Futurama: "A Clockwork Origin"

Futurama: "A Clockwork Origin." Running-no. 97 = season 6, #9. Dwayne Carey-Hill, dir. Dan Vebber, script. Initial airing 12 August 2010. Videographic information from [Wikipedia entry]

The main plot is summarized on Wikipedia, " […] Professor Farnsworth leaves Earth after being frustrated by anti-evolutionists' belief in 'Creaturism', a form of Creationism. He and the Planet Express crew arrive at a lifeless planet and the Professor introduces nanobots into the environment. The nanobots rapidly begin evolving into mechanical organisms, allowing the crew to witness a whole new evolutionary history that unfolds before their eyes." (The plot and subplot are explained in detail elsewhere in the Wikipedia entry, although the plot summary has been contested as too detailed and may be cut back. .)

The episode touches on the motif of the "Microcosmic God" (to use Theodore Sturgeon's title), and uses the motif of robot/mechanical evolution, a central premise of such works as Stanislaw Lem's "The Invincible" and "The Upside-Down Evolution" and Michael Crichton's much later Prey.[] As hinted by the title, "A Clockwork Origin" is science-fictional satire more than science fiction and is, of course, comic. As in the novel and film A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, the episode offers an odd-angled and distancing look at science, but in this case Darwinian evolution and the Evolutionism/Creationism debate. Insofar as the episode takes a position in the debate, it supports evolution but allows for a "panspermia" twist, but in good satiric fashion finds all sides behaving foolishly. The upshot of the robotic evolution, in let's say, an homage to "The Squire of Gothos" episode of classic Star Trek shows the robots finally evolving "into a state of incorporeal transcendent higher consciousness. They are no longer concerned with the Professor any more, finding corporeal beings altogether irrelevant." In the coda of the episode, the Planet Express crew return to Earth, and Professor Farnsworth reconciles with his Creationist opponent, the orangutan scientist Dr. Banjo — cf. PLANET OF THE APES — with each acknowledging that both their competing theories have "some plausibility" and perhaps even complementarity. "Dr. Banjo argues that what the Professor witnessed was evolution, however evolution set in motion by an intelligent creator. The Professor agrees that it is possible, however unlikely[,] that Earth evolution was set in motion the same way. However, they quickly prove to have not learned the lesson of tolerating others' views and beliefs, laughing off [the robot] Bender's theory that this 'creator' entity may be a robot," asking mockingly, "And who created that robot? Some magic bearded robot in the sky?'" although Bender has "proved his point in the episode" that robots can evolve (quoting Wikipedia plot summary). Possibly missed by the Wikipedia writers, the mocking question on creation by the robotic demiurge points at a weakness in the "Intelligent Design" revision of Creationism, where the Designer of creation isn't identified with God, for good Constitutional reasons in the United States but raising the philosophical problem of an uncomfortably infinite series of Who created the local creator?

5. DRAMA, RDE, 01/I/14, RDE, Title, 22Aug19