The crew throw an oddly subdued Fry a surprise birthday party, which ends up in a crash and party games… TO THE DEATH!

The premise, game obsessed aliens recreate Fry’s 8th birthday party, is interesting and for the first five minutes it’s pacy, fun and steering towards the kind of poignant exploration of Fry’s past the show does so well.

Then the deaths start, and don’t stop. They’re not traumatic in themselves, and so many name characters are taken out so fast you know they’re being rolled back, but they set a profoundly mean-spirited tone that the episode never recovers from. The gamester aliens are fun (Tom Kenny especially) but aside from very loose riffs on Squid Game and early Star Trek, the games feel empty and cruel. By the time Fry is sobbing over the accidentally killed Bender’s corpse while a raging cyber donkey is taken down you’re either going to be bored, annoyed or both. I was both. Frequently. There’s no arc to this plot. Cruel aliens mess with the main characters, resurrect everyone then leave. That’s it.

The B plot is much worse. Fry’s 8th birthday party is the one time he can do no wrong. He tries hard, he wins every game and on what should be the best day of his life he becomes estranged from every single one of his friends, who think he’s cheating. David Herman’s work as Gedgie, Fry’s best friend, is flat out brilliant as he evolves from friendly rival to disgruntled kid nemesis and it’s nice to both see the character again (he first appeared in Season 6’s ‘Cold Warriors’) and see why he and Fry drifted apart.

But this is also where the episode makes its biggest misstep. Fry wins every game, doesn’t cheat and loses his friends because they expect him to be a loser. We find out in the final moments that his parents rigged the games so he could win for once, and the episode closes on Fry tearfully watching his ex-friends leave as his mom looks lovingly on. Roll end credits. And therapy.

Looked at one way this is a clear echo of the final scenes of ‘Leela’s Homeworld’ where we see how her parents have always been with her. They did their best, and so did Fry’s. But from that perspective Fry’s parents didn’t just damage him, they didn’t know they were doing it. Looked at another way these scenes show that Fry was always an outsider in the past and explain and reinforce his feral love for his 31st century life. Looked at still a third, they send the message that Fry is an idiot, he always has been an idiot and he’s happiest being an idiot. None of these are tidy or comforting and I know not all fiction needs to be that. In fact, on its own, this would be bleak but potentially interesting. Combined with the perfunctory games it plays as mean-spirited, pointless and cruel. This is an episode where everyone dies and it doesn’t matter. This is an episode where Fry’s refusal to cheat causes him nothing but agony and it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters bar aliens we’ll never see again getting their jollies as we find out another way Fry’s broken.

Verdict: I honestly don’t know what else to tell you. As a conveyer belt of jokes the episode is competent. As a parody it’s perfunctory. As a character study it’s one of the most nihilistic and profoundly depressing half hours of TV I’ve seen in a long time. Go in aware of that and perhaps you’ll have more fun than I did. 4/10

Alasdair Stuart