Good news, everyone! After a decade away, Futurama will return with its eleventh season this summer. Fry, Leela, Bender and the gang have been in the broadcasting equivalent of cryogenic stasis since the end of its first revival on Comedy Central, but they’ll return to ship deliveries across the known universe from 24 July on Disney+.
The trailer for the new season has just dropped, and it looks very much like we’ll be picking up roughly where we left off in 2013, but with some extremely 2020s twists: in the middle of an outbreak of the Explovid-23 pandemic, Professor Farnsworth demonstrates a new nose-scraping tool to show who’s infected and who isn’t, for instance, and a trip to Crypto Country turns into a firefight in the Wild West.
Elsewhere there are giant sand worms, lasers, and a very overfamiliar digital assistant punting erotic massage oils. Plus! There’s a roll-call of pretty much every single one of the great Futurama occasionals: we’ve got Evil Santa Claus, robot thesp Calculon, Nibbler, Emperor Lrrr from Omicron Persei 8, and Zapp Brannigan demanding to be manscaped by the long-suffering Kif.
The promo for the new season also teases “payoffs to decades-long mysteries”, too. We’re apparently due some revelations about the whereabouts of Kif and Amy’s tadpoles, as well as what’s actually in Nibbler’s litter box. The mind boggles.