Futurama: 10 Worst Episodes

5. Neutopia

The Episode: After accidentally landing on a foreign planet, the Planet Express crew and their passengers are neutered by a giant rock alien seeking to ease the sexual tension in the group and thus eliminate their disagreements. The alien pops up again just as the crew have realised that they're better off without genders. It tries to restore them to normal, only to mix things up and turn the men into women and vice versa. The crew then decide to create a nude calendar featuring the now-female characters as a means of saving their company from bankruptcy.

Why It Sucks: The characters, who normally have at least some level of depth, are reduced to a set of gender stereotypes throughout the episode. The men are all misogynistic pigs, the women are all man-hating pseudo-feminists. Obviously this was done to fit in with the plot, but did the writers have to be quite so heavy-handed about it?

Admittedly, showing how the characters would behave when neutered was reasonably entertaining. However, the second half of the story, in which the characters had their genders switched, wasn't so much funny as it was downright disturbing. A female Professor Farnsworth posing nude with only a pair of nipple tassels to preserve her dignity is something that no one should ever have to see.