Futurama I Know What You Did Next Xmas: Recap, Review and Ending

Futurama I Know What You Did Next Xmas explained

Futurama I Know What You Did Next Xmas aired on Hulu on August 28, 2023, as the sixth of ten episodes in the revival's eighth production season, which broadcast listings count as the eleventh season of the show. Crystal Chesney-Thompson directed it from a script by Ariel Ladensohn. Wikipedia's season article gives its production code as 8ACV06 and its overall number as 146. Hulu carries the revival in the United States, and Disney+ streams it internationally.

The title plays on the 1997 slasher film I Know What You Did Last Summer, but the story is a holiday special in the show's usual sense: a gag-heavy sci-fi plot that ends on a warm note and an unexpected villain. It revisits one of Futurama's oldest recurring threats. Robot Santa first appeared in the 1999 episode Xmas Story, voiced then by John Goodman, as a mechanical Santa whose naughty and nice standards are set so high that everyone is judged naughty and attacked. In this episode John DiMaggio, who also voices Bender, plays him.

The premise starts with a holiday special inside the holiday special. Kwanzaa-Bot, voiced by Coolio, and the Hanukkah Zombie, voiced by Mark Hamill, appear in an in-universe program that explains to the audience that there is a holiday for everyone, even though everyone cares only about Xmas. The short version, given in the special, is that Santa is a gift-delivering robot whose naughty and nice meter is broken and who is out for blood. Then Bender gets a Xmas card with a threatening message: I know what you did next Xmas.

The setup: a time machine and a week off

Professor Farnsworth decides to fix Robot Santa so that he stops murdering people, and since the problem needs going back in time, he builds a newly revised time machine. Unlike the one in The Late Philip J. Fry, this one can travel both forward and backward. He goes alone, a wise decision after Fry became his own grandfather in Roswell That Ends Well, and returns convinced he has succeeded. To celebrate, he gives the entire Planet Express crew the week before Xmas off.

Everyone finds somewhere to go, and the cast of regulars is spread across the holiday. Hermes has his family, Kif joins Amy at her parents' house, and Fry is double-booked by the Professor and Leela. That leaves two characters with nowhere to be: Zoidberg, because his species dies if it reproduces, and Bender, because he was built and not born, so there is no family to visit. Zoidberg introduces Bender to dumpster nog, and the two of them become friends, a word Bender resists.

The crime: kidnapping Santa

The dumpster nog does its job: it makes strange bedfellows and poor decisions, and the kidnapping becomes the pair's brilliant plan. Drunk and sad, Bender and Zoidberg conclude that if they cannot have a good Xmas, nobody should, and they kidnap Santa. It goes badly. They accidentally kill him, then spend the rest of the episode dealing with the corpse, which at one point includes a joke about whether to have a white Xmas or a dark one when carving him up. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew is making versions of turducken.

Each group builds the dish in its own way. Hermes does it alphabetically unless one of the birds is too expensive, the Professor 3D-prints his, and Leela's family has turduckens that are eager to die. Kif's species goes further and makes a turdolphin, a turtle inside a fermented dolphin. When Fry notices that Bender and Zoidberg are missing, Leela is unconcerned, but the two have decided to hide the evidence by eating it.

The twists

The crew bursts into Planet Express to bring the pair into the celebration, and just as they are about to confess, a fully fixed Robot Santa appears and attacks. The Professor realizes that his own tampering caused the problem. A second twist comes when Bender and Zoidberg from the previous week arrive through the time machine and kidnap Santa, and the moment the crew thought was the past turns out to be the present. Bender and Zoidberg are the ones who, as Wikipedia puts it, literally saved Xmas.

The last turn answers the card. Santa himself sent the messages, in the form of a disembodied head, and he is blackmailing Bender over his friendship with Zoidberg. The episode ends with Bender quietly robbing Amy to pay him off. A bonus song follows, a twist on The Twelve Days of Christmas sung by Kwanzaa-Bot and dedicated to Coolio.

I Know What You Did Next Xmas review: the verdict

Rough Cut Review's verdict was that this was not among the favorite episodes of the revival, but that the standard was high enough to make it not the worst. The Kwanzaa-Bot song was a highlight, and the sight gags carried the episode: gingerbread-style shields with gumdrop defenses, a stocking for Nibbler's worms, and the turducken variations. The review praised the show's respect for continuity and the layered jokes, even when one of them, a time cat, was hard to place.

The weaker parts are the plot's seams. The review found it forced that the Professor was the reason Santa went bad and that Bender and Zoidberg are left out of the crew's plans, since Bender is known for inviting himself along. Santa's blackmail of Bender over his friendship with Zoidberg was judged largely silly. The bigger complaint is about a running joke: the everybody-hates-Zoidberg gag, in the review's view, feels old. The review pointed to how much the show has evolved, with Fry and Leela moving from will-they-won't-they into settled couple storylines and Kif and Amy's children being written into scenes, and asked that the Professor, Hermes and Zoidberg get the same growth.

Coolio, who voiced Kwanzaa-Bot in three earlier episodes, died on September 28, 2022. Two days later it was confirmed that he had recorded another appearance before his death, and this episode turned out to be it. It carries a dedication to his memory.

The revival drew strong attention that summer. Wikipedia's season article cites Parrot Analytics, which reported that Futurama had the second most in-demand U.S. series premiere of the second quarter of 2023, and Whip Media, which ranked it among the five most-streamed original series in the U.S. from the week ending July 30 to the week ending September 3. All of the main voice cast returned for the revival, John DiMaggio among them.

The revival has outlasted this episode by a long way. Hulu ordered 20 episodes in February 2022, premiered the first ten on July 24, 2023, and in November 2023 renewed the show for two further production seasons of 20 episodes, to run in 2025 and 2026. Wikipedia's list of Futurama episodes reports that the eleventh production season premiered on August 3, 2026, and that a July 2026 announcement described a set of three extra-long specials, the first due in 2027. For this episode, the lasting image is the card on Bender's desk.

Sources

• Futurama season 8, Wikipedia — Episode credits, air date, Hulu release and the Coolio dedication.
• List of Futurama episodes, Wikipedia — Hulu revival, renewals and the later seasons.