A Cool Link Between Futurama Season 11 And A Classic Episode From 2001
"Futurama" has been around for a long time by this point, which means it's more than possible that viewers of the new season have forgotten about events from the old seasons. It's been over 20 years, after all, and even though the characters don't seem to age, it's been twenty years for them, too, so it makes sense that they'll occasionally find themselves on familiar adventures.
The most recent episode, "Parasites Regained," finds yet another member of the crew under attack from a bunch of parasitic worms. Back in season 3, the infected crew member was Fry, who got infected by eating a long-expired egg sandwich he found in a men's bathroom. This time, it's the adorable man-eating Nibbler who finds himself infected by the worms, and the crew needs to on go a "Dune"-inspired quest across Nibbler's litter-box to figure out how to stop them.
It's a continuity-heavy episode, mining humor from long-running gags like "everyone keeps forgetting Nibbler can talk," "Nibbler's part of a hyper-intelligent alien race," and "Fry's brain works in weird, mysterious ways." This is shown in the contrasting ways the worms treat each victim. For Fry, the worms actually make him smarter. For the hyper-intelligent Nibbler, the worms render him increasingly stupid, to the point where he's no different from a regular pet.
At first, it seems like this new episode is telling us that Fry's season 3 experience with these worms was a unique one. Much like how those floating alien brains didn't affect him in "The Day the Earth Stood Stupid," the implication here seems to be that those worms wouldn't have had such a big effect on the average person.
A happy ending?
But whereas the worms' original appearance ended with Fry destroying them for his own self-gain, "Parasites Regained" ends with the gang reconciling with the worms. Thanks to a bunch of spice-induced hallucinations that "Dune" fans are already familiar with, Leela manages to the figure out the real reason the worms are making Nibbler dumber: They themselves are infected by parasitic worms. Leela remarks that this is "too many layers" to the circle of life, urging the worms to kill off their mites instead of trying to peacefully co-exist with them.
It's a dark yet strangely heartwarming ending in that way only "Futurama" can pull off. Yes, it involves thousands of mites being killed off mere minutes after Nibbler waxes poetic about the value of all lifeforms no matter how small, but it also means Leela gets to enjoy her loving relationship with her adorable pet Nibbler once again. It also serves as closure to any fan who might've been annoyed by the ending of season 3's "Parasites Lost," in which Fry evicted his worms despite them doing nothing wrong. This time around, the worms get to stick around in the loving home they've built for themselves.
It's a lot like the ending to the classic episode "Love and Rocket," in which a bunch of "love radiation rays" destroy a whole lot of planets filled with innocent people. "But one planet was at exactly the right distance to see the romantic rays, but not be destroyed by them: Earth," Zoidberg monologues. "So all over the world, couples stood together in joy." At the end of "Parasites Regained," it's Leela and Nibbler standing happily together, problems solved. And it only took a little bit of mass murder to pull it all off.