With 14 years and 124 episodes already streaming on Hulu, Futurama is making yet another comeback (complete with John DiMaggio returning as Bender!). If you’re new to the world of the 31st century and looking to jump in, or if you’re a longtime fan who wants to revisit your favorites, we’ve got you covered. Here are our top 10 Futurama episodes, ranked!
No Futurama ranking would be complete without Zapp Brannigan, the starship captain whose smarm surpasses legend and rockets straight into myth. In this episode, Brannigan attends the ribbon cutting ceremony for the new headquarters of the Democratic Order of Planets (or D.O.O.P. for short). His ego gets in the way of his common sense, though, and he wreaks havoc by capturing and interrogating members of the Neutral Planet—and then trying to cut the ribbon with a space laser which destroys the entire headquarters. After that, Brannigan and his lieutenant Kif are dishonorably discharged and end up on the Planet Express’s crew, where Brannigan messes up an easy mission delivering pillows and then leads Fry and Bender in a mutiny against Leela.
The Planet Express crew gets hungry while out on a mission, and they happen upon a planet filled with piles of what look like popcorn shrimp. It turns out they’re not just edible, but addictively delicious, and the crew members gorge themselves. Then they decide to open a business selling the things, calling them popplers. It turns out that the popplers are actually the larva of the people of Omicron Persei 8, who demand revenge on humanity for eating vast quantities of their young.
Bender decides to take a nap in a torpedo tube, but the problem with that plan is that a torpedo tube is where you launch torpedoes. That’s exactly what happens to Bender when the Planet Express ship is attacked by space pirates. Bender accidentally gets launched while the ship is going full speed, which means that there’s no way Fry and Leela can catch up with him. Bender finds himself destined to float through the void of space forever and picks up a tiny civilization on his stomach when he drifts through an asteroid field.
The inhabitants of his torso (and later, butt) think Bender is an omnipotent God, and begin to demand all sorts of favors from him, like making their crops grow or smiting their enemies. Like the other best Futurama episodes, this one makes you think. What if the god you’re praying to is real but just as clueless and inept as you are? What if we’re all just tiny people clinging for dear life to a rock floating through space? Oh, crap, we ARE!
Fry decides to learn to play the holophoner, a notoriously hard instrument to master, so that he can impress Leela. He sucks at it, though, so Bender suggests that he get help from the Robot Devil. The Robot Devil tries to trick Fry into a Faustian bargain but accidentally ends up trading away his own hands. With the Robot Devil’s hands, Fry becomes a holophonor virtuoso and writes an opera about him and Leela. The Robot Devil wants his hands back, though, and he refuses to give up on trying to get them, which leads to all kinds of shenanigans in the lead-up to Fry’s opera debut. This episode, which was the final episode of the original four seasons, also features Hedonism Bot, a golden robot built right into his chaise longue who’s always a decadent barrel of laughs.
Fry discovers that his old bank account from the 20th century has remained active for the past thousand years, and unlike any bank account in real life, has actually accrued a significant amount of interest! Now filthy rich, Fry buys the last can of anchovies in existence so that he can have anchovy pizza one last time. When he outbids the ruthless robot magnate, Mom, at the auction, though, Mom thinks that Fry has discovered the secret to making oil that can permanently lubricate robots, which would put her out of business. Mom hatches a scheme to get the anchovies from Fry by stealing all his money and then offering to bail him out by buying them. (Why she wouldn’t just steal the anchovies themselves is an excellent question, but don’t overthink it.)
Fry ducks out of a boring Planet Express shareholder’s meeting and finds a support group for people who have been cryogenically frozen. Although he’s really only there for the free food, Fry finds camaraderie in a Wall Street shark from the 80s. The ’80s guy—who’s only ever referred to as “That Guy”—promptly stages a hostile takeover of Planet Express, and things spiral out of control from there.
Mom is always a fantastic character, but she’s really at her best in this episode. Plus, “Future Stock” has classic moments like That Guy’s bizarre Planet Express commercial, which is a riff off of a classic Apple ad, and the Intergalactic Stock Exchange.
The Harlem Globetrotters visit Earth in their flying saucer and challenge humanity to a basketball game. To beat them, Farnsworth unveils a team of mutant atomic supermen, but he needs to speed up their growing process to make sure they’re adults by game time. He sends the Planet Express crew to gather particles called chronitons to do the job. The chronitons work, but they lead to random jumps forward in time, during which everyone behaves normally but has no memory of what they did during the jump.
Coming to with no idea of where you are or what you’re doing is terrifying in real life, but comic gold in a sci-fi farce, and this episode succeeds in taking the premise to ridiculous lengths. The only problem with the episode is that it leans hard into Fry’s quest to “make” Leela love him, which was never funny to begin with. Other than that, though, watching the Planet Express crew deal with the hilarious consequences of the time jumps is a lot of fun.
Fry eats a rotten egg salad sandwich at an interstellar truck stop, and soon finds himself physically and cognitively enhanced. Farnsworth discovers that the eggs in the sandwich were actually worm eggs, and Fry has a full-on worm infestation throughout his body. The crew use micro-droids and VR to go inside of Fry’s body to rid him of the infestation, but Fry realizes that he likes what the worms have done to him—especially since Leela’s attracted to his new body and mind.
What makes this episode stand out is the fact that it raises some legitimately unsettling questions about the nature of our minds and personalities. If you could become artificially smarter and stronger, would you do it? What would you do if someone you were in love with loved you back, but only because parasites in your body were changing your personality? And when you get down to it, is this episode really all that far removed from the billions of bacteria that already inhabit our bodies and influence our minds? (The short answer is yes, because Fry’s worms build cities and have government officials and stuff, but you know what I mean.)
Fry goes to a museum and finds his fossilized dog, Seymour Asses, from the 20th century on display. He manages to get Seymour back, and the Professor tells him that he can use DNA in the fossil to clone him, complete with personality and memories. Bender gets jealous, though, thinking that once Fry has his dog back, he won’t need Bender as a friend anymore.
This episode has some great comic moments in it, but what really makes it is the absolutely devastating ending. The best Futurama episodes are the ones where you lose track of whether you’re crying from laughter or pathos.
This episode got Futurama its first Emmy win, and with good reason! The Planet Express crew goes to watch a supernova, but when Fry puts a metal popcorn pan in the ship’s microwave, he triggers an explosion that sends the ship back in time to 1947. They crash-land in Roswell, New Mexico, where officials from the nearby air force base find Bender’s body and Zoidberg. The crew quickly realizes that they’re the infamous aliens found in Roswell, and they decide to steal a microwave antenna to try to get back to their own time.
This episode has some of the best gags of the whole series, from President Truman smashing his way out of a crate of canned eggs to the gang throwing Zoidberg’s internal organs around like they’re in a food fight. Plus, Fry’s hijinks with his grandparents lead to him having special brainwaves that become a plot point in future episodes.
What are your favorite Futurama episodes? Any you think should have gone into the top 10? Let us know in the comments!
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Julia Glassman (she/her) lives in Los Angeles, where she consumes massive amounts of Marvel movies, folk horror, and other geekery. Her writing has appeared in Joyland, Make/Shift, and other outlets.
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