Futurama: Bender's Game

Futurama: "Bender's Game." Four-part series issued on DVD 4 November 2008 = Season 5, #9-#12 (episodes 81-84, first aired 26 April 2008). Dwayne Carey-Hill, director. Eric Horsted and David X. Cohen. story. Eric Horsted, scripts for Parts 1 and 2. Michael Rowe and Eric Kaplan, script for Part 3. David X. Cohen and Patric M. Verrone, script for Part 4. Comedy Central. Total running time 87 minutes.

The title is a playful but non-significant allusion to Orson Scott Card's novel, Ender's Game. Part 1 is relevant for Leela's anger, controlled for a bit by a shock collar, contrasted with Bender's theoretical lack of imagination as a robot. When Bender very successfully imagines himself a medieval knight he "gets lost in his fantasy and goes on a rampage, resulting in his commitment to the Hal Institute for Criminally Insane Robots," with an allusion to HAL 9000 in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968), who goes quietly mad and murderous. In the succeeding Parts, we see Bender at the insane asylum receiving a "Robotomy" to remove his imagination — with a robot "Nurse Ratchet" alluding to Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and the "Robotomy" alluding to the exactly similar operation on humans in Yevgeny Zamiatin's We. Later in the story, the crew discover the dark secret of Dark Matter: that it is produced by caging thousands of Nibblonians, mechanically force-feeding them chickens, and collecting the spherical pellets of their Dark Matter excrement, for the superimposition of the somewhat mechanical upon the Nibblonian organic for the production of starship fuel. Note also science-fictional (pseudo) explanation of transporting of characters into Cornwood, a realm in Bender's imagination combining and gently mocking elements of Lord of the Rings, Greco-Roman mythology, and Dungeons & Dragons. Typical of satire, "Bender's Game" tosses in an allusion to HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE (2004) apparently just for the hell of it.

RDE 03/XII/16