Futurama is back (again), baby, and io9 has an exclusive clip to share from next week’s episode. Titled “Quids Game,” it sees a jam-packed Planet Express ship visit a mysterious planet that contains an exact replica of Fry’s childhood home—on the occasion of a memorable birthday party he and his friends must re-live… with a macabre twist. If that episode title sounds familiar, well… that’s no coincidence.
At a press roundtable at San Diego Comic-Con last weekend, io9 got a chance to ask Futurama executive producer David X. Cohen about “Quids Game.” Obviously, it draws on a certain hit Netflix series, but as with most Futurama stories, there’s another layer below the pop-culture reference. “We have some Squid Game fans in the writers room, including myself, obviously,” Cohen said. “[But] we like to take everything and make it one step removed. So we’re not going to say this is a memory of Squid Game or something. We’ll do our sci-fi version of it so that people who are not familiar with the original, or if 10 years [have] passed and people [don’t get the reference], they’ll still enjoy the show. So it requires no background knowledge in Squid Game.”
He continued. “But that’s the inspiration obviously, to take some innocent childhood thing and do it to the death. And I guess one other thing I always find touching just about the whole sci-fi premise of being in the future—and any time traveling—is that when you go into the future, you’re always leaving stuff behind when you cannot go back. It’s sort of like our own lives; everyone wishes they could go back to something in their life.
So I always feel like there’s something automatically emotional when you do episodes like that, where you’re seeing Fry’s childhood and you know, like, ‘Oh, he left all these people behind a thousand years ago.’ And we get to remind the audience a little bit of that basic premise, that his old life is gone, but it meant something to him. I do think you get extra emotion, even in a goofy episode [where] people [are] dying left and right and then explaining that. But it’s touching, I think, because of that hook to Fry remembering his childhood.”
Watch “Quids Game,” the second episode of Futurama season 12, August 5 on Hulu.
Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
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