Is the listicle dead yet? You'd think it'd at least be in decline. What fuels a "best-of" list is the debate it generates between one person's judgment on the best TV shows, movies, refrigerators or whatever and the readers who disagree. There are sites who generate nothing but listicles and they tend to be bottom feeders, chasing mindless engagement for the click of it. But these same sites are also low enough to replace their entire underpaid staff with robots the second it became possible, and a listicle generated by AI lacks the same punch. Who cares how a machine ranks Office episodes or yogurt flavors or types of amphibians? What would it know?
Fortunately, you can be assured that 100% of the content I generate for this site is human-brain-grown, because no robot could generate anything this weird. Thus, you can trust the following listicle enough to be enraged by it.
It's interesting how many of the shows people consider the greatest of all time have endings that range from mediocre to terrible. An ending is the hardest thing for any show to come up with, and the longer it's on the air, the harder it gets to wrap it all up in a way that satisfies everyone. But what if a TV show could get a second chance at an ending? And then another one? And then another one? And then another one? And then another one? And then another one?
Futurama has had a record six endings so far (actually I don't know which show holds the record, but let's just say it's this one). It's constantly been on the bubble of renewal, sometimes disappearing for several years before coming back like nothing happened. It adds up to so much that you can make a listicle out of them now, so I did exactly that.
There's so many it's hard to keep track. My loose headcount was originally FIVE finales, but upon tallying them up I counted six in all. I'm keeping the URL to this article the same, because "Five Futuramas" is catchier and alliterative. This is gonna be fun on a bun...times six!
1. The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings (2003)
Many of the greatest episodes from the Fox run aired with little fanfare over the summer of 2003, as the network dumped its remainder of material. There's an inverse relationship between the way classics like "Jurassic Bark" and "The Why Of Fry" were initially treated and how revered they eventually became. I remember watching these things with feelings as melancholy as Fry staring at his one-eyed target of unrequited affection. The show was getting deeper and richer in its final season, with some writing that was really refined and polished, but it felt like I was the only one who would know.
That circumstance might have biased my opinion toward making the original Futurama finale my #1 pick, because it's not really a FINALE in the traditional sense. It wraps up nothing; it doesn't close the book on any of the character arcs Fry was in the middle of. What it IS good at is being a really really great episode. Fry feels he can win Leela's heart if he's a musical prodigy, so he makes an arrangement with the Robot Devil to exchange his hands for robot hands that can play the Holophonor.
The hands are supposed to be chosen "at random" and the viewer is led to believe Fry and Bender will swap appendages, before one more impossible move of the wheel makes it land on "Robot Devil" -- an even funnier choice. Ol' Robo-Scratch is forced to come up with an elaborate plan to make Fry swap their hands back. It climaxes in a dramatic opera where the characters just sing how they feel ("That makes me feel angry!") and a bittersweet, last-second hologram glimpse at a relationship that could have been.
2. Meanwhile (2013)
Many episodes later, Fry is in a much better position with Leela than he was in Episode 72. The Comedy Central run caps off with his marriage proposal -- if he can live to see it through. Farnsworth has invented a time-travel gizmo that sends the user back in time thirty seconds whenever they press its one button. Fry uses this to erase his many screw-ups on his proposal date with Leela, but he's left hanging on whether she accepts.
Believing her tardiness to their second date signals a rejection, Fry leaps off the tall building...but sees Leela approaching and changes his mind. He hits the button, only to discover he's been falling longer than thirty seconds. Now he's trapped in midair with his time-trips the only thing keeping him alive. It's a tense predicament that doesn't have an easy solution, and the show thankfully does not drench it in silliness to water that tension down.
Though Fry eventually finds his way out of it, he winds up falling on the button and freezing time forever. While this is a bummer, there's one good thing that came out of it: Leela is also stuck there with him. They live a full, happily married life in their frozen world, before Farnsworth returns in the last minute to blink them back to the moment they left -- where they will revert to their original ages and remember nothing. It's a cheat designed to provide a literal reset in the event the show gets renewed again (it did, but it took a while)...but it's very good at giving viewers what they wanted to see without actually giving it.
3. Final Ending: The Last Conclusion (2026)
As I write this, this ending's just a week old. But it's emblematic of Futurama's Hulu years as a whole. The Fox run was peppered with lore expansion, much of it pre-planned, and the deepening of characters throughout...they grew as you watched, like a good book. The Comedy Central run had some of this, but it didn't quite land in the same way. The Hulu run, however, abandons any attempt at enriching the universe and just goes for laughs. You won't see Fry learning any lessons that stick, discovering anything about his destiny or unraveling any great secrets to the cosmos. Instead, you'll see his pants drop a lot.
"Final Ending: The Last Conclusion" doesn't take itself very seriously either, mocking the very idea of concluding a story. It starts out with Fry describing a theater trip he and his brother took where he didn't get to see the resolution to his favorite film. The crew then splits up and each member gets into their own cliffhanger, and for a while I thought the show was just going to leave them in those situations for kicks...then when the Hulu specials came out things would be back to normal like nothing happened. But it didn't have the guts...Bender and the train, Fry and Leela's heist, and Hermes' choice of chili were all resolved within the last minute. Fry even got to see how his movie ended, though in a very peculiar way.
