REVIEW: FUTURAMA “FREE WILL HUNTING”

As as a robot, Bender lacks free will so he embarks on a quest or the meaning of life.

Spoilers Below

Bender decides to wear nerd glasses in public which gets the attention of a local sorority, and allows the droid to get into a college. However, he soon owes a bunch of money to the mob so to help pay off the debt Bender joins a gang that gets him hooked on a robot-drug(think electronic cigarettes). Like most junkies, Bender has to score so he dries to rob a bunch of girl scouts of their cash and their cookies only to get the ever-loving crap kicked out of him and then sent to jail. However, at his hearing the Southern Chicken is able to get Bender off scott-free as he is able to prove that robots have pre-programmed actions and therefore are not responsible for their crimes. The judge, also being a robot, lets Bender go of whom is now all pissed off because he feels he should be in jail.

Yep, all that in the first seven minutes. Want some more?? So, the Planet Express crew has to ship a package to Robot Homeworld, but only Bender can make a delivery because his friends are human and are in danger of being killed at first sight. Its here, Bender decides to stay a bit and join a monastery where he learns that every robot was built by Mom and each robot had an added feature of a free-will slot. Bender, abruptly leaves the monastery and takes off back to Earth where he convinces Fry and Leela in breaking into MomCo. Its here that Bender learns that the free-will chip was created by Farnsworth and Mom tells Bender to pretty much take it up with him. At first, the Professor refuses to hand over the chip because he fears that Bender will try and shoot the old man, however eventually he does install it and the first thing Bender does is shoot the hell out of him! This lands Bender back at court where he is found guilty on all charges. YAAAYY!!

Bender always shows up with a barrel of laughs and “Free Will Hunting” is no different. I’ll be honest it felt like the Futurama writers could have come up with THREE different Bender plots from this week’s episode but decided on just the one, which is fine, because there were a lot of twists and turns. For one, the first seven minutes gave us a whole heck of a lot with Bender going from a college grad to a drug addict faster than you can say “We have a rival gang? I HATE THEM!” Then one would think we are going to get this long,hard fought journey for Bender to find out who he is but he gets in and out of the monastery so fast there was hardly any time to laugh at the fact that Bender clearly looked like a friar from Robin Hood.  Plus, any episode with Mom is usually pretty funny because she might be one of the most underutilized characters of the group, but the fact that it all came back to the Professor was great mainly because he was just blatantly fucking with Bender.  Great episode, now for me to get my swiveling surprise chair.

(8.0 out of 10)