Trollheart

THE STARS OF THE SHOW

Bruno Ganz, as Adolf Hitler
It would of course be odd if, in a film centred around him, Hitler were not the key figure here, but it's the portrayal of the Nazi dictator by Bruno Ganz that really strikes me. Unfortunately I don't speak German, and anyway my copy came bizarrely with some sort of Slavic audio track, but in any case it's subtitled so I just switched the sound off, but commentators remark upon Ganz's voice and accent being uncannily, even eerily close to that of the Fuhrer himself. Nevertheless, even without sound the man can still convey the passions, insanity, anger and refusal to admit defeat or take responsibility that make you see him not as Bruno Ganz, actor, but as the feared and hated leader of the Third Reich.

As the movie revolves around Hitler's final hours, there are no get-out clauses, like speeches to the masses from Nuremberg, where video footage can be studied and any actor worth his salt could competently duplicate Hitler's mannerisms and movements. In taking on the role of Hitler, Ganz has accepted that he must deliver a performance of a man who is broken, bitter and defeated, but determined to go down in a blaze of glory, to cheat his enemies of the final victory of displaying his dead body for all to see. He shows us the narccisism of the man, the blind faith in his own ability and his rage against everyone who is seen to have let him down. We see virtual spittle fly from his mouth and his eyes crease up like a mental patient's as he lets loose a tirade of abuse on those he considers traitors, weak and disloyal. We see his body shake with apoplexy and his fists bunch in rage, slam down on tables and desks, and we see too his advancing Parkinson's begin to take hold: Hitler walks shakily, bent over, his hand trembling uncontrollably as he hides it behind his back.

Adolf Hitler could never be seen as a sympathetic figure, nor should he be, but here Ganz makes his into a more tragic, almost pitiable man than a monster, while still showing that the rages he can fly into and the cold calmness with which he orders executions, or commands men to stay and fight to the death in a lost cause, marked him as a dangerous lunatic. For years, that dangerous lunatic was the most powerful man in Europe, and his long dark shadow fell across most of the world as it struggled to get out from beneath it, and fight its way back to the sunlight. Ganz also (although this must really be credited to the writer and director) avoids portraying Hitler as a parody, a cartoon, a black villain (though he was), by endeavouring to show some of the more human traits of the man who almost destroyed the world. He loves his dog, he loves his wife. He sits with his nephews and nieces on his knee. He thanks Frau Junge for her help as he goes to commit suicide.

Such human traits are needed, because otherwise Hitler is a two-dimensional figure, and no matter how evil a person is there is always some spark of humanity within them somewhere; perhaps they are kind to their mother, or like animals, or give to charities. Nobody is one hundred percent evil, and to present them as such would be too easy, too banal. Look for the good in anyone and you'll find it; it may be a tiny spark but you will find it. But Ganz and Hirschfield are careful not to allow Hitler's few small redemptive qualities to outshine his innate brutality. Even as we see that he loves Eva Braun, he tenderly rejects her pleas for clemency for her brother-in-law and tells her kindly that all traitors must die. When she, tears shining in her eyes, looking for mercy in the face of her soon-to-be husband that is not there, asks why, at this late point in the war, when all is lost, he must pronounce such a doom on her brother-in-law, he snarls "It is my wish!" revealing the truth behind Adolf Hitler: that he cares nothing for anyone, and all who oppose him must die, even if it is almost too late to exact that vengeance, even if the vengeance itself will serve no purpose.

Looking at Ganz, it's sometimes hard to separate actor from historical figure, and you feel at times that you've somehow gone back in time, and are watching the final days of Adolf Hitler as they unfold in the bunker below Berlin. The fact that the movie is shot entirely in monochrome adds to that feeling of being back in 1945. It must have been hard for Bruno Ganz to have taken on the role of such a figure in Germany: pilloried, hated and despised by so many and yet there are those who secretly hope to bring back the ideals he espoused, and so it was important that the film not be seen as glorifying Hitler in any way. It was important that though he be seen as a tragic figure there be no sympathy for him, no understanding, no attempt at redemption. History must also be reported as it happened; no revisionism. Those who committed unspeakable acts must face them in the film, not pretend they did not do what history proves they did. Even at the end, Hitler's one comfort is that he cleansed Germany of so many Jews. He has no regret on that score, believing he did the right thing.

German director Wim Wenders is on record as accusing the film of trivialising the role Hitler played in World War II and of glorifying him. I don't see it. There's nothing here that makes me feel "this was a misunderstood genius", or even makes me feel sorry for him. Uppermost in your mind all the time is the knowledge of what he has done, what has been perpetrated at his hands, and that's something that there will never be any understanding of, nor forgiveness for. I personally think Ganz is far and away the best Adolf Hitler I have ever seen on film.

Alexandra Maria Lara as Traudl Junge

When the film opens, the aged Frau Junge is relating her experiences in the service of Hitler, and lamenting that she was so taken in by his charisma, as were so many millions of Germans. Initially we see her delighted to get the job as his personal secretary, but as the war begins to turn against Germany and defeat seems inevitable, she operates in the film almost as a disconnected spirit, an observer watching the fall of the man she had considered to be the greatest German ever, and she sees too the way his people react, now that he has been proven to be fallible. Many turn against him, though in private, like Himmler trying to sue for peace and Goerring wishing to take over in Hitler's stead; many desert him, while the more loyal or stubborn refuse to surrender. Some, like Goebbels and his wife, decide suicide is the only path remaining to them, while Eva Braun, infatuated with him and it would seem perhaps fascinated by death, is happy to die with him.

She sees how the great Nazi empire was really held together by the almost supernatural strength of this man's charisma and will, and that when it is clear that he is losing his grip, and the war has trurned against him, his empire begins to fragment as people lose faith in him and try to save their own skins. Hitler's fantasy orders, commanding armies that are not there into battle, thinking he will be able to spring a surprise attack on the Russians and trap them, and thus win the war, show everyone that he has lost touch with reality, and they can no longer depend on him. Frau Junge is torn as she watches the man she respected fall apart, and as the full horror of what he has done begins to become apparent she wonders what is to become of her.

She watches Eva Braun dance and party as if nothing is wrong, wilfully refusing to accept reality, witnesses firsthand the cold determination of Magda Goebbels, who reasons that her children cannot survive in a world without the Nazi party and Hitler, and hears, as does everyone else, the slow disintegration of the mind of her Fuhrer and he slips deeper and deeper into a fantasy in which he expects still to turn the tide of the war.

In ways, Trudl Junge represents all the idealistic, starstruck young women, and men, who followed Hitler into perdition, believing everything he said and trusting totally in his ability to lead them back to glory. She realises much later how wrong she was, as she relates in the film's closing minutes seeing the grave of a young German woman who was the same age as her, executed by the Nazis in the same month she signed on as Hitler's secretary. As she shakes her head and her eyes mist, her final words, indeed, the final words of the film, hang heavy in the air: "Youth is no excuse."

Why do I love this movie?

I absolutely did not expect to, and so it took me by complete surprise that it affected me as it did. I have never seen, nor do I think I ever will see, a more faithful and chilling portrayal of Hitler on the screen. The movie also shys away from explaining what Hitler was about, trying to see things through his eyes or even trying to excuse or justify what he did. It also similarly avoids the easy-to-fall-into trap of damning him, creating a two-dimensional, caricature of ridicule and disgust. "Downfall" certainly shows the Fuhrer's madness, and no apologies are offered for what he did, but the crowning achievement I believe of the movie is that it's told through the eyes of an ordinary German girl; not a rabid Nazi, but someone who truly believed Hitler would be Germany's salvation, and who realises all too late that she has placed her faith in a madman, that she has, for the last three years, served a tyrant and a despot, and that he cares less about his people than an abuser of animals cares about his pets.

It's her realisation, tearful and horrified, as the film unfolds, that she has been party to such horrors, even if they were unknown to her, that shocks and revolts her, and in many ways she is a surrogate and metaphor for the entire German people, who were prepared to in some cases wilfully and in others blindly ignore all that was perpetrated in their name. The film newsreels of the people of Auschwitz being taken to see what had been taking place there is harrowing, but scarier yet is the look on some --- not all --- of the faces of these ordinary Germans. That looks says, without words, "so what?"

And it is this deep, ingrained belief in their own superiority and hatred of jews that sadly ensures that though Hitler is now just ashes, like his dream of empire, a thousand-year reich that lasted barely ten in all, Nazism and fascism is still with us today, and probably always will be.

For some people, history will always repeat itself, as they refuse to learn from it.
A very sad truth about we stupid humans.

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Unknown Soldier

Not only is this your best ever review but it's probably one of the best reviews if not the best that I've ever seen on MB. I love Downfall and I've always loved Bruno Ganz as well. Downfall is a viewing experience and as a film it captures the last moments of fanatics torn between duty and fanatical delusions and does it more intensely than any other film that comes to mind. For example there are scenes where Hitler is raging like a madman and believing relief for Berlin is just around the corner and in the next room Nazis are committing suicide at the same time. As much as I like Bruno Ganz I thought the actor that played Goebbels was the best actor on show.

Bruno Ganz's performance was amazing considering that he is better known in playing sensitive and charming roles whilst always being fairly modest. He is one of the great European actors of his generation without a doubt and his performance as Hitler was completely against type. If you haven't seen him in The American Friend, Norsferatu, In the White City and Wings of Desire then I suggest you do so.

