Bender (John DiMaggio) lies wrapped in bandages in a hospital bed, a bottle of Löbrau beer hanging from his IV pole, and that one image settles the cliffhanger “Futurama” left hanging over its season 14 finale. The show premiered a Marvel-style post-credits scene at its New York Comic Con panel on Saturday, October 10th, and Hulu posted it to its official YouTube channel the same day. In a little over a minute, it saves Bender, sends the crew back in time, and flashes glimpses of all three extra-long specials still to come.
The finale, “Final Ending: The Last Conclusion”, premiered on Hulu on September 28th and left Bender in rough shape. Hulu has no plans at the moment to bring “Futurama” back as a regular series, but three supersized specials are in production. They are billed as “XXXL” and arrive across 2027 and 2028, with a Christmas installment first in 2027. The tag hides a glimpse of each of them in plain sight. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Futurama” and the season 14 finale’s post-credits scene.
The tag hides a glimpse of each of them in plain sight.”
The panel ran at 11 AM on the Main Stage. It shared a back-to-back slot with “Bob’s Burgers”, and “Futurama” went first. Producer Lee Supercinski hosted, bringing out creator Matt Groening, showrunner and head writer David X. Cohen, executive producer Claudia Katz of Rough Draft Studios, and voice stars Billy West, Katey Sagal and Maurice LaMarche. Cohen set the tone early, reminding the crowd that “Futurama” is “a science fiction show set in the future”, yet one still made the old-fashioned way, by human beings. Per Laughing Place, the panel added that it is made for humans too, joking that it had spotted several in the audience.
West, Sagal and LaMarche also performed a live table read that, per Laughing Place, picked up the story right where a clip from the finale’s opening left off. In that account, Fry (Billy West) admits he never saw how the movie ended, and the crew goes hunting for a copy in a refrigerated film archive stocked with parody titles like “Megaflopolis,” “Deadpool and Moana,” and “The Fast and the Furries.” The same report says the panel admitted it had changed a few things for the live audience and pointed fans to the real version on Hulu. It is a small bit of honesty from a writers’ room that seems to enjoy rewriting itself in public.
The post-credits scene itself opens on a beam of blue and white light, then a title card spelling out “EXTRARAMA” as the Planet Express ship swoops past. In the hospital room, Fry leans over the bed and tells his friend, “You survived, Bender.” The next line explains that the doctors pulled it off with “an emergency triple ass bypass.” Bender sits up, holding a film reel, and the blame lands squarely on Fry: “None of this would have happened if you’d just seen the end of this stupid movie when you were a kid.” Professor Farnsworth answers in close-up with the only logic the show has ever needed, “Then let’s bring it back in time so he does see it,” and the time machine is already parked beside the hospital bed.
That is where the teases hide. The machine lurches the wrong way (“Oops, I went forward.”), and through its windshield Fry, Bender and the Professor watch three flashes of the future roll by. The first is a winged baby reindeer with candy canes for antlers, floating against a blue sky. The second is Fry on one knee, holding up a ring to Leela (Katey Sagal) in a purple evening gown, while Amy (Lauren Tom) and Zoidberg watch from nearby. The third is a woman in a pink tracksuit firing guns mounted on both forearms, her coloring flickering mid-shot as if the vision itself cannot hold steady. Laughing Place reported that the scene teased all three specials, naming the reindeer and what looks like Fry proposing to Leela. ComicBook described the reindeer appearing as the Professor teases what is to come.
Nobody involved has said which flash belongs to which special, and that is worth keeping in mind before treating the proposal as a promise. “Futurama” has teased Fry and Leela’s future plenty of times before, and a single shot of a ring through a time machine’s windshield might just as easily be a fake-out as a destination. The reindeer is the safer read, since the holiday footage shown later in the same panel featured winged baby reindeer, according to Laughing Place.
