By Pentadact

Futurama hasn’t been this good in years. It’s been very funny this season, and I think most of the movies had some inspired gags, but this week’s was the first time the plot’s been as good as the jokes since the good old days. It did what all the best episodes do: found the humour value in an old sci-fi concept and took it to ridiculous extremes.

If you didn’t see it, Farnsworth invented a mind-swapper. He and Amy swapped bodies to enjoy youth and food respectively, but found they couldn’t switch back because their body’s immune response blocked the same switch being made again. They could still swap to other bodies, though, so Bender and the Professor (really Amy) swap minds.

Bender (really the Professor): Now then Amy, we’ll simply switch bodies, and then we’ll… no… I’d be back in my body, but then you and Bender would be switched, and the Amy and Bender bodies can’t trade minds again since they just did!

Professor (really Amy): Oh no! Is it possible to get everyone back to normal using four or more bodies?

Bender (really the Professor): I’m not sure! I’m afraid we need to use… MATH.

You can already tell the whole episode is going to be amazing at this point, but I had to pause and work it out before watching any more. You could call this an intentionally self-inflicted spoiler, but you kind of already know the main characters aren’t going to end up permanently switched, right? I just wanted to know if this was a way they could be restored, and if so how many more people they’d need.

It’s trickier than it seems as first, but not as impossible as it starts to look shortly after that. To be as clear as possible, I’ll refer to people as Person They Appear To Be (Person They Really Are). This is important because it’s the bodies that can’t switch back directly – there’s no rule about minds.

By this point in the show, here’s the story so far:

Amy and the Professor switch

Producing:
Professor (Amy)
Amy (Professor)

Amy and Bender switch

Producing:
Amy (Bender)
Bender (Professor)

Leaving:
Professor (Amy)

Bender (Professor) proposes switching with Professor (Amy) but doesn’t go through with it. It’s easier to think about if he does do that, though, because we’re back to just two wrong ‘uns to fix.

Bender and Professor switch

Producing:
Bender (Amy)
Professor (Professor) – Fixed!

Leaving:
Amy (Bender)

Now Bender and Amy need to switch, but they can’t directly. So we use Fry as temporary storage:

Bender and Fry switch

Producing:
Fry (Amy)
Bender (Fry)

Leaving:
Amy (Bender)

But that’s not enough. We need a somewhere else to put Bender’s brain so we don’t end up using the same storage person twice for the same trade. So:

Amy and Leela switch

Producing:
Amy (Leela)
Leela (Bender)

Leaving:
Fry (Amy)
Bender (Fry)

Now we can get Amy’s brain back in her without putting Bender into Fry – we can’t re-swap that pair.

Amy and Fry switch

Producing:
Fry (Leela)
Amy (Amy) – Fixed!

Leaving:
Bender (Fry)
Leela (Bender)

Similarly, we can put Bender back to rights without stranding Fry.

Leela and Bender switch

Producing:
Leela (Fry)
Bender (Bender) – Fixed!

Leaving:
Fry (Leela)

So finally we can switch two people who both want to be switched, which is the only way you can ever finish this thing:

Fry and Leela switch

Producing:
Fry (Fry) – Fixed!
Leela (Leela) – Fixed!

That was my first attempt. Looking it over, I think there’s probably some flab there – I think I can see a way to save a move or two early on. But figuring out this much made the rest of the episode all the more fun to watch, because the switches get nuts very, very quickly.

It seems to be biting off way more storylines than it can chew, and more maths than it can resolve, but it does both beautifully. The Wash Bucket is one of those sublime minor characters we don’t see enough of lately, like the homeopathy-hating announcer bot in Crimes of the Hot. And although they seem to be glossing over the mess they’ve made by having the Globetrotters announce that any such tangle can be resolved with two extra people, that is provably correct, and they show they’re nerdy enough to do the legwork by doing a montage of all the required switches at the end.

If Futurama sometimes seems weirdly inconsistent, it’s probably because of the crazy number of writers. No two episodes this season have been written by the same person. This one was by Ken Keeler, also behind Time Keeps on Slipping, and I therefore conclude that he is awesome.

Man, there was a time when Lost was so exciting I’d blog about it here. When a series loses its way, as pretty much all of them have to in the merciless American format of multiple seventeen-hour seasons, it’s amazing how quickly it wipes your memory of how good it used to be. I was a Heroes fanboy, once.

But a lot of the complaints you could level at the way Lost ended up sound superficially like things you could as easily have said about season one: it raises interesting questions but never answers them, it’s too mystical, and you’re given far too much backstory for characters that just aren’t that interesting.

But I think a definable line was crossed somewhere in the middle, between unanswered questions that seem like they could have an interesting explanation, and just making arbitrary shit up in the same lame attempt to blow your mind usually reserved for the stoned, at parties, to the completely sober.

Smoke monster, rips up trees, makes a mechanical clanking noise – I’m fascinated.
Dharma Initiative, has bases here, investigating scientific properties of the island – I’m intrigued.
The Others, mysterious, seemingly superhuman, with horrible motives – I’m kind of intrigued.
“I don’t know what’s more curious, where the rest of the statue is or why it only has four toes.” – I’m, uh, nearing a borderline here.
Ben isn’t in charge of the Others. An invisible man in a shack is. He can cure cancer but he hates flashlights. Also the shack teleports.
At this point it’s clear that there isn’t going to be any kind of interesting explanation for this, and I stop caring.

Everything after that point sounded increasingly like a 12 year-old trying to bail himself out of a ridiculous lie by layering carefully constructed but painfully over-specific falsehoods on top of it. I never really cared about whether they’d answer the questions the series raised, only that the questions should hint at interesting answers. Once it strays into random land, there’s nothing for my imagination to chew on and I get bored.