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Metal Wars

Power Metal

Pounding Decibels- A Hard and Heavy History

Trollheart

Wow! What can I say? I'm floored by that comment man, even if it's probably over-generous. I loved this movie and I know the review is long, but I felt it had to be, in order to get across how much it affected me. I think it's probably one of my alltime favourite films, and should definitely be seen by everyone. Should be shown in schools really.

Thanks again for the huge compliment! Makes it all worthwhile!

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Trollheart

1.5 "Here's looking at you"

Worried that his father has not got a hobby and just spends all his time watching TV, Frasier buys him a telescope, however he starts using it to communicate with a woman in the opposite building who also has a telescope. Through a series of written notes held in front of the telescopes they get to know each other. The woman's name is Irene and Martin is very taken with her. Frasier decides it's time they met, and gives Irene Martin's phone number. Surprisingly though, after talking to her and seeming to hit it off with her, he turns down her offer to meet, and neither Daphne nor Frasier can understand why.

Niles calls by with Maris's Aunt Patrice, who takes an instant shine to Martin. Luckily they get rid of her, amd Martin reveals that he is still trying to come to terms with the loss of his wife, but Daphne is wise to him, and tells him she believes it's more that he's self-conscious about his game leg and having to walk with a cane. He eventually realises how silly he's being and decides to go on the date.

QUOTES

Niles: "Oh, who knows why anyone does anything?"
Frasier: "Remind me again what you do for a living? I mean, it was one phone call. Who can make a sound judgement about someone on the basis of one phone call?"
Niles: "Remind me again what you do for a living?"

Niles: "The least you can do is say hello to Maris's Aunt Patrice."
Frasier: "I'm not driving all the way over to your apartment."
Niles: "You don't have to: she's outside in the car."
Frasier: "You left her in the car?"
Niles: "I cracked open a window."
Frasier: "Ah, well then she'll be fine."

EGGHEAD

It's through his perceived superiority to other people that Frasier most often annoys people, puts his foot in it and makes faux pas (I don't know what the plural is, it's French and ends in X!). Here I'll be detailing when these things occur.

Frasier is taking a call, the caller says his mother literally hangs around the place all day. Frasier tells him that she could not do that, not literally. He says "I'm sorry but it's a pet peeve of mine when people use literally when they mean figuratively." When he then advises his caller to continue with his problem he gets this response: "Do you mind if I tell you my pet peeve? I hate it when intellectual pinheads with superiority complexes nitpick your grammar when you come looking for help. That's what I got a problem with!" and hangs up. Showing how little he understands how annoying he is being, Frasier tells his audience, "I'm sure he meant to say, that is a thing with which he has a problem!"

AND ISN'T THAT...?

Doug is voiced by Jeff Daniels

FAMILY

DAPHNE

Here we see that Daphne is more than just a care worker, looking after Martin. She has become a sort of perhaps not surrogate wife and certainly not sister, but a friend to him who tries to make him feel better about himself. You could say it's all part of his therapy and therefore her job, but then later on they have quite heated arguements, so it's more a friendship thing. He sees her as an ally against Frasier when sides have to be taken; Daphne knows Frasier pays her wages but has no time for his smug superiority and like Roz can deflate him with a sharp word. Having grown up in a house full of boys she knows how to handle herself around men. Here she works out what Martin's problem with Irene is, and through her charm and common sense makes him feel he's making too much of his disability, and thus helps him on his way towards perhaps romance.

Of course, at times Daphne will team up with Frasier against Martin, but almost always only when they are trying to convince him to do something that is good for him, as here, when she and Frasier both tug at his heartstrings about how lonely Irene must be. In the end, they all want what's best for the old man, even if he himself doesn't know it.

1.6 "The crucible"

Frasier is delighted that he has been able to acquire a painting by Seattle's premiere artist, Martha Paxton, and even more ecstatic when the artist, hearing on Frasier's show that he bought one of her paintings and the effect he says it has on him, "uplifting his soul", that she calls in and agrees to attend a little soiree he is putting together. Frasier is a bundle of nerves at the reception, but things do not go as planned when the artist arrives and takes one look at the painting, sneering that it is not an original. Frasier is scandalised, embarrassed and eventually, after everyone has left and his humiliation complete and public, angry that he has been taken by an unscrupulous art dealer. He determines to get his money back but the dealer tells him that's life; there's nothing he can do and no way Frasier can force him to refund him his money.

He determines to go to the police, but his father's bluff advice is not heeded and he makes a further fool of himself. Though his father tells him just to get used to it, life isn't always fair, Frasier wants to get the guy back and so he goes to the gallery with the intention of throwing a brick through the window. Niles however goes to stop him, but ends up losing it and smashing the window himself when he remembers an embarrassing incident from his school days.

QUOTES

Frasier (of the painting): "Well enjoy it while you can, because first thing in the morning this thing is going back to the art dealer I bought it from, going to demand my money back."
Martin: "Frasier, you're a little upset about this. Maybe I should return it for you."
Frasier: "Thanks dad, but really, what do you know about the art world?"
Martin: "Apparently, about as much as you do!"

Martin: "You can let it eat a hole in your stomach or you can file it away under the heading sometimes life sucks!"
Frasier: "Yeah, well, that file's getting pretty thick!"

Frasier: "I'm going to phone the police! Dad, who do I ask for?"
Martin: "Have them put you through to the Fine Arts Forgeries Department!"

FAMILY

MARIS
Little by little, we're learning about Niles' reclusive socialite (if that's not a contradiction in terms) wife, who he has brought to the reception Frasier is throwing, but has "tired easily under the pressure to be interesting" and has fallen asleep under the guests' coats! As the series goes on many more references will be made towards Maris' fragility and slightness, leaving us with a picture of a woman so frail and delicate that she surely is not actually there. We will, however, never get to test that premise as she will never be shown onscreen, only referred to.

MARTIN
This is the first time Roz visits Frasier's apartment --- "Is it everything you imagined it would be?" he asks smugly, to which she quips "Well you know Frasier, I don't spend my time idly wondering what your apartment looks like. But I did imagine a lot of beige." She looks around, grins. "Oh look! I was right!" --- and the first time she meets Martin. The two hit it off right away, and a strong friendship is forged when Martin realises she is nothing like his son, and she that the father is nothing like Frasier, not at all what she had expected.

NILES
From the moment he clapped eyes on Daphne Niles has been helplessly, head-over-heels in love. Just one problem: he's married. Oh, two: he doesn't know if his feelings --- which he can't voice --- are reciprocated. Here we see him relish the chance to be near her again. True, he's there like any other snob to meet the artist, and true, he must secretly love it when Frasier's evening comes crashing down about his ears, but he's mostly there to be around the object of his infatuation. He goes into the kitchen and lingers over the heavenly sight of Daphne bending down as she removes something from the oven, he smells her hair --- a practice he will continue; he almost gets caught here but gets away with it --- and later when Daphne is helping him look for an alleged ring that Maris is supposed to have lost, the two emerge from the bedroom looking a little flustered. Niles replies to Frasier's demand for an explanation --- as Daphne does up her blouse --- that she was good enough to crawl under the bed looking while he... at which point Frasier asks archly "Yes?"

DAPHNE
Again we're party to Daphne's supposed psychic ability, and yet there seems to be something to it. When Niles gives her, at her request, the matching earring so she can try to get some psychic impression off it, she says "Yes, it's in your father's room. No, now it's in the bathroom. This is odd! Now it's in the hallway!" A moment later, Eddie appears and it's all too clear what has happened to the earring, also where the dog has just been!

AND ISN'T THAT...?

Gary, the man who wants to buy a sump pump rather than take his wife on holiday to Italy, is voiced by comedian Robert Klein

EGGHEAD

Frasier is so pompous and has such an exaggerated sense of his own pride that Martin has to explain to him that the police don't have time for chasing art forgers: they're much too busy with real crimes. But Frasier in some senses is something of a little boy, unable to believe that the world is so unfair and that he cannot correct the error he has made, nor make the man responsible for hoodwinking him pay. When he goes to see the gallery owner, and he is told flat out that he's not getting his money back, he is stunned into inaction: he simply can't deal with this kind of offhand callous treatment. You would think that as a psychiatrist --- not to mention a man in his forties --- he would have learned the basic lesson of the world, that you can't always get what you want and that life is not fair.

1.7 "Call me irresponsible"

Frasier takes a call from a guy called Marco, and when he realises the guy is not prepared to commit, that he admits he wants to "wait in case someone better comes along", advises him to terminate the relationship. Martin and Daphne are constructing a Christmas scene, even though it's only October: they want to take the photograph that will go on this year's Christmas card to their friends. When Marco's now ex-girlfriend, Catherine, comes to berate him for pushing the breakup he ends up going out with her. Niles is however aghast, saying that Frasier is breaking his ethical code: Marco was technically his patient and he's now dating his patient's girlfriend.

