We’re back baby!

A while ago it was announced that Futurama was coming back on Hulu.  I resisted the urge to blog about this because people don’t come here for my personal life rambling, they come to watch me create crummy worlds of plot holes and run-on sentences.  Plus I figured that a lot of other wordpressarians would be freaking out about it.  I found little to no freaking out despite the fact that 43% of the web is built on WordPress!  Maybe people were bummed out by the Bendergate Controversy before they could get excited about it. 

Anyway, Futurama is coming back and I’m excited and hope that it is good.  Now, my girlfriend has mounted yet another expedition to try and watch the Eternals.  On this attempt she’s gotten as far as the part where it’s implied that the Deviants were the true force behind Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event.  At first blush this seems to contradict what we all know from Futurama, that the Big Brain of the Brainspawn was behind said extinction.  However, what are the Deviants?  And I quote “unstable creatures that were born in new and more horrifying forms each generation”.  Ergo I submit to you that the Brainspawn are Deviants.  Which makes the Nibblonians Eternals I guess.  And Frye is Kit Harrington?  That sounds right.

Futurama is a silly comedy of course, but the Brainspawn are actually a villain I like for real and true.  They’re jerks, but they’re not actually evil, sentient thought of other creatures is unbearably painful to them.  My head canon is they tried to isolate themselves as far away from everyone as they could but races kept expanding into their telepathy-pain range and some faction of them finally decided there was no way to stop that other than to wreck everyone else.   Eternal quiet. 

What does this have to do with Shang-Chi?  Nothing, but I watched the first part of it again the other day and I noticed that in one of the fight zone pods (sponsored by Mountain Dew Spark) there was a Window fighting against an Extremis guy.  Since everything in the MCU is an Easter egg I looked up what minor characters these were that had appeared in dozens of comics since the late 90s.  Imagine my surprise when I found out they were no one, just background extras for the movie.  Blasphemy.  There’s approximately 9871 trillion D-level Marvel characters.  You telling me they couldn’t have thrown in a 15 second fight scene between Harpoon and Speedball? 

If I wasn’t so lazy I’d write some backstory for those two.  But I am. 

It’s not clear when Shang-Chi takes place other than after Iron Man 3, but I’m going to assume that it’s after Black Window also.  Plenty of reasons that a Widow could be pit fighting, but the Extremis dude is more of a puzzler.  As in why he is he alive?  I’ve been forced to admit that Iron Man 3 is kind of a mess, but the implication was that without a cure all the Extremis people would blow up sooner rather than later.  But having said that a couple of Killian’s minions seemed to be just fine Extremising it up all across the land.  Pepper seemed like she was going to blow up within minutes.  I don’t know man, point is somehow that guy was alive and full of Extremis and fighting in a pod.  Seems interesting.  Probably there’s some kind of Lost-style twist in the story where the Widow was there specifically after that guy because or something in the past. 

Speaking of being lazy, one idea I’ve had for a long time is from the Next Gen episode Cause and Effect.  It would be a timeline where the Enterprise really did blow up and two of the very few people that managed to abandon ship in an escape pod land on a nearby Tatooine and have to try an survive and signal Starfleet to come get them.