When they first appear together on screen, Philip J. Fry and Turanga Leela from “Futurama” don’t seem like the obvious choice for a romantic relationship that will carry the series.
Their initial meeting in the defunct animated series does, however, include Leela telling Fry to take off all of his clothes — he just awoke in the year 3000 after 1,000 years of cryogenic sleep.
They’re a mismatched pair that feels familiar, an odd couple whose differences run deeper than their orange and purple hair and three total eyes. Leela, an orphan, has the confidence and the brains. Fry is a slacker interplanetary delivery boy whose immaturity and lack of ambition hold Leela back from romantic interest.
It’s a love in that I was only moderately invested when I wolfed down the entirety of the series recently via Netflix. I wasn’t alone. Even the show’s writers showed a passing interest in their romance, sometimes forgetting about it for episodes at a time.
While it’s never one of the central, driving themes of the series, Fry and Leela share a bond that deepens as the series unfurls. Each of the four de-facto series finales — 2003 Fox conclusion “The Devil’s Hands Are Idle Playthings,” 2009 direct-to-DVD film “Into the Wild Green Yonder” and the two Comedy Central end caps, 2011’s “Overclockwise” and 2013’s “Meanwhile” — focus on the pair.
From the scriptwriting perspective, as Bada-- Digest writer Film Crit Hulk, an insightful critic who “talk like Hulk” and writes in ALL CAPS, would say, “the ending is the conceit.” Although what comes before the finale matters, what the makers of a particular piece want viewers to take away hangs in that final episode, those final moments, those final scenes.
The fact the “Futurama” crew kept revisiting Fry and Leela’s relationship for its concluding episodes shows that even if it wasn’t written in capital letters, they wanted to end on a hopeful, sweet note for Fry and Leela and, by extension, for us all.
As of now, it’s hard to imagine “Futurama” having a better sign off than “Meanwhile.” Fry swipes a device created by Professor Farnsworth, his 29th century-born relative who has a penchant for doomsday devices and mad science. The device causes time to skip backward 10 seconds for the entire universe. Fry decides to propose marriage to Leela, but when he fears she isn’t coming, jumps off of the top of a tall building.
Fry uses the device to survive the fall, but breaks it in the process, freezing the universe except for him and Leela. The couple marries and grows old together while all of time stands still. In the end, Farnsworth reappears with a solution to set everything right at the cost of wiping out their decades of exclusive history.
In the show’s final lines, the now-elderly couple chooses each other:
Fry: “What do you say? Wanna go around again?”
Leela: “I do.”
The image and idea of Fry and Leela living a lifetime together while the universe stands still is a conceptual home run. It’s also an interesting statement about love itself, its ability to tune out all of the fuzz and distortions and freeze everything except that person.
We see parts of ourselves in the characters we watch. We latch on to their hopes, dreams and aspirations. Even though Leela can do better than Fry, it’s hard not to root for the twerp because he’s our conduit into the series, the contemporary human turned into the 31st Century schizoid man.
His pursuit of Leela is like a fly that won’t shoo. One perspective could say he wears her down, but there are so many instances of Fry working to improve himself that I latch on to a part of him I recognize in myself – meeting someone who makes you want to be your best, who just being in proximity to them pushes you to improve. Maybe I didn’t always get the girl, as Fry does Leela, but I know what it’s like to meet someone who knocks you out and leaves you thinking, “I need to step up my game.”
As for Fry and Leela, their bond throughout the course of the series speaks both to Film Crit Hulk’s point about endings, and its creators feeding us that eternal hope and romanticism that we rely on TV to give us. It’s reassuring to think that if these fictional characters can let love bloom, so can the rest of us.
So if Fry can earn Leela’s affections, maybe there’s hope for all of us to either find love or maybe even be lucky enough to go around again together.
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