The third episode of Futurama’s 2024 season manages to come up with the first big surprise of the batch – it’s not a story about Fry, Leela or Bender, but about Frank, The Temp. Wait, who? Exactly! It would be unfair to reveal too much about the episode, so I’ll try to keep it spoiler-free. David A. Goodman, who already wrote two wonderful Futurama episodes besides being a prolific television writer for over 30 years, brilliantly insert a new tale into events from a popular third season story to create an everyday workplace horror à la Twilight Zone – or even better The Scary Door.

By going back to the workplace sitcom roots of the series, The Temp easily manages to find back to the early Futurama of the 2000s the story builds on without looking like a bad imitation. We get all the classic elements plus some new ones – the biting social commentary about labour in the 30th century is the dominant theme of this episode. The callousness and ignorance of the Planet Express crew has always been there in the past, but here it’s not really played for laughs, but for drama and even horror.

The structure of the story is not straightforward – it starts in the “present” but then slowly unravels and goes into two different flashback timelines, tying everything neatly together in the finale. There is no real b-plot except an unrelated bit in the first act that brings back the Omicronians and their leaders Lrrr and Ndnd in a welcome distraction from an actually surprisingly serious and earnest plot.

While the mystery about Fry’s strange replacement is slowly explained, the relationship of Fry and Leela is also explored further. Their attraction is even the tipping point of the episode that almost feels like a “love conquers all” plot device, but is entirely heartfelt and justified. The story also takes great care to integrate the rest of the crew into the shenanigans and while they are certainly present and all get a couple of lines, they are mostly just decoration here. Without them, it wouldn’t feel like good old Futurama though!

The animation is amazing as usual but since this is essentially a “bottle episode” we only get to visit one planet in the main plot and the rest plays out either in the Planet Express headquarters and the spaceship with all its nooks and crannies. The actors are in top form too, especially Billy West and Katey Sagal bring a lot of emotion into their performances once again. Curiously, there is no guest star – Frank, the temp, is voiced by series regular David Herman in a completely unremarkable, forgettable way perfectly demonstrating the mundaneness of his character.

This is also one of the few episodes actually acknowledging the passage of time, which has probably already sent some fans into a search for inaccuracies and plot holes. Futurama has largely been good keeping its complicated timeline together and while there may be some timey-wimeyness going on here, it can safely be ignored in favour of a good story. Futurama is a series that can afford to be scientifically accurate just when it wants to.

The Temp is simply classic Futurama at its best without just retconning the series’ past, but carefully adding onto it. Stories like this could be the future of the series, there are still a lot of stories to tell from the past. And it’s probably not the last we get to see of Frank…