Against all odds (and the law of diminishing returns), Futurama is back, baby. A quarter of a century after its debut, the latest in a daisy chain of revivals has beaten the odds by not missing a step, bringing audiences back to the world of tomorrow and bidding them to gaze into the Scary Mirror. It’s funny. It’s poignant and comforting. It’s enough to make you wonder why the show was ever canceled. Not that time, the other time. No, the time before that.
Way back in 2003, Futurama wound up on the chopping block at Fox. Getting canceled by the network was very fashionable in those days — Family Guy, Firefly, and The Tick had all met similar fates. Luckily, Philip J. Fry and company had a solid heads-up before they met their maker, and the folks behind Futurama gave audiences one of the most emotionally resonant episodes of TV ever to feature a crotch plate/air horn swap.
“The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings” starts with Fry doing what Fry does: trying to impress Leela. This time around, he’s going the artistic route, doing his best to learn how to play the holophonor — sort of a double-reed laser light show — despite the instrument’s considerable complexity.
When hard work doesn’t pay immediate dividends, Fry does what any reasonable person would do and makes a Faustian pact with the Robot Devil, with whom he swaps hands. His fresh new metal digits are terrific at playing the holophonor, and Fry composes an opera for Leela.
Things get complicated. Ridiculously circuitous, even. The Robot Devil, wanting his hands back but unable to renege on a deal, hooks Bender up with an industrial-strength air horn. Bender uses it to deafen Leela who, badly wanting to hear the opera being performed for her by Fry, barters herself a set of robotic ears in exchange for the promise of one of her hands. The Robot Devil, being a little stinker, calls dibs on Leela’s hand (dramatic pause) in marriage. Fry concedes defeat and swaps hands with the Robot Devil to save Leela from a life filled with an above-average amount of musical numbers.
Fry, no longer able to effortlessly play beautiful music, walks the auditorium at the performance of his opera. The only person left in attendance is Leela, who wants “to hear how it ends.” Fry plays a lilting, “Hot Cross Buns”-level tune, projecting childish images of himself and Leela walking toward the horizon, hand in hand. Nobody watching the episode looks at each other for a while because everyone has something in their eye.
“The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings” is an emotional T-bone, the kind that Futurama got a real kick out of hitting its audience with back in the day. In a show that once spent an entire faux-nature documentary repeating that life is a meaningless, painful slog to entropy, it reminds us, time and again, that there is beauty. That whether we can see them or not, the good things never have to end.
Except Fry’s dog. That thing is toast.
