On Sat, 26 May 2007 21:26:48 -0400, Puffin' Billy <sorry@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
wrote:
> At the end of “Anthology of Interest I”, Professor Farnsworth is
seen
> sitting alone in front of the What-If machine as he says, “So that’s
> what would have happened if I had invented the Fing-Longer. A man can
> dream though, a man can dream.”
>
> The suggestion here, as I see it, is that the entire Futurama storyline
> is contained totally within the confines of the What-If machine from the
> point of view of Professor Hubert Farnsworth. The key point being that
> Farnsworth is in the room alone with no one else around at the end of
> the episode.
>
> Think about it. As you all know, the What-If machine shows you what the
> world would be like if you pose it a what-if scenario. During the
> preceding ****tions of this episode, Bender, Leela and Fry pose their
> questions to the device and in each instance the professor uses a
> Fing-Longer to activate it. However, the end clearly shows him sitting
> by himself contemplating what would have happened if he had invented the
> Fing-Longer! The contraption has shown him a scenario that included all
> of the Planet Express crew and their questions to the machine. The
> Professor views alternate scenarios involving these characters but in
> the end the characters were never there.
>
> The Professor’s invention shows tales that are “out of series
canon” so
> the ending seemingly proves my point that what Farnsworth has just
> viewed is not “series reality”. The only thing that is real is the
> solitary figure of Hubert Farnsworth in an empty room. Fry, Leela and
> all the rest are only creations of the apparatus.
>
> Comments?
Response number one:
The only thing that is real IN THAT EPISODE is Farnsworth and the
What-If machine. The Fry, Leela, Bender et al that we see aren't real,
but that doesn't mean there's not a real Fry, Leela and Bender outside
the machine, any more than seeing Farnsworth himself in the machine
implies he's a creation of the machine.
If you think about it, the outer Farnsworth we see in that episode
could himself be the creation of another What-If machine and the
entire episode, including the ending, could have been made up. For
all we know it could be What-If machines all the way down. It might
even be the case that Futurama itself is fiction.
Response number two:
Dude, you need beer. I mean, seriously.
--
Matthew Winn
[If replying by mail remove the "r" from "urk"]
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