Bender has an existential crisis when someone buys all the NFTs he’s made of himself. He goes back to his ancestral village to find himself while the others vow to heist the NFTs in the single most complex way possible.

Futurama hits the ground sprinting with this season premiere that gives John DiMaggio a lot to do straight out of the gate. Good Bender episodes always balance cheerful sociopathy with the fact he’s the tiniest, thinnest skinned baby and there’s some really sweet moments. Renee Victor is great as his grandma, Abuelatron, and the legendary Danny Trejo has enormous fun as cousin Doblendo.

The plot is a little more obtuse, balancing ancient Mexican ball games with sacrificial familial shenanigans with an extended riff on sacrifice and ancient gods. This is all good fun, and the episode gets one of its best jokes from subverting  Bender’s ‘Bite my shiny metal ass’ catchphrase. It all pays off too, and does so in a manner that combines ancient quipu technology (essentially string computers) with the concept of strings of numbers in computer memory. This of course ties back into the NFTs and does so in a manner that’s tremendously clever and entertaining but not actually that funny. If you’re a scientist by training it’ll, odds are, be much funnier. I appreciated it intellectually, but the gut punch laugh I was expecting never quite came.

If there’s an issue with this episode it’s that: it’s clever and entertaining more than it’s actually funny. This is small beans criticism to be sure but it also needs to be said there’s a lot of sizzle here for less steak than you might expect. That in itself might be a meta gag about NFTs but if so that’s still not that funny.

That isn’t to say there’s nothing to enjoy here, there is. Bender’s family will presumably recur, and they should, because they’re great and the heist story unfolds with typical maniacal glee. There’s precious little Zoidberg this episode but what there is may be the best joke they’ve ever done with him. Likewise Leyla’s one eyed domino mask and sight gags like ‘Maquina de Turing’ and The Museum of Modem Art.  This is an average episode of Futurama and it’s still funnier than most. But it’s not as funny as it should be. Even the mocking of NFTs, richly deserved as it is, feels like it doesn’t quite go far enough.

Verdict: Despite all that, this is still tremendous fun. But the show’s capable of better. Hopefully that’s on the way. 7/10

Alasdair Stuart