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1ACV03: I, Roommate
First UK airing: Sky One, 8:00pm, 5-10-99
(my birthday!)
"You call that an antenna?"
Who would have thought it? An episode that actually
makes Bender into a sympathetic character! Obviously robots are
people too.
'Roommate' did what many of my personal favourite
Simpsons episodes do -- take an everyday situation, and spin
it into something extraordinary. The simple act of Fry looking
for an apartment generated some truly outstanding jokes, and
even as a non-American I completely got the one about New Jersey.
But while on the surface it might look like Fry's episode, it's
Bender who gets to develop as a personality rather than just
a series of booze and theft jokes.
While comedies can't generally let their characters
change, since that would screw up the premise, the best ones
do allow us to see other sides of the people in them. Thinking
about it, my favourite Simpson is probably Lisa, because she's
the one who has the most going on inside and doesn't necessarily
behave in the obvious way in a given situation. However, most
people seem to prefer the 'Homer becomes a [X]' episodes. Not
that there's anything wrong with that, but I don't know whether
that says more about me or 'most people'.
What this episode shows is that while on the surface
they're fairly callous (which, let's face it, makes for better
comedy), the Planet Express crew actually do care about each
other underneath. Futurama, even
at this early stage in its life, proved that it had the right
balance -- too much bonding and it's off into mushiness territory,
but too little and you end up like Veronica's Closet or Just
Shoot Me or any number of other middle-of-the-road sitcoms, where
you wonder why the hell these people stay together at all.
Bender's descent into non-alcoholism was brilliantly
done (the Lost Weekend-inspired neon signs were superb), and
I genuinely didn't think he'd go through with snipping off 'Little
Bender' just to stay with Fry. Of course it didn't matter, since,
as Fry would later observe, in television everything's back to
normal by the end of the episode. Still, it gave Bender an extra
dimension -- or, since the best he can ever hope for is to be
two-dimensional, half of one at least.
The only downside of the episode was the overplaying
of the 'All My Circuits' gag. Yes, we know that daytime soaps
are mindless and full of ludicrous plot twists, but these jokes
were done to death on Soap 20 years ago, and more recently got
a thorough exhumation in the 'Dr Drake Ramore' episodes of Friends.
And now I find out that Calculon and co are set to return in
season two. D', and indeed, oh.
Rating: 
Footnote: There's an episode of Space:
1999 ('Brian The Brain') which also features a robot with a very
strong attachment to his 'antenna', something that gains an amusing
new twist after watching 1ACV03. Probably a coincidence, but
I thought I'd mention it.
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