Things go from bad to worse as Marco returns to the air, annoyed that since he broke up with Catherine she is now going out with someone else. Frasier is shocked, and probably a little uneasy, to find that he's being stalked. Marco wants to get back with Catherine but Frasier counsels him against it, a point Niles picks up on when he gives him a lift from work. He challenges him to listen to his stomach: back when they were kids, any time Frasier got anywhere near a breach of his ethics he would feel sick, often throwing up. Of course Frasier scoffs but now the idea has been put in his head and things begin to take their course. When he tries to make love to Catherine he starts feeling sick. Try as he might, he can't shake the feeling, and when Catherine hears that he can't get intimate with her without getting sick, well, how do you think she feels?

The relationship is of course doomed, killed stone dead you could say by Niles but really it's Frasier's own lofty sense of ethics and his professional pride that have put him in this position. Which means, as far as Catherine is concerned, he won't be getting in any of them with her!

FAMILY

DAPHNE incorporating GRAMMY MOON
A character who we will never see (assume she's dead by now) but who has obviously been a huge influence on Daphne's life is her grandmother, affectionately known as Grammy Moon. We hear the first of her pearls of wisdom here, as Daphne tells the tale of how Grammy refused to believe her husband had died, as he used to sleep like the dead. When he did die, she just kept saying "He's napping, he's napping!"

DAPHNE (alone)
Interesting to note that even after this short time (seven episodes, not sure how long: maybe a year, less probably as this is their first Christmas card to feature her) Daphne has already become so much a part of the Crane family that there is absolutely no objection to her being in the family Christmas photo, nor does anyone even think of raising such. She may as well have always lived with them, she's so integrated into the unit now.

NILES
While Frasier reacts to breaches of his ethics via his stomach, it seems Niles too has a "failsafe system" hardwired into his persona. When he attempts to cross that line, he starts getting a nosebleed. Considering how many weird foibles will be uncovered concerning the younger Crane brother, this little idiosyncrasy will end up seeming almost trivial.

EDDIE
So much more than just a dog, Eddie was Martin's only companion when he lived alone, and though Frasier tried to prevent his moving in Martin would not hear of it, and now the dog is as much a part of the apartment as Daphne is. Like all the characters, he has his own little peculiarities too, the most annoying to Frasier of which we have seen, that he stares at the psychiatrist, which unnerves Frasier. Here we see that Martin tends to dress him up for the holidays, sticking a pair of false antlers on his head, and also that he thinks nothing of the dog drinkign out of the toilet, when he remarks "Oh, he's just in the bathroom getting a drink."

QUOTES

Frasier, walking in as Martin and Daphne are singing Christmas carols, with the apartment done up like it is Christmas: "Excuse me: exactly how long have I been asleep?"

Frasier: "My producer tells me you want an autograph. Who should I make it out to?"
Catherine: "You disgust me, you parasitic fraud!"
Frasier: "Well, it's certainly different than the usual "best regards"!"

Catherine: "Are you telling me that the thought of making love to me makes you sick to your stomach?"
Frasier: "Yes, but don't take it personally."

Catherine: "Oh! To think I was going to have sex with you! And it was going to be hot! Oh like you've never had before! We're talking steamy, sweat dripping down your back, neighbours pounding on the walls, illegal in forty-eight states sex!"

Frasier: "How I envy you Eddie! The biggest questions you face are who's going to walk me? Who's going to feed me? I won't face that sort of joy for another forty years!"

AND ISN'T THAT...?

Bruno Kirby voices Marco
BUT
more importantly, Hank, whose only real contribution was to get cut off because he was on a seven-second delay and kept saying "Hello? Can you hear me?" is voiced by ... ta-ta-t-a-tahhhh! EDDIE VAN HALEN! Yeah, THE Eddie Van Halen! Score!

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Trollheart

Almost nothing in this journal comes from this year, and there's a reason for that. I usually have to go through at least a season, sometimes a whole series of a programme before I can review it, as I don't like to leave loose ends untied, particularly ones which may never be explained if the series does not get renewed and ends on a cliffhanger. So by design I've only chosen to feature series that have completed their run, or are so popular that they're unlikely to be cancelled. This, however, breaks the mould. It's called "The Returned", actual title "Les Revenants", and it only broadcast on Channel 4 here a few short months ago. I want to write about it now, so soon after watching it, for two reasons: I haven't been able to download it anywhere and I want to write it up while it's fresh in my mind, and also still available on my Sky Box.

I started watching this last week, following my usual habit of recording all the episodes and then watching them one by one, and have now finished it. To my both annoyance and delight it ended in a cliffhanger that promises a second season, and because it's got nothing to do with the fickle US TV networks I'm confident it will get that second season. It's a French drama, a supernatural mystery which runs over eight episodes in its first season, and which, slowly and tantalisingly, begins to knot together what at first appeared to be separate threads into a pretty stunning whole. The relationships between people, many previously unsuspected, are revealed and the story takes on so much more character and while smaller, internal mysteries are solved, or at least we understand them more, the main, overarching mystery remains.

The basic story is this: people who have been dead are coming back to life. No, not in a zombie "Day of the dead" or even "The Walking Dead" way. These are people who have perished in different ways and at different times, and who are now back, and nobody, least of all them, knows why, or how this has happened. Some look upon it, understandably, as a miracle while others are convinced it is a curse upon the village. As the series progresses we find that some of them have their own strange story, and that indeed some of them --- most of them, in fact --- have a darker design on the world. There are things hinted at, shown and revealed while so much more is left shrouded in mystery.

The almost ordinary setting for this series gives it both a terrifying feeling of "this could happen anywhere" and also an somehow satisfyingly grounded feel. This is not Buffy, or the aforementioned zombie show. It's not even Lost. It's just an ordinary tale that is far from ordinary, set in a French village which seems on the surface typical and boring but which hides its own dark secret, much of which is hinted at throughout the eight episodes. It's a story of families coming to terms with loved ones returning, whom they have grieved for and now have to face being alive again without knowing why, and of the other families, jealous that those who have passed away in their lives have not seemingly been granted the same choice. It's a story of faith, and fear, and the Unknown. And a story of love. And hate. And death.

It is of course all in French but there are decently-placed subtitles that never fade into the background as they can sometimes, making them hard to read. But because it is subtitled, you have to watch every frame. You can't really take your mind off the screen for one second, or if you do, you need to be in a position to be able to rewind and find out what they said. Because the language is, to me, foreign and I can't speak it, I can't just listen. I have to read everything that happens in order to keep up with the storyline and the developments.

"The Returned" also features some of the most haunting and spooky ambient music from Mogwai, whom I had never heard before, but on the strength of what I hear here I want to experience more. The actors and actresses will be unknown to anyone who is not familiar with French drama, and are perhaps unknown even there. Or they could be mega-stars in their own country, I don't know, but it's no surprise for me to tell you that I don't know a single one of them. It doesn't matter a bit. Each one is great in his or her part, and contributes to the storyline in their own way. Each episode focusses, mostly, on the story of one character, often stepping back through time to show us how he or she died, or their life leading up to whatever killed them, all of which helps to flesh out the main plot and link all the main characters together.

I won't list cast here as as I say above, most if not all of them will be unknown outside of France, but that doesn't mean they're not great at what they do. I will instead just talk about each character as they step forward to tell their tale as the episodes unfold. Be warned though: as I have already mentioned, though this is a mystery, and a supernatural one at that, for the moment at any rate there is no solution or answer to why this is happening, or even how, as the final episode leaves more questions unresolved than it answers, raising even more in the end.

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Season One, Episode Four

"The high price"

James is disappointed to see how few Irish emigrants Baines has returned with, but once again Callon has beaten him to the punch and stolen all his trade. However there are now enough barrels to merit a voyage back to Lisbon, and James rubs his hands both at the prospect of returning to sea and, more importantly, the profit he can make. Anne is concerned that her father seems to have more money than he should, and wonders where it's coming from? James is more concerned with acquiring a warehouse, and sets about talking to the owner of one in which a sweat shop rag and bone operation is being run. He learns that the owner died but that his wife, a Mrs. Arkwright, retains possession of the premises. She is a French lady, quite well-to-do and intrigued by James's letter begging an audience.

Elizabeth and Fogarty are having dinner, and it seems obvious from their somewhat hushed conversation that Elizabeth suspects she is now expecting, though it later becomes clear her husband-to-be does not. The arrival of Frazer to their table does nothing to lessen the atmosphere of tension, and the cutting remarks of the shipbuilder's son on the news that they are to be wed can only be interpreted as sarcasm hidden in humour. Fogarty admits he is due to set sail within the next day, music to Albert's ears. Sarah is awaiting the birth of her first child and has taken to her bed, where Elizabeth begins making tentative enquiries from her into what it is like to be pregnant, much to Sarah's surprise and dismay.

James and Robert go to see Mrs Arkwright, and Robert is dispatched to see what information about her mistress he can get from the servant, Miss Simmons, who takes an instant shine to him. Mrs Arkwright is asking for a specific sum for the warehouse, and James is eager to know why that exact figure. Meanwhile, Robert's first child, a boy, is born, and the Onedins celebrate the latest addition to the family. James prevails upon Robert to meet again with Miss Simmons, who unfortunately takes his attentions as being romantic and when he gets the information he needs she is crushed to find out that he is married, and has no interest in her, romantic or otherwise. It's also doubly awkward when it is Callon, who has shadowed Robert to his meeting, who breaks the news to the lady.

