Yes, it’s back again – that animated show about the pizza delivery guy being catapulted into the future! It seems Futurama is just indestructible, but this time its return was already planned last year. After its temporary demise eleven years ago at the hands of Comedy Central, it caught up with the streaming world a decade later being picked up by Hulu. The first batch of ten new episodes of what is the first half of Production Season 8 or alternately Broadcast Season 11 was released last summer. And as promised, the second half is now coming out as Season 12 in the same weekly rhythm on Hulu in the US and in the rest of the world on Disney+. Sadly I only managed to review the first episode last year, but hopefully I can at least write some quick reviews in the coming weeks. Now, let’s have a look at what the Planet Express crew is up to this week…

The Season 12 premiere starts with a story starring everyone’s favourite foul-mouthed, drinking and chain-smoking tin can, Bender! His episodes have always been fan favourites and he even was the focus of two of Comedy Central’s feature-length movies, so it’s no wonder that he is getting his fair share of stories again. The One Amigo was written by Eric Horsted, who has been with the series from the very beginning and wrote 16 episodes and parts of Bender’s Game, which you can really feel in this new episode.

It starts unauspicious with an almost generic parody bit about NFTs, but that part of the story is just the MacGuffin that allows moving part of the plot to Mexico. There, driven by a sense of loss caused by selling his likeness in the confusing digital art form, Bender goes looking for his ancestral home and meets not only his long lost cousin Doblando and his grandmother, but also a whole Rodriguez clan we’ve never heard about before. Meanwhile back home, the rest of the crew headed by a surprisingly alert Professor Farnsworth and the help of the younger generation, hatches a scheme to steal back what made Bender leave for his hometown.

The story may be a little muddled, but it is a nice follow-up to Eric Horsted’s season six heartfelt Bender origin story Lethal Inspection that also had him going to Mexico. Like the previous tale from 2010, The One Amigo adds a lot to the Bender lore and has quite a lot of fun with his heritage, bringing in a lot of cultural curiosities surrounding the robot clan. While the mexican part of the story flows along nicely, what happens back in New New York seems almost superfluous – what could have been a great Topkapi-style heist gets a little lost in the technobabble about NFTs. Or maybe that is actually what Horsted wanted to achieve, to confuse the viewers completely? Maybe just putting current-day technology fads into the future instead of coming up with something original isn’t such a good idea after all.

In any case, the b-story gives the other series’ regulars once again an opportunity to shine, even though they definitively play the second fiddle here. Even some new characters are casually introduced – there are now two teenage offspring of Kif and Amy around, who together with Cubert and Dwight have fun berating the clueless adults about the mysterious NFT technology. Everyone else has just basically nothing to do, especially Fry and Leela are just barely present – something which is always happening with such large ensemble casts and probably can’t be avoided. But everyone’s there and it feels like the band is back together again!

The production is once again at the top of its game – the animation is as detailed and playful as ever, especially in the creatively designed mexican sequences. The voice actors are all back and hit their marks perfectly, especially John DiMaggio as Bender gives a wonderful performance showing that he doesn’t have to rely on just being loud and crude. Guest starring as Bender’s cousin is Danny Trejo, who has Mexican origins himself and gives Doblando the perfect individual tone without making him just another Bender copy.

Despite the weak subplot, The One Amigo is still a fun episode and one of the better Bender stories – a very nice beginning of the new ten-episode season. Judging from the episode titles and the trailer it could even get a lot more interesting in the coming nine weeks!