Review: Futurama “Game of Tones”

Spoilers Below

There’s a space ship headed for Earth emitting some sort of melody and Fry thinks he knows what it is but he isn’t sure. To help, the Professor hooks him up to a machine to try and see in his subconscious where this melody could have come from.We are sent back to 1999 at a time before Fry was frozen only to be awaken several thousand years later. Fry wakes up with no answers and worse yet the space ship has reached New New York and the tones are louder and way more destructive.

Our only chance is for Fry to go back into his dream sequence. Its here we see Fry reunited with his now talking dog ‘Seymour’ and the rest of his family. Turns out since they are in a dream, they can hear the constant battering of the Professor. Leela, Nixon, and the rest of the gang show up to pry Fry away from his cushy home life  and to find this friggin’ melody once and for all.

To try and remember where the melody was last heard, the crew decides to trace Fry’s last steps before he is frozen. We learn that the melodies that Fry heard happened RIGHT before he fell into the freezer with two extra notes, so Nixon decides to take the PE workforce over to Mt. Shooshmore where the Prez happens to have a keyboard that can communicate the two extra notes to the alien ship. The ship lands and out comes Dibbler a little guy that resembles Nibbler.We find out that Nibbler was the one that pushed Fry into the freezer and to celebrate the two aliens got drunk and lost one of their ships, but Fry knows exactly where it is. Dibbler gets back the ship and flies away, and Fry gets to talk to his mom one last time.

Our Take

I have mixed feelings about this week’s episode and you will too. For starters, the Seth MacFarlane and Sarah Silverman guest spots were so quick that if you blinked you missed them, but at least Sarah brought something a bit more substantial whereas Seth probably didn’t even remove his jacket to record his one-liner. As a matter of fact, this means that IMO, Larry Bird’s one-liner may be the best one of the season! Wouldn’t that be swell?

On the other hand, the premise of this week’s episode had a lot of inspiration from movies like The Matrix and Inception which is fine with me because I love those movies and I thought the visits back to 1999 were really well-done and thus proved to be a good way to begin the end of Futurama’s last season on Comedy Central. I thought the way that the aliens were written in was rather lackluster at best and as a result the episode didn’t bring the emotional toll that ‘Jurassic Bark’ did.

Overall a solid episode, but nothing that’s going to blow you away.