What emerges from the conversation is that Mrs Arkwright hates being in England, and wants to return to France. This is why she needs the particular sum she is asking for the sale of the warehouse. James now has a bargaining chip he can use. Elizabeth sees Daniel off at the dock, playing the very role she swore she would not act. She tries to tell him about the baby before he leaves but he is distracted by his preparations and has to leave before she can break the news. James tries to get his brother to sit on the board of his new holding company, and though he is reluctant it is in fact Sarah who counsels him to listen to James, seeing a better deal for her husband than James has so far offered. She also sees the future being laid down for her newborn son. Robert gets the nod from his wife, and agrees.

Anne goes to the sweat shop and discovers that some of the items there are stolen, which gives them another bargaining chip. Unfortunately Callon has been at it again, trumping his offer. James tells Mrs Arkwright though that the offer is worthless, dependant as it is on a contract being drawn up. He tells her of the history between the two men, and explains that this is just a ploy to thwart James's efforts to buy the warehouse. His offer is lower, but includes the purchase of a house in France and free passage there for the lady.When the offer is accepted, all James has to do is get rid of the sweat shop, which he does through a combination of threats and inducements. When they get home they find that Anne's father has been borrowing money from Callon, set against the house, which is now to be repossessed as he cannot afford to pay the money back. With no alternative left, Anne and James must now move into their new warehouse, letting it double as their temporary home.

But James has his warehouse...

FAMILY
ELIZABETH
More than anyone, other than James, in the series it is the Onedin sister around whom most of the drama and controversy will centre. Here, she has realised, or suspects, that after her night of passion with Daniel Fogarty on the ship she is now pregnant, and she is afraid. Afraid in two ways: one, that she has never been pregnant before and does not know how to cope with it, and has no-one to confide in about it, and two, that she now seems destined, forced by an unforgiving society to marry Fogarty, for an unwed mother in the nineteenth century is nothing but a symbol of scandal and shame. She may not want to marry Daniel, but if she is indeed pregnant, this may be the only choice left open to her.

ROBERT
Here we see that despite Robert being the head of the house, it is Sarah who really rules the roost. When James offers him a seat on an as-yet-non-existent board of directors, it is Sarah who convinces --- almost orders --- him to accept. Yes, James is a huckster and a rogue, and many of his schemes have and will go belly-up, some literally. But the lure of having her husband rise up through society as a company director is too much for her to resist, and as we will see later in the series, she pushes Robert further in his, or, vicariously, her own, ambition.

CALLON
As we have seen, ever since James humiliated him with Senor Braganza and stole the contract, which he had assumed was his by right, out from under him, Callon has been doing everything he can to thwart his rival and put obstacles in his way. From flooding the quays with empty barrels to try and overwhelm him to trumping his offer on the warehouse. He has of course no intention of buying the warehouse --- he has more than enough of those --- but is prepared to put in a higher bid just to stop James getting his hands on it. He also spots Robert talking to Miss Simmons and follows them to the tea house, embarrassing the older Onedin brother by talking about his wife and newborn son, and trying to scandalise Robert, who is expectedly flustered by the encounter. It also serves as a warning to James, that Callon knows what he's up to.

CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY
The fact that her husband died and left her with stakes she knows little or nothing about in businesses she cares less for is shown very clearly when Mrs Arkwright, on learning James's trade is in shipping, remarks, "I have no such interests ... so far as I am aware." For all she knows (or cares) she could own a shipping company, could have been left one, or a share in one, by her late husband, but as a well-bred woman of the nineteenth century she does not concern herself with such things, and leaves matters of this kind in the hands of her lawyers.

James convinces Robert to setup a holding company with him, and sit on the board of directors. He promises Robert a percentage of the profits, without any need for his brother to outlay money, and Sarah, liking the idea of her husband being a company director, gives the venture her blessing, essentially allowing him to accept the offer. Of course, the cogs are always turning in James's sharp mind, and no doubt he has some other plans for Robert. But this at least limits his personal liability to creditors.

When we see the workers in the sweat shop they are a ragged lot, pitiful wretches eking out the barest existence under the baleful eye of their harsh taskmistress, but their plight touches James not one bit: all he is concerned with is getting the warehouse. In truth, he almost has more in common with Mrs Gamble, the head of the shop, in that they are of like mind and understand one another. He also cares little for Miss Simmons, who, under Robert's probing at James's behest, yielded up the valuable information that allowed James to put forward a proposal to buy the warehouse at a price he could afford.

When Mrs Arkwright finds out that she has been, as she sees it, betrayed, she dismisses the woman and despite James's grudging agreement to Robert's plea to ensure she is looked after once her mistress is departed, she ends up working at the sweat shop, a situation that shocks and scandalises Robert, but which means nothing to James. He said he would find her a position, he grins, and he has. It means nothing to him that without this woman's help they might not have been able to find a way around Mrs Arkwright's higher asking price, and less that she has now lost her position because of it. He feels no sense of responsibility or duty to her, unlike Robert, who not only deplores the fact that James has not lifted a finger to help her, despite Robert's insistence, but also now feels that his word has been broken, word he gave to Miss Simmons that he would ensure she was taken care of.

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1.5 "Friends of St. James"

Attending with bad grace his school reunion Alan runs into someone he has not seen in years, but seems to have somehow become the president --- for life! --- of one of the tiny islands in the Caribbean. When Lance presses Alan for help in financing the islands "special tobacco crop", the Tory is unimpressed. But Lance gives him a sample of this "special tobacco" and Alan, high as a kite, signs a cheque. After delivering a rather interesting keynote speech he goes to see Norman, who confirms that Lance is shown as being president for life of the Republic of St. James. When he hears that they have no banks there though Norman is very excited and sees an opportunity to make a killing. He tells Alan that if he were to start up a bank there, get enough investors to deposit enough money on the back of offers such as high interest, no tax and total confidentiality, they can close the bank and pocket all the profits.

When he gets back to Westminister B'Stard sets about putting the plan into motion. Soon he has enough greedy politicians desperate to avail of his new bank and they are on their way. B'Stard charters a clapped-out old Dakota and they make a flight to the island, however as they approach they run into a hitch. The airport is closed for harvest. B'Stard can't understand it, and called up to the cockpit he tells them that he has permission from the president to visit, but the air traffic controller tells him that the president is deaf, dumb and blind, and the man he spoke to at the reunion is the president's grandson, and he is known for pulling scams. Having to come up with a rescue plan on the fly, B'Stard recruits the flight crew into going along with him as he stages a hijack which he "foils" by pretending to overpower the hijackers over the intercom where no-one but the crew can see.

With the story now that B'Stard has saved the plane but the terrorists took the money with them, Alan's reputation is secure and nobody blames him. They turn and head home.

QUOTES
B'Stard's keynote address at the school (under the influence of the special tobacco) "Why have I got the largest majority in the House of Commons? Easy: because I got more votes than anyone else. They all put their little crosses in my box. Pathetic really isn't it, the amount of people who can't spell their own names? That's why we need schools like this: to keep us away from them, to stop them dragging us down to their level. So don't talk to me about the "education crisis"! Look around you at this beautiful school! There's nothing wrong with the education system that £2500 a term can't put right!

Ditto the so-called housing shortage! There are thousands of empty houses if you know where to look: the Algarve is empty six months of the year! That's what this country needs, you see: radical ideas, shooting straight from the hip!

Which brings us on to the health service. I mean, we hear an awful lot of lefty whinging about the NHS waiting lists. Well, the answer is simple: shut down the health service. Result, no more waiting lists! You see, in the good old days, you were poor, you got sick and you died. And yet these people seem to think they have some God-given right to be cured! And what is the result of this sloppy socialist thinking? More poor people! In contrast to my policy which would eliminate poor people, thereby eliminating poverty. And they say that we Conservatives have no heart!"

Catchpole: "Twenty-five percent interest? Is there any possibility of their opening a branch in my constituency?"
B'Stard: "Mister Catchpole, the trees don't have branches in your constituency!"

Captain Hirsch: "Our motto is service with a smile. That's why so many famous people have flown Caribbean International: Buddy Holly, Otis Redding, Jim Reeves, Glenn Miller..."

Hirsch again: "Boy I've met some tough bastards in Nam but he ain't got nothin' on them!"

MACHINATIONS
The plans get bigger and more complex, as Alan and Norman plan to defraud B'Stard's colleagues out of their money by setting up and then unexpectedly sending into bankruptcy a dummy bank. There's one phrase Norman uses that convinces Alan it's worth going ahead with: "We could make millions!"

THE USER AND THE USED
This time out it's the whole House of Commons --- or as many as could get into the investment meeting anyway --- that B'Stard uses, playing on their innate greed and the fact that none of them will bother checking into the credentials of the bank, see that it has only just been set up today. There's no sympathy for these people; they're all corrupt and greedy and the fact that they lose their money --- and that B'Stard gains nothing from the enterprise, though to be fair he could have been in a lot of trouble had it not been for his "brilliant plan" --- adds the icing to this particular cake. For once, it's a win-win for the viewer.

SIDEKICK
Piers is back! Yay! Although he doesn't have too much to do in the episode, only coming into it when they're on the plane, on the way to St. James. He is however blamed by Alan for losing the members' investments, but when he complains that he's not the treasurer of the committee, only the secretary, B'Stard promotes him on the spot, in order to have him take the blame! Alan also needles him about his fiancee, saying that he has slept with her whereas Piers has yet to.

