Futurama: "Rebirth"

Futurama: "Rebirth." Season 6, episode 1 (first episode of revival season for the series), Comedy Central 24 June 2010. Frank Marino, dir. David X.Cohen and Matt Groening, script.

The Wikipedia summary correctly notes, "The episode begins with the Planet Express ship crash landing on Earth, killing many of the main characters. Professor Farnsworth, who survived the crash, revives the others using a" stem cell loaded "'birth machine'. However, a complication with Leela's rebirth results in her remaining in an irreversible coma. Out of loneliness and despair, Fry creates a robotic version of Leela, containing her memories," taken from what turns out to be the Planet Express's extensive surveillance system, "and they attempt" successfully "to resume their relationship." In something of a subplot, "[...] Bender is reborn lacking adequate power supply to function. The Professor fits him with a doomsday device to power him, but it generates excess power. Bender is forced to party endlessly to burn off the excess energy. Otherwise, he will explode."

Bender does explode, but in a Cyclophage trying to eat the revived organic (and cyclopedic) Leela, killing the monster and allowing Bender to party again only when he desires, which is often. The main plot is resolved when organic Leela is revived, organic-appearing Fry turns out to be a robot, and a second organic Fry is successfully produced by the Birth Machine — allowing the two robots to go off together as a hetero-mechanic couple, and Fry and Leela remaining together, organic, awake, and in love.

In a more or less explicit, perfunctory, self-aware, and comedic manner, the "Rebirth" episode raises issues of when machine complexity can reach the level of consciousness, the possibility of robot love, intrinsic and contingent robot/human differences and identity, and whether or not an AI robot is essentially changed in discovering she or he is a robot. That "Rebirth" got produced and aired indicates some combination of the existence of a fairly large audience sophisticated on such topoi of SF and/or the fragmentation of audiences to the degree that studio executives would go for a small audience with sophistication and disposable money.

RDE, 2Feb17