The Scrapped Futurama Episode That Was Too Sci-Fi For Comedy TV
"Futurama" is an animated comedy, yes, but it's also a show that takes its science very seriously. As nonsensical and absurd as some storylines can be, the writers' room on the series also boasted actual scientists to make sure things made theoretical sense. They were so good, "Futurama" often predicted the future. During the "Futurama Live!" post-show with Nerdist following the series' original finale, the creative team was asked if the science ever got in the way of a storyline. As it turns out, it did.
"I was working on a story with one of our writers, Josh Weinstein [...] We were working on this very complicated story where this character showed up who was living backward in time and talking backward and moving backward, and we worked on it for like three days and it was the coolest science fiction story, but there was nothing funny about it whatsoever," said showrunner David X. Cohen. "And we finally threw in the towel, which we don't usually do after three full days of work, [but] we threw the towel in."
While Cohen doesn't say how long ago this idea came to be, it certainly predates a major film that dabbled with a similar sci-fi premise, Christopher Nolan's "Tenet." The film obviously wasn't directly influenced by an unaired "Futurama" episode, but Nolan has said it took roughly 20 years for him to crack the story, seriously starting work on the script in 2014 ... the year following the end of "Futurama." Cohen is a few years older than Nolan, so they likely grew up influenced by many of the same things, so this bit of synchronicity is a happy coincidence.
Futurama saved the good part
Honestly, the closest comparison I could think of to the scrapped "Futurama" episode is actually Jason Robert Brown's musical, "The Last Five Years," where a relationship is examined with one person moving in chronological order after the couple first meets and the other told in reverse chronological order, beginning the show at the end of their marriage. The idea might not have made for comedy, but David X. Cohen wisely knew not to scrap the idea completely, borrowing an element for the series' finale. "The climactic moment of that episode was the forward moving in time people met the backward moving in time person and time froze, and they were finally able to interact," he told the audience. "So we took that idea and used it in the finale tonight, so there you go."
That series finale, "Meanwhile," sees Fry and Leela's timelines meeting together, after time is frozen throughout the universe for everyone and everything except the two of them. They marry, spend decades roaming the frozen world, and grow old together. Eventually, they agree to reset the timelines knowing that they'll be zapped back in time without any memory of their lives together during the time stoppage, bringing the show to the timeline that would kick off the new revival series on Hulu.