WHAT IS LOVE?
While in the House, Alan gets a call from a young lady who he is making an assignation with. Her name is not mentioned, but the words "olive oil" and "block and tackle" are...

PIERS
Alan tells Piers that in all likelihood he will be thrown off the plane when the investors realise they've lost all their money, and Piers wails that he has never even be physically intimate with his fiancee, to which Alan replies that he has, and Piers isn't missing much! This kind of copperfastens the idea that Piers is not quite on physical terms with his fiancee, borne out by his comment in "Sex is wrong", two episodes back. When Sir Stephen reads out the title of Lady Virginia's pamphlet, Piers pipes up with "That's what my fiancee is always saying!" Mind you, later on we will discover that this in in fact far from the truth, though in fairness the fiancee presented in season two's "May the best man win" may be a different person to the one he's describing here.

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1.1 "Space pilot 3000"

Fry is a pizza delivery boy, working on New Year's Eve 1999. He's not happy with his lot. Who would be? As he heads out to a delivery he comes across his girlfriend in a taxi, who says she is leaving him. Even more disconsolate, his mood is not improved when he arrives at his destination and it is deserted, and he realises he has been played. Philosophically, with midnight approaching he stays where he is, which is the cryogenics centre, and through a bizarre series of circumstances falls into one of the cryo-chambers, set for 1000 years. He awakes in the year 3000, to find he is alone in a strange new world of which he knows nothing.

Taken to his career assignment officer, a one-eyed sexy alien called Leela, he is dismayed both to find how long he has remained in the cryo tube (though he thinks it's a million, not a thousand years) and also that his assigned career is ... delivery boy! He can't believe it! He's in a totally new millennium, a thousand years in the future, and he's still a loser! He decides to go on the run, avoiding the implantation of his career chip, which will forever label him as only good for the job of delivery boy, and Leela pursues him. He gives her the slip and, having found out that he has one relative or descendant here in the future, decides to give Professor Hubert Farnsworth a call. Unfortunately for him, there are no phone booths in the thirty-first century, and what he enters is a Suicide Booth, where people go to, well, be killed. For twenty-five cents a time.

Here he meets a disgruntled robot called Bender, who tries to help him use the Suicide Booth, but they both back out at the last moment. Bender introduces himself and tells Fry that he wants to die because he is a bending unit, and has learned that the girders he bends for a living are being used to make these booths. Fry offers to get him a job with his nephew, and the two head off to find him. However before they can they are spotted by Leela, who has been tasked to return Fry for implantation. Bender suggests hiding in in the Head Museum, where the heads of famous people have been preserved along with their brains, so that they can talk and interact with people. But when the police officers she's called for backup start beating on Fry Leela steps in and they escape.

They make it into the sewers but Leela follows them. Fry gives in, but Leela, impressed by the young guy, instead removes her own chip. So they all go to see the professor. It turns out he's about ninety years old and somewhat the dodderer, but he does have one redeeming quality: a spaceship! They use it to flee from the police, and the professor then tells them he need a crew to fly the ship, which he uses as a delivery service to fund his wild experiments. Fry is a little less than happy to find that, after all he's been through, his destiny is, and always has been, to be a delivery boy! But hey, it's a big universe out there, and they'll be delivering to quite a lot of it. Anything could happen...

QUOTES
Fry, on awakening in the year 3000: "My god! It's the future! My parents, my co-workers, my girlfriend: I'll never see them again! (Pause) Yahoo!"

Leela: "You've been assigned the career you're best at, just like everyone else."
Fry: "What if I refuse?"
Leela: "Then you'll be fired."
Fry: "Okay then! I refuse!"
Leela: "Out of a cannon, into the sun!"

Farnsworth: "Are you three by any chance interested in becoming my new crew?"
Bender: "What happened to your old crew?"
Farnsworth: "Oh those poor, sons of ... er, that's not important right now!"

SIMPSONS REFERENCES
To be fair, there aren't that many, as Groening obviously wanted to make this show as different to his blockbuster success as possible, but they inevitably creep in from time to time, mostly in the first season. Here, as Fry hurtles through the transport tube we see the ocean wherein swims one of the three-eyed fish from the Simpsons episode in which Burns ran for governor.

PCRs
As you might expect in a show like Futurama, it's absolutely littered with clever in-jokes, comments on society, references to movies, TV shows, books and other media, and just a lot of sharp, witty observations. The spoken ones you'll get, but some of the more subtle, clever ones may pass you by as they are often gone in the blink of an eye. Here I'll do my best to point them all out.

A particularly clever one, glimpsed only for a moment, is a couple who walk by naked, but their private parts are covered by floating black bars, like the censoring bars popular on some TV shows. But these are real, and can I guess be seen as a fashion statement.

Bender drinks "Olde Fortran" malt liquor. This is appropriate, as he is a robot and Fortran is a computer programming language.

The pub they drink in is called O'Zorgnax's, which is hilarious, in that it shows clearly that it's owned or run by an alien, but there is obviusly some Irish ancestry there, tracing probably back to Old New York, and at the same time making the old but never boring joke about Irish people being drunks.

Leela's callsign is Officer 1BDI --- geddit? One beady eye! Yeah I know it's not a PCR really but I just think it's cool! It's also funny that she calls for backup, and the two officers, standing right behind her tell her they'll be there in five minutes!

THE HEAD MUSEUM
Guest stars became a staple of the Simpsons, though some would say that in the latter years they began to become more important than the storylines themselves (witness Kiefer Sutherland's first appearance and also that of Sarah Michelle Gellar), but how to do so in Futurama, where everyone you might ever know should be dead a thousand years? The answer is the Head Museum, where the heads of famous people are kept preserved for posterity. They still have life of a sort, and can talk, crack wise, rant and make jokes and observations. Many a guest star will show up in Futurama as a "head".

The first we meet is Leonard Nimoy, good old Spock himself, and as Bender and Fry try to blend in with the Heads to avoid detection, we also briefly see the Heads of Barbara Streisand and ... Matt Groening! Later we also see the Head of Dick Clark. Some are not the actual people voicing the heads, admittedly, and some play a more recurring role than others --- the Head of President Richard Nixon shows up several times, often in storylines --- as does that of Clinton and others.

BAD IDEAS?
You can see from the first episode that there were things intended to run through the show, catchphrases that for one reason or another ended up being dumped. Here we see two of these.

"You gotta do what you gotta do". This is a slogan Leela points to on the wall, a poster which essentially shows a not very happy worker giving a weak thumbs up, declaring that whether you enjoy your job or not you have to do it. This did not progress beyond the first episode.

"I am already in my pajamas!" Professor Farnsworth says this twice in the pilot, and it's pretty obvious that this was intended to be his catchphrase. It was quickly changed to "Good news everybody!", possibly because it was realised that having the professor permanently in PJs might be impractical to the storylines.

1.2 "The series has landed"

Each episode is preceded by a tagline which runs under the opening credits. As the series wound on and was threatened with, and eventually hit with cancellation, and then reborn, many of these poke sly digs at Fox, the channel that cancelled the series. I'll be referring to each tagline here, and if necessary commenting on or explaining it.

(Tagline: "In Hypno-Vision!" This will become more appropriate down the line, when we meet the Hypno-Toad)

In this episode we meet the remaining employees who work for Professor Farnsworth's company, which we learn is called Planet Express. First up is Hermes Conrad, a Jamaican bureaucrat who is the acountant, HR manager and general pen-pusher in the company. Next is Doctor John Zoidberg, whom everyone will end up just calling Zoidberg, an alien lobster-like being who serves as the company's medical officer, though he seems woefully inadequate to the task. He is also permanently poor, scavenging through bins for food and often acting more as a pet than a humanoid. We also meet Amy Wong, a young rich intern whose parents own half of Mars.

The first job for the Planet Express Ship is a delivery to the Moon, and though Fry is excited about this the others are not: they've been there plenty of times. In fact, they reach their destination in less time than it takes for Fry to do the takeoff countdown. He finds that the Moon has been turned into a huge amusement park, and it's as humdrum to the people of the 31st century as we find Butlins, or Bush Park, or Disneyland. As they prepare the freight for delivery, Amy fails to notice that she has dropped the keys to the ship into the crate. Their delivery made, their mistake unnoticed, they go to visit the park.

It's not how Fry imagined it though: commercialised, sanitised, Disneyfied. He learns that magnets mess up Bender's circuitry and make him start singing folk songs! Leela takes Fry on a trip onto the Moon's surface, to try to show him more of the Moon he remembers or knows of, while Bender and Amy are horrified to see the keys to the ship be tipped into one of the crane-arm machine games that are so frustrating. Amy squeals that Leela will kill her, but Bender grumps that she'll probably make him do it! Amy tries to win the keys while Fry, still not happy with being on the surface of the moon --- as it's another animated construct with the car on carefully-set guiderails --- takes the rover off the track and heads off across the real surface of the moon. Unfortunately he's never driven on the Moon before (something we could all admit to!) and he plunges the car into a crater. Leela has to rescue him by flying out with a jetpack that uses up their oxygen and leaves them in danger of dying on the Moon's surface, no way back to the park and little air left.

