How About That Thing?

I was kind of surprised that Futurama ever tackled the issue of blindness in the first place. I kind of figured by 3000 AD, we’d have found cures for all forms of blindness, deafness, and so on. Hell, Fry had his hands eaten by a dinosaur, and they were able to give him new ones within a matter of minutes. Heads are kept alive in jars for as long as the jar remains in tact. Hell, your headless body can be brought back from the dead without reattaching your head!

But I guess the caveat is it happened to Lila: the one-eyed being we all thought was alien, but later turned out to be a sewer mutant. I guess when you’re dealing with alien/mutant biology as unique as hers, there’s going to be some complications.

Either way, today, we’re going to be talking about the season 2 episode “Bender Gets Made.”

Our story begins when the gang get tickets to see this guy.

This is Elzar. For those who aren’t in the loop, he’s a parody of Emeril LaGasse. If you’ve never heard of Emeril, then it’s a safe bet you weren’t a big fan of cooking shows in the 90s. Suffice to say, Emeril was all the rage. Right up until Gordon Ramsay came along and told him “GET OUT! DONKEY!”

So yeah, Elzar has the most popular cooking show on 3000’s TV. As well as a cookbook entitled “How to Cook Slugs for Dinner and Cook Dinner for Slugs.” I probably wouldn’t read the book, but I wouldn’t mind seeing B. Dylan Holis make a few of the recipes on YouTube Shorts.

Bender marks out, and convinces Elzar to kick it up another knotch with his patented “spice weasel”. Only for Bender’s camera flash to startle him, and the weasel spray ends up in Lila’s eye, blinding her.

SIDE NOTE: yeah, remember when flash photography was a thing? I guess camera phones come with a flash, but I don’t know many people who use it.

The good news is Lila’s blindness is only temporary. The bad news is she’s got to keep her eye covered for at least a couple days. I got to say: between this, and the King of the Hill episode from last week, I’m kind of sensing a pattern with these blind related episodes. Either way, “hilarity” ensues.

For what it’s worth, Lila having to guide Zoidberg after he ingests some setatives is actually kind of funny. Amy then proceeds to shout at the top of her lungs “We’re right here!”, clearly mistaking blindness for deafness. And boy, let me tell you: you’d genuinely be amazed how often you ableds do that. You laugh, but I’ve seriously had multiple people try and talk to me in sign language. To be fair, one of the times it happened, the girl was drunk off her ass, but that’s a story for another day. Even then, what is it with you people and thinking blind and deaf are the same thing? Bad enough we have to keep telling you idiots to quit trying to merge the school for the blind and the school for the deaf here in Kansas. No, they’re NOT, in fact, the same thing, and no, you’re not helping. STOP IT! THIS INSTANT!

ANYWAY…

Elzar invites everybody over for an appology dinner… And Lila eats a house plant, thinking it’s salad. Not funny. Seriously, even an idiot blind person can tell the difference between a random plant and a dinner plate. Boo, I say. BOO!

Once dinner is over, Elzar gives them a bill. The only thing more outrageous than the fact he’s billing them for an appology dinner is the amount he’s charging. And if the amount he’s charging isn’t outrageous enough, he has them arrested the moment they admit they can’t pay it. Which leads to our B-plot where Bender joins up with these guys.

These three are The Robot Mafia. Consisting of Donbot, Clamps, and Joey Mousepad, these three basically run the robot criminal underworld. And bender becomes their number four.

While Bender is diving face first into the world of organized crime, Lila comes to work late and uses Zoidberg as a chair. Not in the kinky way, but in the unfunny “hur hur, blind people can’t tell the difference between furniture and coworkers” way. Though the bit about Nibbler taking her through the zoo actually WAS kind of funny.

Fry and Lila go on their latest delivery while Bender fakes sick in order to do some crime. And for SOME reason, Lila’s piloting the ship. She insists she doesn’t need sight to pilot… But yeah, no. Seriously, my parents wouldn’t even let me ride a bicycle through the suburbs after I lost my right eye. Why the hell are you letting her pilot a spaceship? There’s pride, and then there’s this.

Anyway, actual hilarity ensues when Bender realizes the crime they’re committing is to rob the Planet Express ship of its cargo. In the process of hijacking the ship, Lila gets knocked out of her chair… Then starts using Nibbler’s food bowl, thinking it’s the stearing wheel. Okay, I admit that I don’t really know much about the 31st century and its tech overall, but I’m pretty sure detachable stearing wheels still aren’t a thing, and this isn’t funny.

The mafia board the ship, and in an attempt to hide his identity, he changes his voice settings to sound less like Bender, and more like… Someone from Britain? Okay.

Bender takes Lila’s blindfold off momentarily, and Lila almost ends up seeing him before he puts a new one on. He also convinces the mob to let him burn the ship, which he obviously doesn’t go through with, and instead pretends to be kidnapped like everybody else once the mob leaves.

Lila finally gets to take her blindfold off, Bender gets his cut of the heist, and nobody learned a thing.

I have to admit, I’ve always kind of had a love-hate relationship with this episode. For all the talk about the original run being flawless, say for that episode where they became superheroes, this episode has always made me feel a little polarized.

all the stuff with blind Lila wasn’t funny. It consisted mostly of the stereotypical “Hur hur hur she can’t tell the difference between [A] and [B]” humor, none of which made me laugh at any point during this rewatch.

My laughter generally came more from Bender being part of the robot mafia than anything else. Hell, to this very day, I find myself declaring: “YOU’RE A FREAKIN’ GENIUS, YOU IDIOT!” more often than I really need to. Which probably tells you a lot about what kind of shape the world is in lately… But I digress.

I would hesitate to call it mean-spiritted, what they did with blind Lila. If anything, I’d probably categorize it under cliched at worst, and “they don’t know any better” at best. They had a good start with Amy yelling at Lila at first, but it was all downhill from there.

If you want to watch this episode, watch it for the robot mafia, for Elzar, and nothing else.