5 Reasons the Futurama Crew Should Be In Jail

It’s pretty simple: if you want the cradle of humanity, or possibly the whole universe, destroyed, call Planet Express. They’re actually pretty good at it.

Granted, this isn’t as big a deal in the thirty-first century as it is in the twenty-first: as Bender points out, it’s not like it’s the only planet, or universe, we’ve got.

On the other hand, it is a little dismaying how often the Planet Express crew has, uh, essentially doomed an entire realm of existence to destruction. Or at least a bad date, considering how clingy and possessive Yivo was.

Sure, we could just sit back and admit it’s a cartoon: but then we wouldn’t be shamelessly nitpicky nerds.

Good news, everyone! We’re shamelessly nitpicky nerds! To the nitpicks!

#5) Reversing the Earth’s Rotation

Episode: “That Darn Katz!”

In terms of physics, ironically, this episode deliberately got it right: since the Earth was at a full stop and slowly started rotating again, we wouldn’t be slamming into walls at a thousand miles an hour, unlike the cats, who get what they’ve got coming to them.

The problem is that reversing the earth’s rotation means you change the climate; wind currents, tides, all of it would suddenly reverse. So Amy Wong probably just doomed billions to starvation and natural disasters.

By the way, this isn’t even considering the time they changed the Earth’s orbit, thus extending the seasons and also probably triggering another wave of starvation and natural disasters. There’s more blood on Farnsworth’s hands than we thought.

#4) They’ve Triggered Invasions By Man-Eating Space Reptiles Not Once, But Twice, and For Stupid Reasons To Boot

Episodes: “The Problem With Popplers”, “Llllrreconcilable Ndndifferences”

The first time the ruler of the plant Omicron Persei 8 and his shrewish wife attacked Earth, it was…well, it was technically Fry’s fault, but he had a point: who the hell watches Fox, anyway? Also, he had no idea it’d come back to bite him in the ass in a thousand years.

The second time, where they land on an uncharted planet and eat something they can’t identify out of a ditch, is a lot less justifiable considering that’s contrary to almost every single type of training they give professional naval captains, of which Leela is technically one. And the third time, where they fake an Earth invasion just to fix a marriage and then seem completely unable to get out of it, kind of makes you wonder if they like being eaten.

Granted, that one was not helped by Zapp Brannigan’s idiocy, but still.

Just…don’t talk to the alien species, guys. At all. Especially since you also managed to get Earth completely taken over by Zoidbergs.

#3) They Turned Bender Into Grey Goo

Episode: “Benderama”

For those unfamiliar, grey goo is a theoretical state where nanomachines run amok, consuming all matter to turn it into more nanomachines and wiping out the entire human race, and the earth to boot. In “Futurama”, that grey goo consists of copies of a sociopathic drunk.

Before Bender was done, he’d eaten huge chunks of the earth, turned all fresh water on the planet into alcohol (triggering a massive crisis unto itself, since there were no nano-Benders to convert it back), and destroyed Patton Oswalt.

We’re not sure which of the three is worse.

#2) They Ripped a Hole in Space/Time to Defeat the Harlem Globetrotters

Episode: “Time Keeps On Slippin'”

So, there are absolutely no stakes in a game against the Harlem Globetrotters, who literally landed on your planet solely to talk trash and challenge you to a pick-up game. Do you A) lose gracefully, or B) rapidly accelerate the age of your atomic supermen, and in the process rip a hole in time that means you rapidly skip over huge portions of your life and possibly bring the entire universe to an end? And that’s just the tip of the iceberg?

#1) They Stuffed Our Entire Universe Into a Box, And God Knows Where It Is

Episode: “The Farnsworth Parabox”

By the end of this episode, the entire universe is in the hands of a robot who wants to destroy all humans, a man who shagged his own grandmother, a senile loon with multiple doomsday devices, an incompetent lobster “doctor”, a physics doctoral student/utter ditz, an OCD bureaucrat who had to think hard about destroying another universe in the first place, and Scruffy.

In other words, we’re screwed. It’s a good thing those scammer aliens didn’t sprunge it, or we’d all be screwed even more.

image courtesy Twentieth Century Fox

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