At some point during Season Five – where one timeline is itself jumping back and forth through time – I stopped watching entirely – hence the 0. I never really came back, except for finales and premieres, and I only watched the two episodes preceding the grand finale this week.

I think that let me enjoy it. It was complete hokum of the laziest, stupidest kind, but emotionally well judged and oddly satisfying. Getting a shitty answer to some of the central questions, even the really interesting ones, turned out to feel better than getting none at all. What they gained by deciding not to do anything particularly special in the whole two hours was the freedom to pace it to give each meandering, pointless story thread its own little send-off. I’m not sorry I skipped what I did – in fact I wish I’d skipped most of seasons 3 and 4 too – but I’m glad I tuned back in for the end.

The crappy, crappy end.

Last one of these – I won’t do a music one because I didn’t really get into much last year, and everyone’s heard Florence and the Machine. The Music Downloads tag has everything I liked enough to share.

Is this list in order? If you care, no. If you don’t, yes.

Curb Your Enthusiasm

Dollhouse

Man-doll Victor’s been the other treat of this season – previously stuck in some pretty dull roles, he’s since been given three or four chances to mimic other characters when ‘imprinted’ with their personality. Each time, the performance has been creepily good. When trying to tot up how many times it had happened just now, it took me a while to remember that he’d ever impersonated Topher – I just filed that whole sequence as ‘the bit with two Tophers’.

Update: just saw the latest. Whaaaaaat.

Castle

It couldn’t pick a more worn-smooth formula if it consciously tried: a police procedural starring a non-cop ‘consultant’ who helps the department solve crimes by a) having some special insight into the criminal mind and b) projecting an aura that prevents ordinary cops from grasping rudimentary logic until it’s phrased to them in allegorical form. The flavour this time is that he’s a best-selling crime writer. And that it’s brilliant.

The twists are small but effective: Lady Cop’s disapproving relationship with him is complicated by the fact that she’s always been a fan of his trashy work, and there’s something almost cute about her determination to give him a harder time to compensate. Castle himself is a rockstar in the literary world, but a powerless underling in law enforcement – Fillion manages to be charming, funny and pathetic as both. And his profession gives him a boyish excitement for working with the police rather than the sneering smugness the genius character usually has.

His daughter, whose inclusion initially triggers a Pavlovian sense that this is where it’s about to jump the shark, isn’t used as a source of whiny teenage tension. Instead she’s just a bedrock for the character, convincing, likable and sweet. It’s so rare to see a father/daughter relationship on screen where they just seem to be friends, and neither of them is being an asshole – the highest compliment I can pay is that it reminds me of Veronica and Keith Mars. It’s only because all this stuff works that she serves the purpose most irritating daughter characters are trying to: she humanises a man who seems otherwise ghoulish in his enthusiasm for murder.

Dexter

Funnily enough, despite an exciting escalation from the worst Thanksgiving ever to an extraordinarily grim finale, the episode that stuck with me was an early one-off. A sleep-deprived Dexter completely loses track of where he’s stashed a body, and consistently one-ups himself by avoiding all the places even he would think to look. I think the core appeal of Dexter is that, whether or not we’ve killed anyone, we all remember how it feels to have done something bad. Even if it was as a kid, the consuming fear of getting caught is scarier than any monster or murderer, because no-one’s going to be on your side.

Jen said she’d never ever see me again
When I saw her again, she said it again
Jan met another man
Leeza got amnesia just forgot who I am

Felicity, said there was no electricity
Emily, no chemistry
Fran ran, Bruce turned out to be a man
Flo had to go; I couldn’t go with the flow

Carol Brown just took a bus out of town
But I’m hoping that you’ll stick around

(He doesn’t cook or clean; he’s not good boyfriend material)
Ooh we can eat cereal!
(You’ll lose interest fast, his relationships never last)
Shut up girlfriends from the past
(He says he’ll do one thing and then he goes and does another thing)
Ooh, who organised all my ex girlfriends into a choir and got them to sing?
Who? Who? Mmm, shut up
Shut up girlfriends from the past

Mimi will no longer see me
Britney, Britney hit me
Paula, Persephone, Stella and Stephanie
There must be 50 ways that lovers have left me

Carol Brown just took a bus out of town

Love is a delicate thing it could just float away on the breeze
(He said the same thing to me)
How can we ever know we’ve found the right person in this world
(He means he looks at other girls)
Love is a mystery, it does not follow a rule
(This guy is a fool)
(He will always be a boy; he’s a man who never grew up)
I thought I told you to shut u-u-up?

Mona, you told me you were in a coma
Tiffany, you said that you had an epiphany
Mmm, would you like a little cereal?
Who organised this choir of my ex girlfriends?
Was it you, Carol Brown? Was it you, Carol Brown?

Carol Brown just took a bus out of town
But I’m hoping that you’ll stick around

Special Mention: State of Play

It’s the story of two murders, a mysterious death, an MP and the journalists investigating their connection. S. It gets complicated at a rate of knots, but never arbitrarily, and making sense of those complications becomes a compulsion. It’s a single six episode series, and if you can make them last more than a week you’re a stronger person than I.

I tried to watch the more recent film adaptation on a plane, but in trying to cram six hours of fast-paced developments into two, they’ve somehow managed to make it slower, less exciting and insufferably preachy. If you can watch the whole thing after seeing the series, you’re a more patient person than I.

Note: Glee

A regular feature in which I ask you to listen to a sound file with no idea what it’s going to be. It’s an attempt to share the strange experience of rummaging through my old download folders, listening to forgotten MP3s with uninformative filenames. All I know about them is that I must have liked them at some point.

Volume Four was the shortest I’ve ever posted, this one is the longest – don’t click play if you’re in a hurry.