Back at Luna Park, Bender is thrown out of the place for trying to get the keys with his own robotic arms inside the machine, and storms off. Leela and Fry are lucky enough to run into a hydroponics farmer, who gives them shelter in return for working for him. He says till sunrise, which seems a fair deal to Fry until Leela points out that night lasts two weeks on the Moon. While they're working and waiting for the sun to come up, the farmer chases Bender out of his house with a shotgun! Bender has been a-messin' with his three robotic daughters! They rob the farmer's moon buggy but he jumps into the Crushinator, which is a huge bus-like vehicle, and follows them. However when they jump over a large crater the Crushinator refuses to go any further, saying "No paw! I love him!"

As night falls on the Moon and temperatures plummet to bone-freezing degrees, the trio come across the original landing craft from Apollo 11. Taking refuge inside it they wait out the night, but they don't have enough oxygen and don't see how they'll be able to survive. Just then, as Bender comes running, chased by the farmer again --- "You hadda come back for the Crushinator, didn't ya robot?" --- Amy appears with the ship, rescues Bender and takes the lunar lander up too; her experience with the crane at the amusement park has made her an accomplished pilot. The farmer stares in anger as they escape, and Bender suddenly feels the urge to start folk singing again!


QUOTES
Zoidberg: "Open your mouth and let's have a look at that brain." (Fry opens his mouth) "No no no! Not that one!"
Fry: "I only have one mouth!"
Zoidberg: "Really?" (Consulting chart)
Fry: "Is there a human doctor I can see?"
Zoidberg (offended): "Young lady! I'm an expert on humans, now pick a mouth, open it and say Bwaa-da-dah-da-dah!"
Fry: (Makes the closest noise he can)
Zoidberg: "What? My mother was a saint! Get out!"

Farnsworth: "Ah, to be young again! And also a robot!"

Worker: "A wise guy, huh? If I wasn't so lazy I'd punch you in the stomach."
Fry: "But you are lazy, right?"
Worker: "Ah, don't get me started!"

And later: Amy: "Excuse me Sir, could you get those keys for us?"
Worker: "What do I look like? A guy who isn't lazy?"

Bender (on being thrown out of the park): "Yeah, well, I'm gonna go build my own theme park! With Blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the theme park!"

and later, when the guys forget to let him into the lunar lander
"Ah, no room for Bender eh? Well forget it! I'm gonna go build my own lunar lander, with Blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the lunar lander and the Blackjack!"

Fry: "Oh Bender! You didn't touch the Crushinator, did you?"
Bender: "Of course not! A lady that fine you gotta romance first!"

Leela: "Fry, look around. It's just a crummy plastic flag and a dead man's tracks in the dust!" Don't think I've ever heard a more eloquent argument against the Moon landings and its cost.

PCRs
On the Moon, there are loads. Even the title, which refers to NASA's announcement of the landing of the Apollo 11 lunar lander on the Moon in 1969: "Mission control: the eagle has landed!" However the first proper PCR is Fry's contention that "Wow! I'll be a hero, like Neil Armstrong and all those other brave guys that nobody knows!" A cutting commentary on the fact that everyone remembers the first man on the Moon, but after that nobody cares. Can you name any other lunar astronauts other than he, Aldrin and, er, anyone else? Glenn? Anyone after that? Me neither.

When Fry steps out onto the surface of the Moon for at least his first time, he intones breathlessly "That's one small step for Fry..." and is sneered at by a guy in line with the rejoinder "... and one giant line for admission!" Seriously, nobody needs this contextualised, do they?

Fry tells them about Luna Park, and Amy returns "It's the happiest place orbiting Earth!" Obviously not wanting to get sued by robbing Disney's slogan!

Bender is approached by a guy called Crater-Face, who tries to confiscate his beer. The guy wears a flat large head in the shape of the moon, into which Bender pushes his empty beer bottle, near the eye socket. This refers back to the 1920s film, "The first men in the moon", where the rocket lands in the "eye" of the moon. Very clever.

The Goophy Gopher Revue is sponsored by the Monsanto Corporation, one of the largest and most villified pharmaceutical corporations. They make aspartame.

Over a thousand years and with the Earth having been invaded by aliens at least twice, history has got a little screwed up. The story of the Moon landings now seems to be centred on "one man, who had a dream", and that man was ... Jackie Gleason! The creators of the park use his segment where he threatens his wife "One of these days, Alice: bang! Zoom! Straight to the moon!" as the prediction that man would one day walk on the Moon. Fry knows this is not the case, but Leela ignores him. This has been "common knowledge" for a millennia or more. Why should she doubt its truth now?

Another hilarious misconception is that because there is a Sea of Tranquility on the Moon, it must have been a real sea, with real water, and ... real whales. And where there are whales, there are going to be whalers. And so we have, "Whalers on the Sea of Tranquility". Good grief!

The Whalers sing a song, called "Whalers on the Moon", and when Fry goes "off-road", he yells "Crank up the radio!" Guess what tune comes out? Yup! Wonder why they didn't call the group Bob Marley and the Whalers? Sorry, sorry...

One of the arcade machines behind Amy is called "Mortal Kooperation". Not quite "Mortal Kombat", is it? Another is called (I had to freeze frame a lot to get this one!) "Gender neutral Pac Person"! Brilliant!

That old joke about the farmer and his three daughters is updated here, as the hydroponics farmer warns Leela and Fry not to be a-messin' with his three beautiful robot daughters --- Lulubelle 7, Daisy-May 128K --- and the Crushinator! Daisy-May 128K is a real in-joke for those who used the old Atari Spectrum, when 128 kilobites (NOT megabytes, KILObytes, ie 1.28 MB) was the top of the line in memory! Oh, and the Commodore 64 too I think. Well before the rise of the modern PC.

When Fry sees the US flag at the landing site, his first thought is "Hey! There's that flag from MTV!" Sigh.

He also rejoices that his bootprint is larger than that of the thousand-year-dead Armstrong. Size isn't everything, Fry!

The motto on the farmer's hat reads "The moon shall rise again". A brilliantly clever reference to the old Southern creed after the Civil War, and also the fact that, well, the moon does rise, every night.

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A ROBOT CALLED BENDER
One of the things that works well in any programme, be it drama, horror, comedy, sci-fi, is a good relationship between characters. The best and indeed funniest relationship in Futurama is without question between Fry and Bender, with the latter treating him occasionally as his best friend but most of the time more like a pet. One thing Bender does not do is disguise his feelings (discuss to your heart's content how a robot can have feelings, but he does) or hold back when he has something to say. He is the original "tell it like it is" merchant, and here I'll be detailing some of his better observations.

Bender hates doing work of any kind. Maybe this is because having quit his job as, well, a bending unit, he now thinks he should not have to work for anyone. Or maybe he is just lazy. Either way he will do anything to avoid work. When they arriveon the Moon and he hears they have to deiver the package they came here to deliver he greets Fry's suggestion that they just drop it in the sewer and say they delivered it with "Too much work! Let's burn it and say we dropped it in the sewer!"

He has really very little time for humans and their frailties. When Fry and Leela worry that they may freeze in the sub-zero lunar night, he quips "Whaddya mean "we", mammal?" He will make this point, in many and in interesting ways, all through the series.

In that context, however, it's hard to accept his reason for trying to commit suicide. I have thought about this many times (yes, I'm that sad!) and it just doesn't stack up. If Bender really has the contempt for humans that he obviously does, why would he care that he was helping to manufacture Suicide Booths? What difference would it make to him? It certainly would not drive him to want to end his own life. And as we will see as we get to know him, if there's one person Bender loves, it's Bender. I think it was something of a clumsy plot device, another perhaps badly or not fully thought-out idea, but given the general overall superlativity of Futurama, I think we can forgive the writers this small slip.

We learn here too that Bender seems to harbour an unconfirmed desire to be a folk singer. This will, to some extent, recur in the episode "Bendin' in the wind", but other than that it's kind of a throwaway line, as indeed is the idea of magnets interfering with his circuits. Again, not really that well thought out or followed through. Damn funny though!

From this episode, and the end of the pilot too, we see that Bender is also an incorrigible thief. He doesn't seem to steal because he needs things (he's a robot after all) but simply because he can. He's sort of like an android version of the Artful Dodger, and he has no compunction at all about who he steals from, including his employer and his so-called friends.

There's no question Bender considers himself superior to humans, and has no problems about saying it, loudly and often. Yet his own past can, like that of any human, come back to haunt him, as here he meets a robot on the Moon whom he used to go to college with, and is embarrassed, ignoring him.

Bender is also a romeo, a casanova and in the best tradition of love-em-and-leave-em never stays long enough with anyone to form any sort of relationship. Over the course of the series his contempt for women will be explored in various ways, some of them rather eyebrow-raising. Here we see him ignore the warnings from the farmer and "mess with" his three robot daughters. We see too that as ever, girls love a bad boy, as the Crushinator has fallen in love with him to the point that she will defy her father in pursuing him. Bender obviously has a weakness for hookers, too, as he mentions them several times.

1.3 "I, roommate"

(Tagline: none)

With nowhere to live in the 31st century Fry has been crashing at the office, a situation that has begun to wear thin with his work colleagues. After all, just how many owls can you trap? When he refuses to take the hint, both he and Bender are kicked out of the office and Fry realises he must look for a place to stay. Bender comes to the rescue, telling him he can stay with him, but it turns out Bender, being a robot, only needs the tiniest, narrowest space to sleep in. It's fine for a robot but way too cramped for a human. So Leela helps them look for a new place together. But nothing suits.

