The Prince and the Product

This is by far the worst episode of Futurama so far. It was incoherent, disjointed, failed to provide a reference for the framing device (the delivery to the King of Space) and had all of the characters behaving completely out of character just for the sake of a lame story. The worst part was the handwave at the end with the professor saying it was a "science spell" in the last seconds.

They are now treating their fans like idiots, who have become used to tightly-written scripts with well thought-out plots and clever dialogue, but Hulu got their mitts on it and gave us this.

Like most here, I've been a day-one fan and watched most episodes episodes multiple times because they are so well crafted, they deserve re-watching. This season? Absolute garbage. Lazily written with no regard to the fans who kept up with it for two decades.

This is a shameful way for this series to go out on. This is Matt Groening's property and still has considerable clout to make sure that this could have been the best season to go out on, but he decided to say f--- it all, I got paid, and I can't be bothered any longer.

They missed, Big Time!

I loved both the Saturday Morning Fun Pit and Reincarnation episodes, as well as the Anthology of Interest I and Anthology of Interest II, but this was bad!.

The obscure non-canonical episodes have been some of my favorites, but this one didn't hold a candle.

Even if they scrapped the pointless King of Space sub-plot, it would have blown, but that plotline, as well as the so-called twist and shoddy ending were so beneath even the worst Futurama episode. I think they were going for an Amazon Women on the Moon non-sequitur style of cohesion, but it was bad.

Even the toy subplots were poorly written. The car one had a couple of laughs, but the robot and rubber duck/weeble wobble bits felt like they were written by a first-year intern.

This season has been hit or miss, which I can deal with. It's my fourth time on this ride, but this is my least favorite Futurama episode, ever and I've never had one before today.

The first episode of this new season of Futurama seemed promising to me, although it seemed to have promised more than it could deliver. I think many of the new episodes have been somewhat dull, but I nonetheless had no problems watching them until the end. There was still the occasional joke that made me smile, and the heart of the show seemed still to be there.

This episode, however, feels like a complete waste of time, it's merely trite filler without any merit whatsoever. The backdrop-plot is Fry, Leela, and Bender deliver a package to some space king, where Leela falls in love with the prince there, although she's engaged to Fry - and in the last second of the episode, it's said she was under a "science spell", without any further explanation. The real episode is about the three shorts about the crew being different types of toys. There is no link between the backdrop and the shorts, so what on earth was the point? It wasn't funny, it wasn't interesting, it added nothing.

Unto the shorts themselves. They were mainly just dull. The jokes didn't land for me, and the set-up just didn't pay off. They were mostly fairly predictable. I always thought that the shorts were more prone to becoming unengaging filler, but episodes like "Tales of interest" were really good, whereas this is bad even for an episode made up of shorts.

I don't have much more to say than that this episode was hard to finish. It felt way too long, and just didn't lead anywhere. In the end, it felt completely pointless. As already mentioned, I thought the first episode of the new season was promising, but I honestly thought the quality hasn't been as high as it should have been, although I have not felt the need to write a review about it until now. This episode was so trite and boring that I'm honestly surprised they made it and nobody had any objection to this episode, since it really hit a low point for Futurama in my view. Not because it's offensive or shocking, but because it's the most boring episode of Futurama to date.

So far the new season has been rather average with a few hits and misses here and there, but this episode specifically was just bad.

It's not out of the norm for Futurama to create a mix of stories and pull them into one episode, e.g. Anthology of Interest, but in this episode specifically they tried to awkwardly gel concepts together in a strange multiverse approach, it almost felt like they were trying to do what Rick and Morty do, but in the worst possible way.

Overall this episode is structurally disappointing, but it also lacks any real laughs to at-least make it entertaining. It's a Farcry from the excellence of the Anthology of Interest episodes of this he past.

I really hope the next episode course corrects.

Honestly, if this episode ended with text saying "Written by A. I", I'd give it way more stars. That would have been a clever nod to supporting the current writers' strike and a great illustration on why good writers are so essential.

In fact, they could have made a whole funny wrap-up segment of an A. I/robot printing the final page of the episode's script and calling it their masterpiece. Would have fit really well with the universe, their show's comedic style, and the current climate around A. I. in media.

But this episode didn't do any of that. So I can only assume humans wrote it. Which easily makes it the worst episode in the entire series, hands down.