TV Review: FUTURAMA - "Fry Am the Egg Man"

I wanted this to be a great, classic episode that would remind me why I love Futurama. I almost got that, but in the end something just a little off.

rating: 2.5

You can tell a lot about a man by the rigidity of his shins. I wanted to really fall in love with this episode, especially after last week€™s disappointment. I wanted this to be a great, classic episode that would remind me why I love Futurama. I almost got that, but in the end something just a little off. The story begins with the crew on the run from a bunch of pissed-off, axe-wielding, robot pogo-sticks. So a standard day for the Planet Express crew. Once they€™ve escaped, they get hungry, so they stop at a highway restaurant. Leela is horrified by all the food on the menu, so she orders a fruit cup, only to be asked what kind of cheese sauce she wants with it. She€™s even more horrified to discover that the word €œfruit€ is spelled €œfroot€ and has quotation marks around it. This being Leela, she overreacts and takes Fry and Bender to a farmer€™s market. There€™s quite a few little scenes of great comedy here, especially when Fry encounters the Amazonian women he€™d met before. €œI€™m scaroused,€ he says, creating a new Internet meme with two words. The next morning, Leela plans to make breakfast for everyone at the Planet Express HQ. The Professor is appalled to find the all there. €œYou€™re not my breakfast friends!€ he rages. Leela is about to cook a giant egg when Fry learns that the egg might be fertile. Rather than risk eating an unhatched creature, he figures he€™ll take care of the egg and once it hatches, then he€™ll eat what€™s inside. This leads to an amusing montage of Fry taking care of the egg, including a scene of him sitting on a nest. Eventually the egg hatches into a small, lizard-like creature that promptly spits acid at Bender, melting away his foot-cups, leaving him a bit unhappy. €œI was gonna go yachting in those feet!€ Fry falls in love with the creature and names it Mr Peppy. It causes general havoc, but mostly doesn€™t seem too dangerous. Well, aside from ripping off Bender€™s arm at one point, but to be fair, Bender was asking for it. The Professor does some research and eventually, inside an ancient monster manual, he finds out the creature is a bone vampire. He also discovers it reproduces asexually and it€™s extinct on its homeworld. Leela figures it€™s a great chance to repopulate the species, so they take the creature there, only to find out that these days it€™s populated by something much more horrifying. Scotsmen. I rather liked the first two acts of this story, but the ending, as with last week, felt like a bit of a cop-out. It was cute that they specifically mentioned Scooby-Doo, but I could have done without that actually being relevant to the plot. On the other hand, it was amusing as hell that all the Scotsmen were named Angus and that a small whiskey was delivered in a ten-gallon aquarium size. I also loved the image of Bender draping a de-boned sheep over his shoulders and saying, €œOoo! Pimpy!€ But really, the ending just felt lazy and the good parts weren€™t as good as they should be. This is by no means as weak of an episode as last week, but it could and should have been much better than it was.
Contributor

Chris Swanson is a freelance writer and blogger based in Phoenix, Arizona, where winter happens to other people. His blog is at wilybadger.wordpress.com