David X. Cohen Says ‘Futurama’ Season 12 Will Answer the Questions Left Open by the Latest Series Finale

Futurama co-creator David X. Cohen says that the universally beloved episode and former series finale “Meanwhile” left a lot of questions for the Hulu revival to answer. Questions like, “Why did you have to ruin a perfect ending?”

This July 29th, Futurama will return with 10 all-new episodes for its 12th season, with two more 10-episode batches planned under the show’s renewed deal with Hulu. Despite an aging voice cast and the erosion of the narrative cohesion that perfectly capped off the the series back in 2013, for once, the future of Futurama seems eminently secured, and the threat of cancellation will not cast a shadow over the arrival of Season 12. Cohen himself seems to be enjoying a level of job security that has never typified his time with Futurama, but he, too, feels that the show’s fourth series non-finale left some unsatisfying loose ends that loom over the new episodes.

In an interview with SFX Magazine, Cohen acknowledged that there are complicated implications of “Meanwhile” for the new seasons now that it’s no longer the Futurama finale, saying that Season 12 will show Fry and the rest of the Planet Express Crew reckoning with the time freeze and subsequent reset that 11 years off the air couldn’t make the superfans forget.

“Everybody seemed pretty happy with it and it was very touching. I loved it,” Cohen said of “Meanwhile,” despite the fact that, for Futurama to return, the emotionally satisfying conclusion of Fry and Leela’s story had to be reversed. “It left many open questions, including some we had to roughly deal with when the show came back, (regarding) the time resets. What did they remember? What did they not remember?”

In the 140th and somehow not final episode of Futurama, Professor Farnsworth invents two new pieces of technology that (not so) permanently change the timeline of the Futurama universe: a button that turns time back by 10 seconds, and a dome that can shield a small number of people from the button’s effects. Meanwhile, as the title goes, Fry’s disastrous attempt to finally tie the knot with his long-time, on-again-off-again mutant lady love Leela ends with his attempted suicide after he falsely assumes her rejection, and the Professor’s pieces of time tech trap the entire dimension in Fry’s long jump off the top of the Vampire State Building.

Eventually, and, as usual, all thanks to Bender, Fry narrowly avoids death, but, in the process, destroys the time button and freezes the entire universe in place — except for him and Leela. Now the only two beings in the universe experiencing the progression of time and with no Professor ex machina to fix the timeline (yet), Fry and Leela perform their own wedding ceremony and spend decades living in a harmonious world without change as they grow old and happy together. 

Then, in what would have been the final Futurama scene ever, the Professor contacts Fry and Leela through a glimmer in space-time and offers them the chance to return to a time before time stopped, thereby erasing their decades of marital bliss. The two decide step into the unknown together, and, 11 years later, emerged into Hulurama unaware of what had just transpired the previous episode.

In Season 12, however, the ghosts of the perfect Futurama finale will come back to haunt Fry, according to Cohen. “(Fry) starts to remember things that he shouldn’t be remembering because time is sort of collapsing in on itself with the loops they’ve been through,” the Futurama co-creator revealed of an upcoming plot line. “So this one does tie into some events of the last series finale.”

As will the next series finale when Futurama leaves Hulu for, let’s say, Paramount+ or some such streamer, presumably. As Fry would put it, “What do you say? Wanna go around again?”