6 Completely Pointless Details In TV Shows (That Will Blow Your Mind)

The writing staff of Futurama famously held three PhDs, seven master’s degrees, and cumulatively had more than 50 years at Harvard University. It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that there are a few fantastically complicated, nerdy details snuck in across the show.

In this instance a special shoutout goes to the alien languages we regularly see in the background of many episodes. Rather than just throwaway, world-building nonsense, these languages are actually coded messages and jokes hidden by the creators.

The first alien language to appear in the show was relatively straightforward, a simple substitution cipher where each Latin letter is replaced with a symbol. When fans worked this out, however, the creators went one step further to ensure nobody had a clue what the ‘Alienese’ said and created a far more complicated cipher for the show’s language.

It is a variation of the classic autokey cipher. Each symbol has a numerical value. To decode a message, the first symbol’s value is translated directly into a character, with 0 being ‘A’ and so on. For the remaining letters, you subtract the previous symbol’s numerical value. If the result is less than zero, you add 26. That number is then converted into a character as before.

Awesome, but also complicated to the point that basically nobody got the joke. To double down on the pointlessness, the creators even went so far to create a third entire alien language with an even more complex cipher, which was never actually implemented in the show due to its ridiculous complexity.