Futurama Season 11 Episode 5 Review: Related to Items You’ve Viewed

This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the series being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Futurama Season 11 Episode 5, “Related to Items You’ve Viewed,” smartly pokes fun at Amazon and Alexa-like home assistants while focusing on its core characters. 

This episode, which was written by Matt Groening, David X. Cohen, and David A. Goodman, continues the show’s penchant for satirizing modern technology — which we’ve already seen this season on episodes like Futurama Season 11 Episode 3, “How the West Was 1010001.”

This 5th installment of the season doesn’t hold anything back when commenting (rather overtly) on the domination of corporations like Amazon and how smart home assistants can be intrusive and dominating. 

“Related to Items You’ve Viewed” is one great example of Futurama‘s ability to comment on (and satirize) modern technology while staying as accurate as possible to the characters we’ve come to love. 

Notoriously money- and power-hungry Mom Corp. CEO Mom (Tres MacNeille) makes her first appearance on this latest reboot of Futurama. She’s in charge of a billion-dollar corporation nearly identical to Amazon. Mom is a surrogate for so-called “Evil CEOs” like Mark Bezos and Elon Musk. 

Like Amazon, Momazon is driving other companies — including Planet Express — out of business, and one of their warehouses has been physically invasive and dangerous. This represents how Amazon’s warehouses have been detrimental to communities.

This episode is more interested in satirizing how American buy products instead of what we buy.

As shown through the characters’ use of Invasa, shopping online via Momazon is dominating everything and soon, our technology can figure out what people want/need. 

As we have witnessed with Season 11, “Related to Items You’ve Viewed” brings back more characters, sometimes in blink-and-miss-it appearances like Tinny Tim, the Crushinator, and Al Gore’s head (voiced by the former Vice President himself). 

Unfortunately, Mom and her sons’ interactions with Professor Farnsworth do not mention her on-again, off-again romance with the Professor. We also don’t learn more about the reveal that her son, Igner, is Farnsworth’s son.

Furthermore, this episode depicts a version of AI taking over — or trying to take over — the world. We’ve seen this in everything from Black Mirror to The Mitchells vs. the Machines. 

While this AI plot is hardly revelatory, it’s the kind of thing that fits into the world of Futurama, which has often featured sentient machinery and technology come to life. 

For all its satire of Amazon and rampant consumerism in the United States, this episode is often at its best when it focuses on the core cast of characters.

Futurama fans who wondered about Leela and Fry’s relationship should be satisfied to see that they are now moving in together — to the (understandable) disappointment of Fry’s long-time roommate, Bender. 

It’s fun that this episode returns to the Robot Arms apartments, first seen on Futurama Season 1 Episode 3, “I, Roommate.” As it did then, this Season 11 episode shows the tribulations Fry and Bender experience as roommates. 

However, as Invasa enters the picture and Bender has left to work for Momazon, Fry and Leela eventually buy much more than they need; by the end, they’ve gotten rid of everything and have only kept the boxes.

Like those Futurama lovebirds, consumers often buy more than they need; even though they’ve essentially “discarded” Momazon, Invasa still rises to the top. 

This episode also returns to the fully-colonized Moon, which includes the human man and his three robot daughters. “Related to Items You’ve Viewed” does not reference Bender’s relationship with the Crushinator, as implied previously in Season 1.

Stray Observations:

• Futurama diehards are sure to spot the appearance of Scruffy, the janitor, on the toilet bowl cleaner that Bender holds. Scruffy is famous in the janitorial world. 
• It’s implied that Bender and Fry’s cabbage fight is something they often do, but we’ve never seen this before. 
• There’s a gag about small items being shipped in large boxes, clearly about a similar problem with Amazon (and other) boxes. 
• Farnsworth’s Smelloscope, first seen in Futurama Season 1 Episode 8, “A Big Piece of Garbage,” appears towards the end. It’s neat for the writers to bring back the Professor’s technology as long as it’s used organically.

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