Back in the machine, the plan is to stop “precisely on July 13th, 1984,” the day Fry missed the end of the movie. The dial overshoots instead, landing on 198,144 BC (“Three, two, oops, we overshot by 200,000 years.”). The same dial reads 10/10 for the date, which is the day the scene debuted. The crew lands on a sunset savanna where prehistoric versions of themselves sit around a campfire, and someone calls out, “Uh, anyone want to see the end of a movie?” as Bender holds out the reel beside a club-wielding cave Leela. The reel rolls away across the dirt, a caveman Professor picks it up, and he announces, “And that’s how me invent wheel.” The scene closes on the marquee for “Deathbot 3000”, rated PG-13, with “The End” across the screen and a voice promising, “But we’ll be back, baby.”
The panel’s closing reveal was the first footage from the XXXL holiday special, which The Pop Insider describes as the sneak peek that wrapped up the “Futurama” half of the slot. Laughing Place, which reported the footage in detail, says it was shown as an early, uncolored pencil animatic. In it, the crew reminisces about Christmas traditions, the Professor reveals that candy canes are nothing but toothpaste, and a plan to bring Christmas back casts Fry as Santa and Leela as Mrs. Claus. Because the North Pole melted centuries ago, Santa’s workshop has moved to the South Pole, home to winged baby reindeer, and in the last scene one of them eats the Professor’s smart toothpaste, mutates, and starts talking.
That talking reindeer will apparently share the special with an old menace. Groening told Variety last month that Robot Santa will play a role, and Cohen went further with ComicBook, saying the holiday story “…involves a big Bender romance with a snowman,” before adding, “You’ll believe it when you see it.” Cohen and Katz also told ComicBook that each special runs about 66 minutes. Cohen framed the trilogy this way: “Another way to look at it is basically it’s about the same amount of material as a season and we’re presenting it in a different way.” That is the most useful sentence anyone has offered about what Hulu actually bought.
Groening has been careful not to say much about the other two. “Stuff that we have hinted at from the very beginning is finally paid off, and some unanswered questions for true fans will finally be answered,” he told Variety, and ComicBook reported that the third special follows up a major theory fans have held for years. Put that beside a proposal glimpsed through a windshield and the temptation to connect the dots is obvious, though it may be exactly the reaction the tag was built to provoke.
A long stretch of the panel went to fan questions, and the answers kept circling back to how long this show has been running on preparation. Groening recalled that he and Cohen spent their lunch breaks on “The Simpsons” inventing science fiction stories: “During lunchtime, we would make up stories about science fiction and how we wanted to do a science fiction TV show.” By the time they pitched FOX, Groening joked, the network “finally greenlit the show in that meeting because they wanted us to stop talking about it.” The over-preparation had a casualty, too: Pocket Pal, a tiny robot designed to ride in Fry’s pocket and explain the future, went unused for so long that the writers realized around the 30th episode they did not need him at all.
Katz’s answer to the last question may be the most revealing of the day. According to Laughing Place, she said that after 27 years, with some writers on staff for decades and others for only a few, the team struggles to remember everything that has happened on the show. Fan sites like The Infosphere have become its memory bank. For a series promising to pay off threads from the very beginning, that is either reassuring or slightly alarming, depending on how much faith you put in a wiki.
There is a craft lesson tucked inside all this. Cohen said on “The Making Of” podcast, per Variety, that “Final Ending: The Last Conclusion” was the sixth time the show has been written as a potential series finale, and the XXXL trilogy hands the team a seventh. Groening calls it “a whistling-past-the-graveyard attitude”, and the post-credits scene is that attitude turned into animation: a finale that refused to end, followed by a coda that literally drags its characters back to the start of the story to try again. It might be too cute by half for viewers who wanted a clean goodbye, and that is the risk. For everyone who has watched this show get canceled and revived over and over, a bandaged Bender on a beer drip is about the most honest promise it could make.
What Do You Think? Is the Fry and Leela proposal a real glimpse of one of the XXXL specials, or a time-travel fake-out? Who do you think the woman firing arm-mounted guns in the third vision turns out to be? And with a talking reindeer, Robot Santa and a snowman romance all in one holiday special, which part are you most curious to see?
See you on the next binge!
