Recap / Futurama S8 E1: "The Impossible Stream"

"We love everything about this show."
"It's canceled!"

Amy: D-did someone switch the universe off and on?
Hermes: It feels like we got rebooted!

AVENGED!

In an attempt to impress Leela, Fry is determined to binge-watch every TV show ever made.

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Tropes:

• All for Nothing: The second half of the episode is dedicated to trying to safely get Fry out of the streaming suit, first by reviving All My Circuits to have new episodes available for Fry to stream, giving themselves more time, and then, after the show is re-canceled, by kidnapping the actors and forcing them to perform the final episode at the same time Fry is watching it in order to ease him back to reality; it turns out that Fry wasn't even in the streaming suit, having gotten bored with the show due to the new episodes' low quality and deciding to do some reading instead.
• And Knowing Is Half the Battle: Parodied in the last scene, which features Fry explaining to Richard Nixon about the importance of not watching too many episodes (or too few) of a single show in a row.
• Archive Binge: In-Universe, Season 47 of All My Circuits, the final final season, has a whopping 13,020 one-hour episodes. When the crew puts Fry in the streaming suit to watch all those episodes in one sitting, it takes him about eight months of non-stop watching to finish that season.
• Back from the Dead:
  • Calculon gets fired from the resurrection cannon from Robot Hell (at the Robot Devil's insistence as Calculon continues to be insufferably annoying) to participate in the revival of All My Circuits.
  • Both Scruffy and Linda are back without explanation after being killed off in The Simpsons crossover episode "Simpsorama". Justified, as that episode may now be ambiguously canon given the cast seems to have skipped over the year 3014.
  • Slurms MacKenzie appears in a dilapidated state in a Parody Commercial despite being killed off in "Fry And The Slurm Factory." Although given his dilapidated state, it's possibly a Retcon that he was Not Quite Dead.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • When Farnsworth asks to see the atomic clock, he asks Hermes to move the large, complicated-looking coffee machine out of the way, which reveals a more traditional paper calendar with robotic elements.
  • Bender claims to be Calculon's sidekick and mark; Bender goes up to him and says he's his "Mark", and offers him coffee. This too is also a bait-and-switch, as the audience is lead to believe Calculon will drink Bender's coffee, but he appears to... relieve himself of coffee instead.
• Behemoth Battle: Double Subverted. The fight between Calculon's half-brother and the Human Friend's full-grown stallion was apparently this in the second take of an All My Circuits episode's pivotal scene, but we don't actually get to see it, as Calculon ad-libs an analogy for love using a terminal triangle pattern...but in real life, he has to use dynamite, and Bender carelessly leaves his cigar near the blasting cap, causing the human to be fired out the window and Calculon to keel over with the line "Thank you, Milwaukee", so it can be inferred that nothing was actually changed from the scene and the stallion won.
• Biting-the-Hand Humor: Fulu is apparently "the fourth most popular streaming service", and much of the episode is taking pot-shots at the writing, filming, invokedExecutive Meddling, and the editing process of making a streaming series. Hulu, the real life equivalent, are the ones who revived Futurama.
• Bland-Name Product: Fulu is one for Hulu, though much of its content it hosts are clearly parodies of shows that are associated with Netflix (a parody of a cooking show, Black Mirror etc.), rather than Hulu.
• Brick Joke: One ten years in the making. The Couch Gag for "Meanwhile" was "AVENGE US". The Couch Gag for "The Impossible Stream" is "AVENGED!" The original commentary for "Meanwhile" even had producer Claudia Katz insist this would be the next opening gag if the show ever returned.
• Call-Back:
  • The Couch Gag for this episode is this to the previous one, which simply said “AVENGE US”.
  • Fry sets his Fulu activation code to be 1077, which was also his PIN number originally revealed in "A Fishful of Dollars".
  • Slurms MacKenzie makes a reappearance during the Parody Commercial for Slurm Zero, looking much older than when we last saw him.
  • The Robot Devil still cannot stand Calculon and his acting. Like last time, he will take any excuse to get rid of him.
  • Leela speaks into the wrong end of the megaphone in the same way Fry did in "The Day the Earth Stood Stupid."
  • The Humorbot 5.0 has another speaking role, trying to crack a joke about "non-binary" robots to a bunch of PC computers.
• Comically Missing the Point: Downplayed. When Leela worries about Fry becoming a vegetable, Zoidberg says "Yum!" before backtracking and saying it's sad.^note His head movements are incredibly stiff while he says this, which may or may not have been an intentional Stealth Pun.
• Company Credit Card Abuse: Hermes hopes that the stuff Fry is buying isn’t coming out of the corporate credit card. That's exclusively for his one-man business dinners.
