Futurama Season 12 to Revisit the 2013 Series Finale

“Meanwhile” is a somewhat complex episode. Fry plans to propose to Leela on top of the Vampire State Building. He has a time-travel widget that allows him to go back in time by ten seconds. Fry knows that if Leela doesn’t arrive at exactly 6:30, she’ll reject him. When Leela is late, Fry, in despair, throws himself off the building. On his way down, he notices Leela walking up. He jumps back in time ten seconds, but finds himself still falling from ten seconds earlier. To stay alive, he has to remain in a constant state of plummeting. However, a series of contrivances allows the Professor to figure out what’s happening with time, enabling Bender to save Fry. Unfortunately, the time travel widget is destroyed in the effort, freezing all time in the universe. Only Fry and Leela remain unaffected.

Happy to finally have uninterrupted time together, the couple wanders the frozen Earth for many years, turning their lives into an endless, romantic adventure. They walk across oceans, create romantic swings from frozen companions, and grow old together.

When writers Cohen and Ken Keeler were conceiving the episode “Meanwhile,” they fell in love with it. They cherished its optimistic tone, despite it being a heady sci-fi story. Cohen, however, didn’t anticipate needing to revisit the episode. Suddenly, Cohen found himself faced with additional questions about temporal mechanics:

“Everybody seemed pretty happy with it and it was very touching. I loved it. […] But it left many open questions, including some we had to roughly deal with when the show came back, [regarding] the time resets. What did they remember? What did they not remember?”

If time reset, what then?