The Dog Episode

The episode is called Jurassic Bark. You know how it ends. Everyone who has seen it knows how it ends. Fry finds his fossilized dog from the year 2000 and the last thirty seconds just—they take you apart, quietly, with a cut that has no business appearing in a comedy. I’ve watched it maybe four times. I’ve cried every single time. I will never learn.

Futurama is one of those shows I return to the way other people return to comfort food, except it also occasionally guts you without warning. The premise shouldn’t hold up as well as it does—slacker delivery boy from 1999 wakes up a thousand years in the future, hijinks ensue—but the writers packed it with enough genuine melancholy and absurdist philosophy that it became something I’ve carried around for years.

There’s a video making the rounds with ten facts about the show that most people apparently don’t know. I’d put quotes around "apparently"—every third nerd on the internet will appear in the comments to announce they’ve known all of these since childhood, which you should factor in before getting excited. The facts themselves are solid, and if you’ve never gone deep on the Groening lore, there’s genuinely interesting material about the mathematical in-jokes the writers buried across the entire run.

The cancellation still sits wrong with me. It was cancelled twice, came back twice, and then finally stopped. More than most shows get. Still.