• Creator Cameo: The writers passed out in the All My Circuits writing room are several writers from the current Futurama season, including Eric Horsted and Shirin Najafi as heads in jars and Ariel Ladensohn and Cody Ziglar in the flesh. The one who talks is even styled after and voiced by Patric M. Verrone, who wrote this episode.
• Disney Death: Fry is initially thought dead when the streaming suit he's in is set on fire and reduced to ashes. Thankfully, he turns out to be alive a few seconds later, having left the suit after becoming bored of All My Circuits due to the new season Leela and Bender made.
• Evolving Credits: On top of the new Logo Joke of the show being briefly called "Hulurama", some slight alterations are added to the opening sequence, including the Nimbus flying across the background, Bender visibly dangling from a giant magnet out of the Planet Express ship, and adding landmarks to the background such as the Vampire State Building, the Robot Arms apartment complex, and the Mom's Friendly Robot Company building.
• Exty Years from Publication: The episode takes place partly on 24 July 3023 and was released on 24 July 2023.
• Fake-Out Fade-Out: Near the end of the episode, Bender brags that, despite his writing faults, he at least filled the allotted airtime, "to, the, second — fade to black." Then the credits start to roll... before cutting to a special news report segueing into a presidential summit on streaming.
• Four-Fingered Hands: Averted when a five-fingered hand appears in the opening of The Scary Mirror.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • As Bender scrolls through all the channels on the TV, there are a lot of in-universe TV shows that Shout-Out real life shows listed that require a few pauses to read them all.
  • Look really closely during the intro — as the Planet Express ship races past the camera prior to colliding with the monitor, you can now see Bender dangling from a giant magnet out of the ship's underbelly.
• Get Out!: The Execubots bluntly yell at Leela and Bender to get out after telling them they'll always be a member of the Fulu family.
• Hypocritical Humor: Hermes: "Fry had better not be putting all this junk on the corporate credit card! That's exclusively for my one-man business dinners."
• Immediate Sequel: To the previous Series Fauxnale “Meanwhile”, showcasing what happened after Professor Farnsworth pressed the Reset Button.
• Innocently Insensitive: Fry criticizes the last episodes of All My Circuits as unwatchable, completely unaware of the fact that they were written and directed by his best friend and girlfriend respectively.
• It's All My Fault: Subverted with Leela; when she finds out Fry will die if he runs out of episodes of All My Circuits to watch, she initially claims it's all her fault, but then admits that it was mostly Fry's fault, with it only being a little bit her fault.
• Lampshade Hanging: Nestled within all the punny "Futurama-ized" parody TV programs—right between "Two and a Third Mutants" and "Quantum Nonlocal News"—is one just called "Fargo But In Space".
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: This episode is basically a mini-commentary on Futurama's history of its own cancellations and revival, with All My Circuits being used as an allegory for Futurama; it too has been canceled three times with several networks dropping it and picking it up over years. The episode ends with Fry in court insisting nobody should binge more than ten episodes of television at a time... which just so happens to be how many episodes are in the first batch of the Hulu run^note albeit distributed in a weekly release, not a binge model.
  Amy: Pfft! Loserama!
• Logo Joke: When the show's title card first appears the title is briefly spelled "Hulurama" before the "H" and "l" spin to become "Futurama."
• Love Triangle: Parodied in an All My Circuits plotline where not only was Monique cheating on Calculon with Human Friend, but Calculon was cheating on Monique with Human Friend as well. Eventually Boxy gets involved, elevating the ordeal to a Love Dodecahedron, or as Calculon puts it, a Love Tetrahedron.
• Ow, My Body Part!: Fry yells "Ow! My cortex!" when he drills the binging goggles that Amy gives him into his head.
• Pity the Kidnapper: Calculon proves to be so annoying with his constant Purple Prose monologues that the Robot Devil tells the Fulu executives that not only is he thrilled to get rid of him but he's also not taking him back if he dies again.
• Punny Name: Fulu, a less-than-flattering Hulu parody, pronounced similar to "fool."
• Reboot Snark: The episode is full of meta jokes referencing how often Futurama has been cancelled and revived, using All My Circuits as a stand-in as Leela and Bender revive it (and its dead star Calculon) for the streaming service Fulu, which will apparently revive anything. Fry concludes at the end of the episode that any TV show that truly cares about its viewers must be cancelled and revived every few years.
• Reference Overdosed: The episode has dozens of parodied television shows, from the Freeze-Frame Bonus titles in the scene where Bender is scrolling through channels, to the various thumbnails on the Fulu home page, to the short scenes depicting parodies of shows like Black Mirror.