By this point it was smart to try a different approach than the usual semi-dramatic ending they'd done multiple times, especially when most of those make up the bottom half of this list. They also might've known at this point that Hulu would let them do specials, so the self-awareness of this not REALLY being the end allowed them to cut loose. It's an enjoyable episode, and given my pick for #1, sometimes that's all I ask.
4. Into The Wild Green Yonder (2009)
The fourth of four Futurama direct-to-DVD movies that served as the first revival of the show. They had one critical flaw: not every episode of a TV show can be a winner, and a bad idea stretched to 90 minutes feels like an even worse idea. I dared to rewatch "The Beast With A Billion Backs" to see if it was really as terrible as I remembered. It sure was, and a total waste of Brittany Murphy in one of her last roles.
The others managed to shoot higher. "Bender's Big Score" was the best, followed by "Bender's Game" and then "Into The Wild Green Yonder" which scored a solid C -- nothing too special, but at least it wasn't "Beast With A Billion Backs." An accident causes Fry to develop the power to read minds. He's invited into a secret society where he is told his destiny is to slay an evil entity known only as the Dark One. In order to do this he must...become pals with Amy's father Mr. Wong, who is threatening to blow up a life-rich planet full of endangered species because it's in the way of completing the galaxy's largest mini-golf course. It makes a bit more sense in context, and meanwhile Bender is flirting with the Donbot's wife Fanny, who only appears in this movie and has a clever design (a propeller on her buttocks that spins when she gets excited).
Bender's plot, though, only happens for the first fourth of the story and is then abandoned so he can become a C-lister in the overall plot. Leela has it the worst, given a situation where she's joined a team of female activists who put "she" puns into every sentence they say. The worst writing in all of Futurama occurs whenever they do "man vs woman" material, because it always relies on the moldiest stereotypes of each. The plot ultimately returns to Fry in its final 15 minutes and adds a bit of drama, which might feel more earned if any part of the rest of the movie had any.
At least the VERY ending is Futurama's most interesting, having the characters journey into a wormhole from which they don't know where it will take them. Since the pickup for more regular episodes was immediate, however, the actual answer had to be quick and consequence free to get everyone back into the status quo.
5. Otherwise (2024)
A vastly inferior sequel to "Meanwhile" that marries off Fry and Leela again, only this time it's even less canon. After taking one too many beatings, it's time to send the Planet Express ship to the Graveyard of Spaceships, a multiversal pool. But as they're about to send the battered vessel to its resting place, they realize Fry is still on it and they rush to rescue him. The ship is dunked in the water with them still inside, and the rest of the episode is an alternate universe where Fry gets to propose to Leela a second time and nothing goes wrong. Except for the part where they end up in a space battle with Zapp and they all die in an explosion. It tries to be meaningful, but you can't really care about anything you know isn't really happening. Plus we already knew the series had at least two more seasons ahead.
6. Overclockwise / Reincarnation (2011)
No sir, I don't like it. My complaints are mostly about Overclockwise, though. The former episode was meant to resolve the series, while the one that followed is just a fun one-off that's one of their better three-story alternate universes. I have no complaints about that, but plenty about its preceding episode...
Bender figures out he can increase his intelligence by overclocking his processor. Since this overheats him, he has to cool himself off with water. But Bender being Bender, he can't stop there...he has to grow and grow and clock it even faster, until finally, the entire world is Bender's CPU and his head is wherever it wants to be. Due to his actions, Cubert and Professor Farnsworth are accused by Mom of violating Bender's warranty and sent to court, and also, Leela is thinking about leaving Earth to take a better job elsewhere. It's all too much for Fry to take and he leaps off Niagara Falls in a barrel, only to find out that's what Bender is now using as a coolant.
Fry pleads with Bender to fix things, but Bender is omniscient now and feels everyone is doomed, and also it's not like Bender to intervene or save people. But this isn't the normal Bender, is it? He's wise enough now to realize Mom shouldn't get away with what she's trying to do, and materializes in the walls of the court to use his infallible logic to spare Farnsworth and Cubert. Leela returns from space, and before Bender is reset to normal he prints off a spoiler sheet of Fry and Leela's future relationship, which they decide to read. We don't see what's on the sheet, only their reactions, but it seems to end happily.
It's heavier than a typical Futurama episode, but that heaviness doesn't feel earned. By this point, the WT/WT between Fry and Leela felt very manufactured and unnatural, and stretching it to this point just annoyed me when she had already said she loved him in "Into The Wild Green Yonder." Also, courtroom drama doesn't really fit a show like this, and the reason they're there is too flimsy to suggest the complete collapse of the status quo, like the episode wants me to believe. Thank goodness this wasn't really how the show ended.
This probably isn't the end of this list either. I reserve the right to recycle and revise it whenever the next six finales come out.