2-D Blacktop

"2-D Blacktop" is the fifteenth episode of the seventh season of the animated sitcom Futurama. It originally aired on Comedy Central on June 19, 2013. The episode was written by Michael Rowe and directed by Raymie Muzquiz. Professor Farnsworth joins a gang of street racing punks, and ends up in a two-dimensional world.

Plot

While the crew prepare to depart for a delivery, Professor Farnsworth finishes turbocharging the Planet Express ship's matter compressor and naming the ship "Bessie". Leela argues with Farnsworth over the tradeoff between speed and safety, suggesting that he install seat belts instead. He dismisses her concerns, and she attempts to make the delivery. The ship barely clears the hangar doors before malfunctioning and crashing back to Earth in a fiery explosion. Representing the severely injured crew, Leela insists on getting a new, safer ship while Sal tows Bessie away. Farnsworth takes this very personally and storms out with an apparently permanent "Goodbye!" He goes on to break into the scrapyard where Bessie lies in a heap, awaiting destruction. He declares that he will convert the ship into a hot-rod using the spare parts lying around the scrapyard.

The next morning, Farnsworth flies away from the scrapyard in Bessie, now a nearly unrecognizable junk heap. Driving like an old man through the city, Farnsworth is unaware that he is impeding a multitude of frustrated commuters. The drivers of two muscle-hovercars move up on either side of him to scold and mock him for "making the streets unsafe for us maniac street-racers." Farnsworth challenges them to a race, which they accept, mocking Bessie's condition. As Farnsworth counts to three to start the race, he banks his ship left and right to unload the piles of scrap he has been inexplicably carrying, revealing that he has indeed converted Bessie into a hot-rod. A brief race ensues, in which the police give chase. The other racers flee in a conventional fashion, but Farnsworth escapes the police extra-dimensionally using a dimensional drift device he had installed the night before. He regroups with the waiting racers, who are awestruck by his driving and invite him to join their "crew".

At headquarters, Leela unveils the new ship, a windowless, nearly featureless, gray box that promises to be both safe and boring, outside and in. The maiden voyage is to a place of glorious beauty, but the delivery crew have no idea. Not only are they unaware of the grandeur, they are also unaware that the ship has made the delivery for them. It opens the exit door only when it has returned the crew safely back home. Leela seems to have suddenly become a soccer mom: Hermes sends her to shop for groceries and deliver Fry and Bender to karate class. During Leela's return from these errands to headquarters, Farnsworth pulls alongside her in his hot-rod and tells her that she is not cool. Leela exclaims that she can still outdrive him, even in her ultra-safe ship. As they race on a looped track, Farnsworth again uses his dimensional drift device to attempt to win. Unfortunately, he ends up facing the wrong direction toward a head-on collision with Leela's ship. Fry is standing between the two ships as they collide, compressing him and the ships to near-flatness in a neat disc shape.

Gallows humor notwithstanding, the spectators presume Fry, Leela, and Farnsworth to be dead. The three are not dead; in fact, Hermes' dark humor is closer to the mark. As a two-dimensional but otherwise healthy Farnsworth conjectures, "It seems that colliding at relativistic speed has collapsed us down into two dimensions!" Bender arrives on the scene, explaining that he had been napping onboard Bessie.

Two creatures calling themselves the Lords of Flatbush arrive and report that a feast is being held in honor of Farnsworth and the others. At the feast, when Farnsworth attempts to explain three-dimensionality to the King of Flatbush, the King becomes angry and orders Farnsworth to be executed. Farnsworth and the others flee. Arriving at the two ships, which are perfectly functional, Leela overrides Farnsworth's suggestion that they use the safer ship. Safe from the Flatbushers, Farnsworth laments that he and the others will die here, but Leela suggests that he use the dimensional drift device to attempt a return to the 3-D world. He complies, and just as Sal and the others in the 3-D world begin to cremate the remains, the remains themselves become the normal Bessie and her normal passengers. That is, Farnsworth and the others have returned to the 3-D world. All is well, and Hermes indicates that the entire incident lasted about five minutes.

The episode finishes with a mockingly corny and sappy scene: Minx, the street-racer whose father verbally abused her by leaving things unsaid, receives a phone call from her father, who then apparently says those things.

Cultural References

• There were two cars incinerated at the junk yard, the first being the Hanna-Barbera character Speed Buggy, and the second the Mach 5 from Speed Racer.
• Professor Farnsworth's fourth dimensional intake manifold features a Tesseract, the 4D analogue of a cube.
• The 'Mobius Dragstrip' is a reference to the Möbius strip.
• The Two Dimensional Skit is a parody of Flatland, a novel by Edwin Abbott Abbott.

Reception

The A.V. Club gave this episode a B+.^[1]

References

1. ↑ “2-D Blacktop” | Futurama | TV Club | TV | The A.V. Club

External links

• "2-D Blacktop" at the Internet Movie Database
• "2-D Blacktop" at the Infosphere, the Futurama Wiki.