• Retcon: At the end of "Meanwhile", Farnsworth configured the button to turn time back before the instant he conceived of it (in other words, a short time before the episode proper). In the opening narration of this episode, he instead says he configured it to turn back time the second time was frozen.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: When Leela (almost literally) overtaxes the original film director, who died of a heart attack from all the chaos, without paying him or even briefly considering to scout out a member of his family to posthumously donate to, she just promotes herself to his role because she's already the executive producer. Justified, as Leela's doing it for Fry because he can't go cold turkey.
• invokedSeasonal Rot: Funnily enough, this is actually what saves Fry. He couldn't stand the show when he got to the Fulu season of All My Circuits, it went downhill for him due to Leela executive producing and Bender writing it, so he got out of the streaming suit and decided to catch up on his reading.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • Many of the jokes in the episode are meta-humor about how series that get rebooted after a long period, especially rebooted to a streaming service, often end up being of significantly lower quality than the original.
    Farnsworth: They'll bring back any old crap!
  • There are several jokes at the expense of television writers, which, of course, were written by television writers.
    Bender: Any idiot can be a TV writer!
    Calculon: Many are.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Robot Devil is seen playing with the Lament Configuration from Hellraiser when he returns Calculon to the surface.
  • Bender snarking that the only thing Calculon could be a spokesman for is fast-acting hemorrhoid cream is an Affectionate Parody-style Johnny Cash riff, as his 1963 hit "Ring of Fire" was used for a Preparation H commercial in 2004. The commercial got a fat "no" from ever being aired due to fear of lawsuits, though a shoddy prototype version exists on YouTube.
• Spiritual Successor: In-Universe, The Scary Mirror, a parody of Black Mirror, is almost identical in format to The Scary Door, parodying Black Mirror being considered a modernized version of The Twilight Zone.
• Spoof Aesop:
  • The episode ends with Fry at a presidential summit giving a lesson on binge-watching, but concluding that any good TV show should be canceled three or four times before coming back, and nobody should watch more or less than ten episodes in one sitting. He then randomly leaves the hearing.
  • Leela encourages and enables Fry's insane goal of streaming every single TV show, which eventually puts him in danger when he is unable to function without something to watch. After Fry turns out to be okay, Leela tells him that she isn't disappointed that he couldn't meet his goal, and she promises to "never be supportive of him ever again".
• Sting: Invoked during the live All My Circuits episode, where Scruffy hums along to the dramatic music after Monique announces her suicide. He repeats it after Fry's Disney Death.
• Take That!:
  • Fry mentions that he's already hate-watched Geiger King once and How I Met Your Smizmar twice.
  • The Scary Mirror has a moment where a character asks his virtual assistant to check the price of his NFTs, only for her to tell him that they're worthless.
  • Zoidberg suggests that they revive All My Circuits with a fan-campaign involving letters and a viral hashtag, with Leela's response being that taking that route would be a recipe for failure.
  • To keep Fry alive, All My Circuits has to produce an hour-long episode every hour for eternity. Professor tells Leela, "If Law & Order can do it, so can you."
  • "Slurm Zero! None of the flavor, all of the addiction!"
  • From the climax, where the plan to save Fry is to get the actors to perform the episode live in front of him to slowly bring him back to reality:
    Calculon: You're asking me to perform a second take?
    Leela: No, no! Think of it as live theater for one unconscious audience member.
    Calculon: Ah, like the Milwaukee Shakespeare Festival.
    Leela: Exactly!
• Throw It In!: In-Universe, When the director has a heart attack mid-shoot, Leela asks if it was part of the script. Bender says, "No, but leave it in, it's hilarious."
• Timey-Wimey Ball: Due to time being frozen at the end of "Meanwhile" and then reset, Farnsworth claims time has been disrupted, so it's the year 3023 now. Fry realizes he's been in the future for 23 years, but nobody looks any older.
• Vocal Evolution: Fry’s voice is noticeably raspier than before, owing to Billy West’s age after the ten years between seasons.
• Weird Crossover: In-Universe, one of the shows we see while Bender is flipping through the channels is Alien vs. Predator vs. Bluey. The former two being horror films and the latter being a preschool show.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Leela and Bender both overwork pretty much everyone involved with All My Circuits, to the point of getting some of them killed without trying to brainstorm a negotiable contract while they're busy with the show, but it's to prevent Fry's brain to succumbing to withdrawal and shutting down for good. While Bender does goof off a bit and thinks the director dying from a heart attack is funny and should be thrown in to one of the episodes, he looks legitimately anguished when the Execu-bots cancel the show and Leela starts crying about Fry's perceived incoming death.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Vaxtron, Calculon's replacement on All My Circuits, was never brought up.

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