Bender Than Life: Part 2

Welcome to the concluding part of my Futurama/Red Dwarf comparison, split in half because of readability and making the best of my tendency to make these articles probably far too long. Let’s get straight into it with a look at some more classic sci-fi tropes…

SPACE WESTERN

The space western is a classic subgenre of sci-fi – Western themes and tropes transplanted into a sci-fi setting. Any sci-fi franchise will do this at some point, and these two are no different. Red Dwarf’s sixth series episode “Gunmen of the Apocalypse” is a classic take on the genre, based around a virtual reality simulation of the Wild West that represents Kryten’s attempts to come up with an antidote for a computer virus.

Futurama’s take, “Where the Buggalo Roam”, is actually rather atypical for the genre: it’s set on Mars, and involves native Martians (inspired by the indigenous people of the Americas) and the titular Buggalo (which they attempt to kidnap in revenge for selling their native lands to Amy’s family), which are pictured below:

Crucially, however, “Where the Buggalo Roam” isn’t an exceptionally funny episode, whereas “Gunmen of the Apocalypse” is. So maybe all the various comparisons of sci-fi concepts count for nothing compared to all that.

TIME TRAVEL

When Futurama was first created, the show’s writers decided there would not be any time travel. “Roswell That Ends Well”, the episode that ultimately broke that rule (it started out as a ‘what-if?’ segment for one of the “Treehouse of Horror”-esque “Anthology of Interest” episodes), still had the caveat that the reason for the time travel had to be a suitably rare, unintentional event; specifically, the radiation from a star going supernova combining with the radiation from a malfunctioning microwave. “Roswell” was a huge success, winning the show its first Emmy, it is the only episode of the show’s original run in which time travel is a major plot element. (Time travel also features briefly in the third act of “The Why of Fry” when Fry is given the opportunity to stop himself being frozen, which is kind of difficult to briefly surmise here, but it’s the result of a unique occurrence that Fry isn’t going to get another chance at.)

In the first of the direct-to-DVD movies, “Bender’s Big Score”, the characters discover a binary code for time travel that only exists via the bootstrap paradox, and although it is ‘paradox-correcting’, it is because any time travel duplicate created by using the code is doomed. (I’d go into more detail, but I’m pretty sure I might be able to get a whole article out of this at some point.) In the revived Comedy Central run, time travel appears a couple of times, but usually with some qualification that prevents it from being readily accessible or usable; in “The Late Philip J. Fry” (which won the show its other Emmy, incidentally), Professor Farnsworth invents a time machine that can only go forwards so as to avoid creating paradoxes; in “All the Presidents’ Heads” the Professor discovers that the fluid used to keep human heads alive in jars traps the heads in a time bubble, and by licking the heads you can travel back in time for a limited amount of time; the time travel code reappears in “Decision 3012”; and in the show’s final episode, “Meanwhile”, the Professor invents a hand-held device that sends the entire universe back in time ten seconds (it takes ten seconds to recharge after each use to avoid the user being able to go back in time indefinitely), as well as a shelter that shields its inhabitants from the effect of the button.

Red Dwarf was never as reluctant as Futurama to do time travel storylines, but it did usually apply some of its own caveats. The first such episode is the second series’ “Stasis Leak”, in which a malfunctioning stasis booth creates a corridor to the ship three million years ago, but the crew cannot bring back anyone or anything from the past to the present without reducing them to dust. In the following series’ “Timeslides”, some developing fluid mutates and photographs start coming to life; by use of a projector the crew discover that they can enter the time and place of the photographs. (The justification for this is initially that they can’t step outside the boundaries of the photo… but they can substantially change history, and the ‘boundaries’ thing isn’t really consistently applied – indeed, the script had to be rewritten at the last minute after Craig Charles pointed out a problem with the logic of the photos’ use. Grant and Naylor may have been more concerned with making it funny, which is fair enough really.)

Although the robotic judge, jury and executioner The Inquisitor (of the episode of the same name in series V) has access to time travel, the boys from the Dwarf won’t be afforded the opportunity again until the final episode of the sixth series, “Out of Time”, where the crew discover a time machine hidden on a derelict space station at the heart of an ‘unreality minefield’ to deter would-be looters. There’s a fairly major caveat – it can only travel in time, not space: “We’re still in deep space, but now we’re in deep space in the fifteenth century. Isn’t it wonderful?” The crew later meet up with their future selves, who have managed to develop the drive to travel in space as well, but they’ve all become evil and are now good friends with the Hitlers as the very best things in history are held by the very worst people. To cut a long story short, the Dwarfers decide they can never again use the time drive so as to avoid becoming their future selves.

