Good news, everyone! I'm going to start every review of this season with that same tired joked, so bite my shiny metal ass (gotcha again!). This week, we catch up with the Planet Express crew, attempting something that maybe they shouldn't: voting. It's the 3012 presidential elections for planet Earth, and once again, Nixon's head is up for another four years of shoddy leadership from a glass jar. His opposing party, the Thundercrats, is having some major issues coming up with a candidate. And by issues, I mean that the general voting public likes people who respond to questions like, "The environment - yes or no," with anything but "This question is ridiculous." The man who answers appropriately is Senator Travers, the white Obama. No, but really. He's from Hawaii, has a Nobel Prize, and Nixon/Bender starts the campaign that declares Senator Chris Zaxxar Travers an alien and, when he denies it, demands he produces his Earth Certificate. Sound familiar? It better, considering that Travers was born in Kenya, the "cradle of humanity." I really wish I could spoil the rest of it, because it's awesome, but I won't. Suffice to say, that it doesn't really matter who you vote for.

It's one of the tragedies of animated television that production takes so long, as usually they're a little late to the party when it comes to pop culture. Most of the stuff in this episode that directly involves the election is old hat to most of us, especially since it's a spoof of the 2008 election and we're currently neck-deep in the 2012. That, and South Park definitely already did the voting schtick on their episode "Douche and Turd". This Futurama episode is not a copy of the South Park one, but it definitely brought up some memories. That being said, this episode was actually rather fresh. It was a Leela-focused episode, but Bender was the one with all the laughs and all the jokes that I can't talk about without risk of ruining the entire episode were actually new or a fresh spin on recurring themes ("I'm forty percent wire!"). The end is a bit groan-worthy, but only if you see it coming. I wish I could say that I did, but I was too distracted by the rest of the episode to actually predict the end. That's saying something.

With the start of the season so lackluster, I was really excited to see that I was right: Futurama has a few more jokes left in them yet. They were just saving them - which seems counterintuitive, but hey, I don't have a seven season-long television show. At any rate, the good news I mentioned at the beginning of this article is not that I have terrible jokes to tell: it's that this show is truly back, and that they've recalibrated themselves for a great season. See you next week!