Then a colleague of Professor Farnsworth dies, and the pair move into his spacious, upmarket apartment. Things go great until it's discovered that Bender's antenna is disrupting not only their TV reception but that of the whole block. Faced with having to leave if they can't sort this out, Bender tries to convince Fry just to leave the apartment and go back to his place, but Fry likes it here. So being somewhat selfish he asks Bender to leave while he stays. Leela is furious: Bender is his friend. How could he treat him so? Fry is unmoved.

The next day Bender turns up a work --- stinking sobre! For a robot this is the worst way to be, as they need alcohol to function properly. Bender acts drunk, with five o'clock shadow and slurred voice. He misses Fry, and has let himself go completely. Bender has caustically suggested to Leela that he cut off his antenna, as this appears to be the root of the problem, but robots looks on their antennae as us guys might look on, well, a certain part of our anatomy, and he doesn't want to do it.

After spending a night cold stinking sobre and waking up in an alley though, he comes to a hard decision. He makes his way to Fry's aprtment and threatens to cut off the thing. Fry doesn't realise what the antenna means to him, and so doesn't see any big deal in cutting off "Little Bender", so despite the show Bender makes of doing so --- "I'm gonna do it, don't try to stop me --- he just doesn't understand.

Once it's cut off the TV comes back on and Bender can now stay. However he seems very down and Fry finally realises what he has done. They recover the antenna and reattach it, and the two move back into Bender's old apartment where Fry discovers a "closet" that is huge enough to make a very comfortable living area for him. Bender bemoans the stupidity of humans, who would be happy to live in a closet, but secretly he's delighted they're both back home.

QUOTES
Hermes: "As this shocking graph indicates, our water consumption has tripled in the last month." (Off shot of Fry heading with a towel towards the Emergency Chemical Burn Shower unit) "I notice Fry has been here a month, I'm appointing him as head of a committee to find out who's responsible!"

Bender: "I need lots of nutritional alcohol. The chemical energy keeps my circuits charged."
Fry: "So what's the cigar for?"
Bender: "Ah, makes me look cool!"

Bender: "Why don't you just move in with me?"
Fry: "That would be great! Are you sure I wouldn't be imposing?"
Bender: "Nah, I've always wanted a pet."

Bender (asleep): "Kill all humans ... kill all humans .. must kill all humans ..."
Fry: "Bender! Wake up!"
Bender (waking): "Aw, I was having the most wonderful dream: I think you were in it." (Going back to sleep after a quick conversation with Fry) "Hey sexy lady! Wanna kill all humans?"

Bender (on the idea of looking for a new apartment): "Ah, I dunno. I got a lot of great memories of my old place." (Opens his chest, hits a button) "And now they're all gone!"

Farnsworth (on the phone): "Oh how awful! Did he at least die painlessly? To shreds, you say? Well, how is his wife holding up? To shreds, you say?"

Bender: "You know, Fry, of all the friends I've had, you're the first."

Leela (to Bender): "Look at that five o'clock rust! You've been up all night not drinking, haven't you?"

PCRs
As Fry wakes up --- on the boardroom table! --- he reaches out to knock off the alarm on his clock but hits Bender on the head instead. Angry, Bender takes the clock and folds it, sticking it on the side of the desk, where it now emulates the famous "melting clocks" painting by Salvador Dali.

And speaking of artists, one of the apartments they look at is that old "stairs that go every direction" thing by Escher.

As Bender and Fry move into their new apartment, cue the music from "The odd couple"... They even do the picking up the cigar with an umbrella bit. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you're too young.

In the Robot Arms (does anyone know if there's a joke or clever reference there? I've been thinking for years there is one but I can't get it) as the apartments are all for robots, the rooms are all numbered in the machine code binary system. Perhaps Bender's room says something clever, but I can't translate binary code.

Speaking of binary, the picture on their wall reads: "10 Home 20 Sweet 30 Goto 10", BASIC code which of course any computer nerd worth their salt knows means that the third line sends you back to the first, so it's Home Sweet Home. Excellent!

There's a great montage that pays homage to those old movies where the hero hits rock bottom and signs like "24 hour drinking" and "all night off licence" slide by in a drunken haze to slow jazz music, but in Bender's case he should be drinking but isn't, so things like "Bible study", "No alcohol here" and suchlike float by.

CALCULON/ALL MY CIRCUITS
One of the top soaps on TV is "All my circuits", starring the dashing robot actor Calculon, whose ego makes Bender look like a shrinking violet! This is the first time we're introduced to it, but it, and its star, will play a role throughout the series. Here, Fry is addicted to watching the thing. So is everyone else, as they all come over to Fry and Bender's new apartment to watch the episode with Calculon's wedding, which is when things begin to go wrong.


A ROBOT CALLED BENDER
Here we find out that it isn't that Bender is a drunk, but that he --- like, as we will later be told, all robots --- runs on alcohol. If he doesn't intake booze he will start to malfunction. We also learn that his contempt of humans manifests itself, at least in his sleep, as hatred. More to the point, we hear about the importance a robot attaches to his antenna; very personal, very intimate. We're shown that robots don't need much space to sleep in --- the apartments in the Robot Arms are all tiny little cubicles --- and feel it odd that humans do. Also, we see firsthand the terrible consequences of a robot failing to drink enough alcohol, which basically mirror the effects a human undergoes when drunk.

But more importantly, we see here the first little cracks in Bender's armour of toughness. When Fry moves in with him he looks upon him as a pet, at best a flatmate, but by the time they've settled in their new apartment they've grown to be more like friends, and when Fry cheerfully suggests Bender should leave the robot is crushed (not literally, of course). You wouldn't expect this from an android who professes to hate humans, but we'll realise Bender is something of a dichotomy. He often hides his feelings under snarky behaviour and aggressive tendencies, jokes and insults. In some ways, he's as human as you and I. Except that he could tear your or my arms off without breaking a sweat. Not that robots sweat.

It takes Fry some time to realise how much Bender actually depends on him, how close they've grown and how badly he has treated the robot. This is first because Fry is fundamentally thick and also very self-centred (so a perfect companion for Bender) but also because he finds it hard to assign emotions to a machine, as I suppose any of us would. Data in Star Trek: the Next Generation underwent the same sort of casual prejudice at first, and Kryten in Red Dwarf to an extent. People don't think robots, androids, automatons or machines have feelings. Of course, they don't, but on TV or in film they can, and often do. This is not to say that Fry treats Bender as property or as a machine; to him, Bender is a guy, and guys don't cry or show their feelings. In fact, he tells Leela loftily, guys don't have feelings. So he assumes Bender has none. But he learns a little late that he has hurt his friend, and makes in ways the ultimate sacrifice, giving up the big plush apartment and moving back in with Bender in his tiny cubicle. That's friendship for you. If a little late.

1.4 "Love's labour lost in space"

(Tagline: "In BC (Brain Control) where available" -- with the BC logo made to look like the Dolby symbol)

Leela bemoans the fact that most men can't see past her single eye on a date, so the guys decide to take her out to see if she can meet someone. However it's a bust: again, nobody can get past her cyclopean feature, and those that can (including an entity of pure energy) don't interest her. She soon has other things to concentrate on though, when the crew are sent to rescue some doomed animals from a doomed planet in a doomed ... you get the idea. The planet was once a source of Dark Matter, but as that is highly-prized as starship fuel in the thirty-first century, the planet has been stripmined and will now collapse within three days. Before that happens, Leela and her crew have to rescue two of each animal from the planet and take them to safety.

However Vergon 6 is a quarantined world, and the blockade is being patrolled by Captain Zapp Branigan, whose ship, "Nimbus", forces the Planet Express Ship (yeah, that's what they call it) to heave to. Leela is besotted with tales of Branigan's bravery and legendary prowess in space, and asks for his help in saving the animals, but when he hears they intend breaking the quarantine set up by DOOP, the Democratic Order Of Planets, of which he is the supposedly finest captain, he snarls refusal and places them under guard. Leela's admiration of and infatuation with him deflates like a balloon. When she goes to reason with him though she finds him so pathetic that she ends up engaging in pity sex with him (the champagne may have had something to do with it too, and her own desperate desire for intimacy) and is horrified when she wakes in his bed.

Trying to conceal her self-loathing, Leela leads the crew down to the planet, Branigan now being too full of his own ego to even bother stopping them. They collect all the animals on the list the Professor gave them, and come across an extra one. A small black creature like a monkey crossed with a cat. Leela decides that even though he's not on the list she'll take him, and calls him Nibbler. It quickly transpires though that, cute as he looks, Nibbler has a voracious appetite and can eat things many times his size, including the animals in the cargo hold!

As they prepare to leave though, now without any animals saved other than Nibbler, the planet begins to implode, but Leela finds to her dismay that Bender has failed to fuel up the ship, and the tank is now empty! With no alternative, and having had to admit to the guys that she slept with him, she has to call Branigan in to save them, which superinflates his already massive ego and makes Leela feel even smaller than she does already. Zapp however refuses to help unless they put Nibbler off the ship, which Leela will not do. Nibbler then poops, and lo and behold! It's pure Dark Matter that he excretes, allowing them to collect it and escape without Branigan's help.



