the past. Season 14 still approaches the same fundamental idea from a considerably more ridiculous direction. Fry is once again missing something from his old life. This time, however, it is not a person. It is a hot dog eating competition.
[Warning: Spoilers from Futurama season 14 are below!]
A Futurama story about Fry, hot dogs, and a very bad scientific idea
That idea alone tells you almost everything you need to know about season 14 of Futurama. There is something wonderfully Fry-like about the entire show and this season. This is a man who has experienced things that nobody from the future century could comprehend.
He has traveled to distant planets, encountered alternate universes, met gods and aliens, jumped across time, and survived enough apocalyptic events that saving existence itself has practically become another Planet Express workday. Yet mention a hot dog eating contest he almost won in 1999, and none of that matters anymore. Fry immediately becomes the person he was before getting frozen.
What’s terrible news for him is that real beef has effectively disappeared because cows are extinct, leaving Fry surrounded by vegan alternatives rather than the hot dog sausages he remembers. Thankfully, as always, the show turns one small thing into a personal problem for Fry.
Once that happens, everything naturally becomes increasingly absurd, and there’s nothing else that matters more than this. If cows are extinct and Fry needs real hot dogs to relive his glory days, then obviously the reasonable solution is to bring cows back.
What makes this idea work, however, is that over the years since 1999, Futurama became so iconic that no matter how absurd you get, for 90% of the time, even the most absurd idea makes sense. And of course, like in the previous seasons, some moments in the series are disgusting, absurd, chaotic, and funny.
The evolution of Fry and his relationship with Leela over the many seasons
After all those seasons, there is one good thing you can say about Futurama, and it is that characters are constantly evolving. Fry is still an interesting character to revisit after so many seasons because changing him too much would destroy part of what makes him work. He cannot suddenly become brilliant, mature, and responsible. Fry needs to be an ancient guy, out of his time, who cares more about an ancient hot dog competition than an alien invasion.
The Fry we meet this season is still recognizably the delivery boy who woke up in the year 3000, but he carries decades of experiences behind his stupidity now. He has fallen in love. He has sacrificed himself for people he cares about. He has learned what happened to the family he left behind. He has experienced entire lifetimes that were erased or rewritten. It is not some enormous transformation, nor should it be. We don’t have to see Fry suddenly seeming like a drastically different person.
The same applies to Leela and Fry’s relationship. One of the smartest choices made during the later seasons of Futurama was finally allowing them to become a couple rather than endlessly avoiding the romantic vibes. Leela now knows precisely who Fry is. She knows he is stupid. She knows he can become obsessed with ridiculous things. She knows following him into some apparently simple situation may eventually result in a fiasco. But that doesn’t stop them from loving each other.
Bender remains one of the great constants of the universe, and he is still one of the most important parts of why the comedy works in the show. The other crew is also evolving, but they go more into the known and discovered regions of their development. But one of the most essential things is that with the constant development, they are still deep down the same characters we loved since episode 1.
Final thoughts on the Futurama season 14 premiere
For this premiere, food has an unusual relationship with memory and is one of the most significant things. You can forget conversations and places, yet one familiar taste can suddenly transport you somewhere you thought you had lost. That’s why it works so well.
Fry’s obsession with real hot dogs is ridiculous, but underneath it is something understandable. He wants to feel, however briefly, like the person who stood in that competition one thousand years ago, believing that it actually mattered.
For a few moments, Fry gets part of 1999 back. And perhaps for many, like me, watching Futurama still works similarly. The world around the series has changed. Media has changed. Animation has changed. We grew older. Yet we get new episodes, and suddenly it does not feel like that much time has passed since the first episode.
Season 14 starts as ridiculous, occasionally disgusting, and imperfect, but as it gets closer to the end credits, it hits you that it is still Futurama. We’ll get wacky, crazy, nostalgic, or trippy episodes within the coming weeks. It’s clear that there is so much left to explore with the beloved, long-running animated series.
Futurama season 14 is currently streaming on Hulu and Disney+.
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