g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

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Wednesday, October 13, 2004
17:12 - I knew it

(top) link
Idle curiosity will kill me one day.

It's what drove me to seek out the episode reviews on gotfuturama.com, to check into what other people had said about the Futurama episode with the absolutely most unforgivable ending ever: "Jurassic Bark". The one with Fry's fossilized dog.

And wouldn't you know it—while throughout the episode guides to all the seasons in the entire series the typical episode had about 70 or 80 reviews from users, this one had 761.

Largely saying things like:

This episode is what's making me visit the site. I've always watched Futurama but seeing this ep. made me love it. I did start crying thats why i was so compelled to just go ahead and type futurama into google and see what i got. Im embarressed to say but yeah this made me cry too, i really wish i didn't cuz its a damn cartoon and supposed to be funny but damn it, i cried.

and

I came on to this website through google because of this episode too. Amazing episode.

and

Don't watch the ending with a dog nearby, though. Mine put her head on my arm just as the credits rolled, and it finally broke me. Damn dog, why must you make me cry?

...And so on. Looks like I'm anything but alone here.

I guess it's all part of the Futurama writers' tendency to dabble in storylines that unexpectedly turn poignant in ways that Simpsons episodes never did. This was a trend that was becoming more pronounced in the later seasons particularly; other notable episodes that left the viewer staring at the screen thinking, Oh, not fair, not fair at all were the one with the holophonor opera and the one where Leela's in a coma, both also in the fifth and final season, and the earlier seven-leaf clover episode that seemed (along with a few others) to have inspired and encouraged this quirk of the show's writing. Naturally, all of these episodes have abnormally large numbers of reviews on the site.

People aren't used to sitcoms that spend twenty-one minutes building you up with humor, then in the final minute tear you down and leave you a blubbering mess—and then don't defuse it with a final joke, even. I don't know if that's a contributor to why Futurama got cancelled—its core audience, geeks, don't tend to be the emotional sort, or susceptible to schmaltz—but it certainly tells me that the writers had something good going on. They knew what they were doing. And I hope they get right back into it in the renewed run that Cartoon Network is sponsoring, resurrected on the strength of all those DVD sales.

In the case of "Jurassic Bark", though, it's like they were establishing the far end of the emotional-ending spectrum, giving a sign like God after the Flood to tell us that they'd never go quite this far again.

I sure hope not. That ending is just not fair. Not fair at all.


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