Futurama holds a special place in the hearts of every older millennial. We all grew up watching Matt Groening’s other show, The Simpsons , and when that really started to go south, Futurama was there to provide the dose of gloomy satirical humor our bodies started to yearn for. It was The Simpsons in space (and the future), and it was great.
Then it was canceled and revived a few years later by Comedy Central, then canceled again and revived again, this time by Hulu, where novel episodes from Season 12 are currently released weekly. And the episode released yesterday offers an alternate history of coffee.
Futurama isn’t novel coffee-based humor. In the 2003 episode — the original — titled “Three Hundred Massive Boys,” Fry has an extra $300 in his pocket thanks to a tax break from the president of Earth, Richard Nixon’s head (sometimes on Spiro Agnew’s body), which he spends on 100 cups of $3 coffee. The culmination is Fry reaching a state of superhuman enlightenment after drinking his 100th cup. (After drinking, I assume, at least 100 cups of coffee at the Expo, let me tell you that this depiction is completely faulty regarding what your body goes through.)
The latest episode, titled “Planet Espresso,” written by Bob Odenkirk, follows Hermes Conrad, who inherits a coffee plantation in Jamaica after his father dies and, after a coffee-induced hallucination, learns that the world’s favorite beverage is much older than previously thought. In fact, it’s 5 million years aged, brought to Earth by a two-tailed, mermaid-like alien race from Planet Thermos, “a world of steaming, brown beauty.” Coffee, it turns out, is responsible for almost all of humanity’s greatest achievements (I guess that’s true).
Hermes et al decide to change their delivery business to a coffee business, changing the name from Planet Express to Planet Espresso. But things are not as they seem, hilarity ensues. Pretty standard Futurama stuff.
The episode is full of coffee references, some more obvious than others. Kyle Maclachlin’s disembodied head makes a cameo appearance to reference his “damn good coffee” line from Twin Peaks, a Chemex appears in the background of several scenes, coffee shop workers go on strike, and there’s even a can of Chock Full O’Bugs.
And while they’re playing around with coffee history a bit, the premise honestly makes a lot of sense. There’s something otherworldly about coffee. It can predict the future, it’s been used in religious rituals for centuries, and the more we learn about it, the more we discover how beneficial it is to our health. It certainly seems like a gift from… someone, God, aliens, or whoever. So while I’m not saying Futurama got its otherworldly reinterpretation of coffee’s origins 100% right, I’m just saying it makes about as much sense as a herd of goats getting excited.