In Series VII (produced three years after the last series and with Rob Grant no longer part of the writing team), the time drive is returned to. In the opening episode, “Tikka to Ride”, it’s used for no better a reason than so Lister can pick up some curries… and it’s inexplicably gained the ability to travel in space as well, which does beg the question why the Dwarfers don’t use it to return home rather than being stranded in deep space. (The extended cut of this episode, which was never broadcast but released on VHS, does have a stab at answering this by saying that they’d risk changing history too much. The episode is of the ‘changing history’ variety, and isn’t dissimilar to “All the Presidents’ Heads”; here the Dwarfers accidentally avert Kennedy’s assassination, whilst the Futurama crew accidentally change the course of the American Revolution so the British win.) It’s then briefly seen again in “Ouroboros”, which brings us on to another big similarity between the shows.

In Futurama’s “Roswell That Ends Well”, during the crew’s trip back to the 1940s, Fry unintentionally becomes his own grandfather by accidentally killing the man he thinks is his grandfather and then sleeping with his grandmother. Red Dwarf VII was not the show’s finest hour, and consequently the circumstances surrounding Lister’s recursive relationship to himself are a lot duller and far less funny, but in “Ouroboros” he becomes his own father (and his girlfriend’s sort of his mother which never really comes up again) and travels back in time to abandon his baby self where he was first found. (The idea of Fry becoming his own grandfather has always sat with me a lot better than Lister becoming his own father; it’s much funnier, but also the extra degree of separation helps a bit.)

In the two-part Red Dwarf VIII story Pete, the Dwarfers discover a device that can manipulate time, and I tend to get a big angry whenever I have to write about that particular story so we’ll move on. Time travel has come up on a number of occasions in the revived series: in “Lemons”, a rejuvenating device goes wrong and strands the crew in 23 AD; a simulant time travel device wreaks havoc with the timeline of Earth in “Twentica”; and the crew manage to rig up a stasis booth to act in a similar way to the stasis leak way back in Series II in “Give and Take” for short-term time travel. I get the sense that maybe the Futurama writers are slightly more interested in strictly adhering to the show’s established rules when it comes to time travel, but both shows otherwise score pretty similarly here.

VIRTUAL REALITY

Futurama’s principle use of virtual reality is to depict the internet as a virtual world (its two major appearances are in “A Bicyclops Built for Two” and “I Dated a Robot”). Some pictures probably get the idea across better than I can describe it:

Red Dwarf’s portrayal isn’t dissimilar, and is used mostly for Lister’s video games in the episodes “Better than Life”, “Gunmen of the Apocalypse” (creating the Western reality) and “Stoke Me a Clipper”. ‘Interestingly’, Futurama also uses traditional desktop computers for when a joke suits it, and in later Red Dwarf episodes such as “Fathers and Suns” Lister also reverts to using games consoles. The concept also crosses over with the flashback episodes for “Game of Tones”, a homage to Inception where Fry revisits his life in 1999 inside his own mind.

But there’s another comparison to be made: Futurama’s virtual world is teeming with real life, whilst in Red Dwarf Lister has to settle to surrounding himself with pixels and automated programs as substitute for real human interaction. Although there are many general similarities between the two, there’s still a lot of differences, mostly arising from the two different set-ups. And yet they both still get frozen at the beginning, or something.

Just to finish this article off, here’s a couple of other general themes and similarities, and the respective episodes of each show they can be found in, why not:

Concept	Futurama episode(s)	Red Dwarf episode(s)
Age reversal	Plot of “Teenage Mutant Leela’s Hurdles” (2003) (NB: The resolution to the plot is uncharacteristically unscientific for the show.)	One of the Inquisitor’s abilities with his time gauntlet in “The Inquisitor” (1992)
Futuristic version of 3D printing	“Forty Percent Leadbelly” (2013)	“Officer Rimmer” (2016)
Huge compound interest gathering whilst character was frozen	“A Fishful of Dollars” (1999) (actually happens)	“Me2” (1988) (as a joke)
Organlegging	“My Three Suns” (1999) “The Six Million Dollar Mon” (2012)	“Give and Take” (2016)
Precognition	“Law and Oracle” (2011)	“Cassandra” (1999)
Robot afterlife	“Hell is Other Robots” (1999) “The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings” (2003) “Ghost in the Machines” (2011) “Calculon 2.0” (2013) Robot Hell is an actual, physical place, including the Robot Devil; Robot Heaven is briefly glimpsed in “Ghost in the Machines”	“The Last Day” (1989) Silicon Heaven is Kryten’s belief
Robot becomes human	“Anthology of Interest II” (2002) – happens to Bender in a ‘what-if’ sequence	“DNA” (1991) – actually happens to Kryten in remarkably similar circumstances to the ‘what-if’ scenario
Time skips	Key plot of “Time Keeps on Skippin’” (2001)	One of the effects of the white hole in “White Hole” (1991)