QUOTES
Amy: "Let's take her out tonight. There's plenty of good places to meet people."
Hermes: "The Federal Sex Bureau!"
Bender: "Suacy puppet show."
Zoidberg: "The rotting carcass of a whale!"

Leela: "They say Zapp Branigan single-handedly saved the Octillion System from a whole horde of rampaging killbots."
Bender (shaking his head sadly): "A sad day for robotkind." (Brightening) "But we can always build more killbots!"

Fry: "I bet Leela's holding out for some really nice guy with one eye."
Bender: "That'll take forever. What she should do is find a nice guy with two eyes, and poke one out!"

Leela: "I might have liked Zapp Branigan if he wasn't a pompous dimwit who threw me in prison."
Bender: "You really are too picky!"

Zapp: "Kiff! I have made it with a woman! Inform the men!"

Leela: "Leave him alone! It's not his fault that he's an unstoppable killing machine! Is it, Snookums?"

Leela: "Bender! I told you to fill the tank before we left!"
Bender: "Ah, I'll do it when we get back!"

Leela: "You know Zapp, once I thought you were a big pompous buffoon, then I realised that inside you were just a pitiful child. Now I realise that outside that child there's a big pompous buffoon!"

NEW CHARACTERS!
Like The Simpsons before it, Futurama has a core cast of characters who are in most if not all of the episodes --- Fry, Leela, Bender, Scruffy (what?) --- but others are introduced gradually, some of whom become regular or semi-regular (think Krusty, Mo, Lenny and Carl, Chief Wiggum) while others only crop up occasionally (Mayor Quimby, Professor Frink, Snake). As these are added I'll talk about them and let you know what they mean, if anything, to the series as a whole.

Here we meet the man who will become the on-again-off-again bane of Leela's life, the egotistical Captain Zapp Branigan. Although not in every episode --- far from it --- Zapp will become so integrated into the mythology of the show that it will be hard to imagine it without him. He's so special that I've started a new section especially for him, see below.

We also meet Kiff Kroker, his long-suffering second officer and adjuntant, who Branigan basically treats as his slave. Kiff will figure prominently in the lives of one of the crew, later on. Kiff is an alien who looks sort of like a squashed lizard, but we will learn more about his people in later seasons.

PCRs
None really this episode, but it's quite obvious that the character of Zapp Branigan is based loosely around a certain captain of the USS Enterprise...

Also, the title is again a PCR, referring to Shakespeare's "Love's labour lost".

ZAPP: WHAT A GUY!
Possibly the only other character to make such nonsensical statements other than Fry and Bender in the series, a man who makes every utterance George W Bush made sound like the pronouncements of a wise old man, Captain Zapp Branigan's speeches, eulogies, comments and just about everything he says is pure comedy gold.

"In the game of chess, you must never let your opponent see your pieces!"

"Killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men in at them until they reached their limit and shut down."

"It's a little thing I call Branigan's Law. I don't pretend to understand Branigan's Law, I merely enforce it."

"Sham-pag-en?" (Poor Zapp is so uncultured he doesn't know how to pronounce the word champagne!)

"So, crawling back to the big Z like a bird on its belly!"

A ROBOT CALLED BENDER

This is primarily a Leela-centric episode, and there's not too much new we learn about Bender, but he does as ever impact the storyline in some ways:

Bender's soon-to-be-legendary reluctance to do any work manifests itself here in what could be a deadly oversight, when he doesn't bother to fill up the ship before leaving Earth. He nonchalantly says he'll do it when they get home, but the ship has no fuel to get home and the planet is tearing itself apart. Even so, he doesn't seem bothered.

Bender advises the crew he possesses what he calls Gaydar, and proceeds to prove it by removing a small transmitter/receiver from his chest cavity, though he does accept that he could be getting interference from a gay weather balloon!

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Episode Three

The Prime Minister has called his cabinet together unexpectedly, to advise them that he is about to tender his resignation. It's greeted with less than surprise, more a feeling of why did it take so long? Urquhart of course is delighted. One major obstacle out of the way. Now he has to make sure nobody else takes the seat of power he has set his sights on. Blood will flow, literally as well as metaphorically. Mattie though begins to wonder privately if Collingridge wasn't framed? The whole situation is just a little too unbelievable, particularly as she has met the brother and can't believe him capable of such guile or even financial competence. Or any competence, come to think of it.

When she visits Urquhart she declares her desire to sleep with him, and says that she wants to call him "daddy". He has no problem with this, but cautions her that their affair must remain completely private. Word about it must never get out. He is however unaware that she is recording everything on a dictaphone. Urquhart meets Ben Landless who says he will support his run for the leadership if he can get it all done within a month: Urquhart has not enough support yet to challenge. If not, Landless frankly tells him he will go with Patrick Woolton instead. He doesn't care who gets in, once it's a man he can use, who owes him big and who will make life easier for him.

Mattie's friend John, who also works at the paper, has also started thinking conspiracy, and he has located Charlie Collingridge. He and Mattie go to talk to the PM's brother who is in a discrete and exclusive sanitorium. After talking to the befuddled old codger Mattie is even more convinced that there is no way Charlie was involved in any shares scam, and she's beginning to wonder if his brother was either. She doesn't know, though, as she's talking to him that she's being observed. Urquhart has of course got spies in the camp, and they report back to him. When they see the press pass on her car, alarm bells begin to go off. Urquhart does not want the tabloids snooping around here!

He is of course furious when he realises that it's Mattie who's been poking around, and directs Roger O'Neill to send her a warning. A brick crashes through her window, with a threatening note attached to it. Terrified, she calls John who comes over and advises her to drop the story; it's just not worth this. But later she talks to Urquhart, who concedes there must be a conspiracy against the Collingridges, and says he will find out what he can. The leadership race begins, but true to his plan, Urquhart does not declare, standing "statesmanlike", as one TV reporter puts it, above the infighting, seeming unconcerned with and calling himself unworthy of the position, happy to do the job he does so well. Of course, this is all very carefully calculated: he wants people to think this is how he feels, especially his colleagues in the party. Nobody suspects his true intentions, so nobody considers him a threat and nobody moves against him. Even to his own private secretary, the formidable Tim Stamper, he pretends he is not interested in the job. In his heart, Urquhart trusts no-one.

Having uncovered enough about this conspiracy to take it to her editor, Mattie is dismayed when she is told she is being removed from the political staff. Urquhart meanwhile has orchestrated a situation where, through his contact with Landless, he is actually being asked to run for prime minister, against his wishes. Apparently. Everything is falling into place. People have been played, circumstances have been manipulated, and the threads of a very dark and complicated tapestry are finally beginning to be pulled together to form one simple image: Francis Urquhart at Number Ten.

Mattie rings around for someone to confirm her story, and ends up talking to Penny when she can't get Roger O'Neill. She is shocked, as she tells Mattie that she drove Roger to her house when he put the brick through her window, but she thought Mattie was a man. In the course of their conversation she tells her also about her and Roger's part in setting up Charles Collingridge's accomodation address, and Mattie begins to see the whole picture. She however goes to see Urquhart and tells him what she has learned, unwittingly putting both Penny and Roger in deep danger.

QUOTES
Urquhart (about Collingridge): "He was in the trap and screaming from the moment he took office. We simply put the poor bastard out of his agony. After life's fitful fever, he sleeps well."

Mattie: "I think you know I'd like to do anything you asked me to do."
Urquhart: "Hardly the words of an independent young woman."
Mattie: "Oh but they are. I'm nobody's toy. I don't get chosen, I choose. And I'm not interested in anyone's taboos about age."
If only Mattie knew how well she was being played she might not feel so confident. "I don't get chosen?" She has been, and right from the start when Urquhart set his sights on her. "Nobody's toy"? She's Urquhart's to do with as he wishes, and all the time she'll think it's her controlling him, when the opposite is true.

Ben Landless: "What his article will say is Little Mikey Samuels has taken an early lead in the polls and he's running around telling the world he's got the whole thing sewn up."
Urquhart: "How do you know he's taken an early lead?"
Landless: "I don't know if he has or not! I'm just telling ya what we're gonna put in the paper!"

Urquhart (in voiceover): "So hard to know who to trust in these suspicious days. Does passion engender trust? Not necessarily. And yet, we all would wish to feed on certainties, to hear the word "always" and believe it true. She trusts me absolutely, I believe. I trust she does. And I? I trust her absolutely, to be absolutely human."

The Royal "We"
At the opening of this episode, all the MPs have been called to an emergency meeting. Urquhart delights in such things: "An emergency cabinet meeting. Always sends a nice little thrill of anticipation down the spine. Someone's in trouble. Someone's going to get it in the neck. But not us, eh?"

After hearing the PM's intention to resign, he can barely contain himself and turns sharply to the camera, to us, with a stern admonishment: "Not feeling guilty, I hope?" he chides. "If you are feeling any pangs of pity crush them now, grind them under your heel, like old cigar butts." It's clear he has no such conscience.

Waiting to see the soon-to-be-gone PM Urquhart frowns "Yes, I know, very irritating to be waiting on yesterday's man, but even a disgraced prime minister has his uses. So it becomes us to be humble and honest good old Francis Urquhart still. Doggedly devoted; such a comfort in a crisis!" He can't suppress a bitter little laugh at the irony.

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Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018