Futurama: The Beast With A Billion Backs

So here we are with the second of four feature length Futuramas which may or may not signal the end of Matt Groening's best creation (yeah I said it!). After the relative choppiness of the first, Bender's Big Score, it's pleasing to say that The Beast With A Billion Backs manages to do the four episodes-as-one thing a little more successfully.

Basically the best point about Beast is that it's less cluttered. Instead of chucking in four episodes worth of ideas it feels more like an actual movie. There are still issues of course. As I said, it feels more like a movie than Big Score, but it still plays like a TV show doubling up. Also there's a startling abandonment of anything and everything that happened in Big Score even though it follows directly on from that film. One of the major criticisms of the first film was that it appeared to reset what had happened at the end of the shows original run. It was easy to dismiss as time having passed and it being a necessity for the plot, especially as the first film having a Fry/Leila angle made sense as this was the primary storyline in the show. It's a little more difficult to forgive this time around.

Beast opens with the rift that opened at the end of Big Score still there but in the time between all the Fry/Leila stuff is again dumped purely so the first half can be about Fry's new girlfriend and the fact that she's a slapper. This is essentially a plot device to drive the rest of the story. Thankfully the second half gets it right. What starts out as your typical pod-people style sci-fi/horror takes an almighty twist when the real motivation of the beast from the rift is revealed. this leads to one of those wonderfully bizarre storylines that Futurama used to excel at. To reveal it would be unfair.

What is frustrating about Beast With A Billion Backs is that in many ways it's better than Bender's Big Score. As per usual the gags, both spoken and visual, are inspired and the invention of the people involved is an absolute joy. But thanks to an unevenness caused by the first half it still lacks something of the brilliance of the show at its peak. It's still great, and fans of Futurama should love it, but like Groening's other creation's attempt at feature length it somehow doesn't quite work. Maybe watching it split up like four episodes is the way to do it.