Some familiar, wriggly faces are returning to screens in the next episode of Futurama Season 11, “Parasites Regained.” Premiering Monday, August 14 on Hulu, the adventure unfolds after Nibbler falls ill, and the Planet Express crew must shrink down for a dangerous journey into the desert world contained within his litter box.
Futurama is created by Matt Groening and developed by Groening and David X. Cohen. Season 11, picking up with Fry and the gang after a brief 10-year hiatus, features the voices of returning stars John DiMaggio, Billy West, Katey Sagal, Tress MacNeille, Maurice LaMarche, Lauren Tom, Phil LaMarr and David Herman. Executive producers include Groening, Cohen, Ken Keeler and Claudia Katz.
Check out the clips and full episode summary below.
Episode Summary: Fry can’t make it to a date with Leela, so she takes her pet Nibbler instead. He’s an ancient alien with great wisdom — though other than that he lives pretty much like a pet cat.
They go to see an alien-language film with subtitles. They have a great time, and bond over their shared interest in the intellectual subject matter. Nibbler goes from being a pet to being Leela’s good friend.
But then: Nibbler falls ill. He’s suddenly getting confused and having trouble with large words. They take him to the vet, and it turns out he has worms. If left untreated, the worms will cause dementia, and the total loss of his brilliant mind. Nibbler, and Leela, are terrified.
The parasites have infested his litter box, which is filled with his precious ancestral sand,. The only hope is to shrink the crew down to microscopic size and send them in to battle the worms. At that scale, it’s an epic desert adventure in a Dune-like desert world, inhabited by monster worms and other strange creatures.
The worms turn out to be the same group previously encountered in episode 3.01, “Parasite’s Lost”. A life-and-death battle breaks out, but it’s interrupted when ailing Nibbler himself shrinks down and enters the scene like a messiah, calling for peace.
With his great wisdom, he has come to see the beauty of this world in the litter box… how everything depends on everything else in a beautiful web of life. He decides to give up his consciousness, so that these creatures can live on. He is at peace with his decision.
But Leela is devastated. She is determined to find a way to save Nibbler’s great mind, even if it means undergoing a very dangerous psychedelic experience in the litter box world.
