This Week in Futurama - 7/15/10

I'm starting to regret making this feature, but enough of that, here's this, and sorry for the delay but I was held up with a piece of artwork last night and had to record the episode instead of seeing it live as I normally would.

7/15/10: Episode 5 - "The Duh-Vinci Code"

I think there's a pattern here with new Futurama, every other week it's been good, bad, good... so guess what this week's episode is? In its defense, "The Duh-Vinci Code" isn't as awful as "Attack of the Killer App," but it's still nowhere near as good as this season two decent episodes so far, and even mediocre episodes from the original run.

So what happens? The Professor goes on about his favorite artist and inventor, Leonard Da Vinci, and it soon leads him and his staff on an exploration from "ancient texts" a.k.a. The Da Vinci Code. Which brings them to Italy, where they uncover Da Vinci's greatest inventions, and then Fry and the Professor are transported to the planet Vinci, where Leonardo is from, and is apparently the stupidest of its inhabitants... go figure.

The problem here, much like in "Attack of the Killer App," is that all the jokes here are either irrelevant or just not funny. Hell, Da Vinci Code jokes would have been irrelevant in any of the direct-to-DVD films, so why the hell are they making this now? I'm sure fans of the books would find this episode amusing, as really it's to the Da Vinci Code as "Where No Fan has Gone Before" was to Star Trek. But that's the key thing, Futurama thrives on science-fiction related humor, so an episode about Star Trek works really well. But what's the show's connection with the Da Vinci Code? Why are you making the jokes in 2010? It just doesn't seem to make sense honestly...

To me, it really just seems like this was a script written back at the height of the book's and film's popularity, and was shelved when there was no production going on, and it obviously wouldn't have fit into any of the four films. But with material so dated, I think this one should have been left on the shelf.

Overall Score: 6.8/10