Futurama: "Free Will Hunting"

'Futurama': "Free Will Hunting." Season 7, #9 (first aired 8 August 2012). Raymie Muzquiz, dir. David X. Cohen, script.

Plot summarized in IMDb citation (see note 1), "After [the robot] Bender realizes he has no power over the decisions he makes, he goes on a soul searching trip to liberate himself from the shackles of his pre-deterministic operation system." Note that the inciting action for the plot is Bender's being found not guilty of a crime on the grounds of his being incapable of choosing to commit it: "'actus reus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea'" ("the act is not culpable unless the mind is guilty") — a phrase that definitely does not get pronounced in the episode. Instead of being delighted with getting away with crime, Bender is depressed by the thought that he is without agency and quests after ways of dealing with enslavement to his programming, ranging from religious acceptance with a Buddhist-monk cast to finding his Maker (Mom, megalomanic owner of MomCorp and its central division of Mom's Friendly Robot Company"), to willing himself (paradoxically) to force Professor Farnsworth to install a freewill utility with a quantum on/off switch with Heisenbergian implications.

The title is a play on GOOD WILL HUNTING (1997), which also deals with an attempt to find meaning and direction in life. More immediately relevant films alluded to wittily include BLADE RUNNER and other quests for a maker, and ROBOCOP (1987), for the climax scene in which it looks like Bender will always be forbidden by his programming to harm Professor Farnsworth. Bender does harm Farnsworth and is judged criminally guilty for doing so — for a happy ending to the episode.

Since "Free Will Hunting" is entertaining, unpretentious, and brief, it counts as one of the better contributions to the long-running debate on free will vs. various kinds of determinism, especially the important question in the 20th century of whether freedom from guilt was worth losing agencies in some varieties of Freudian psychology and all orthodox Skinnerian Behaviorism.