Another day, another Futurama finale.

Released today on Hulu, “Final Ending: The Last Conclusion” is the season finale for Futurama (the show will be coming back next year with three specials) but it plays like a high-concept series finale. Turns out, that’s because originally, it was.

“At the time we wrote the season finale, we did not know if the show would be going on again. So in our minds, that’s a last episode ever, and we wrote it accordingly,” David X. Cohen, the longtime showrunner of Futurama who also co-developed the series with Matt Groening, tells Polygon.

The episode is about a movie that Fry and his brother, Yancy, attended when they were kids, back in the 20th century. They’d snuck into the PG-13 screening, but got kicked out before the ending. Now, in the 31st century, Fry is trying to find a copy of the movie to see how it ends. Really though, the entire episode is about the concept of endings. Professor Farnsworth puts forth a theory as to why people crave endings, while the other members of the Planet Express crew have their own ending-related stories. And while there is more Futurama to come, this episode does mark the ending of this era of Futurama, which consisted of four seasons on Hulu beginning back in 2023.

Here, Cohen and executive producer Claudia Katz sit down with Polygon to discuss the finale, as well as the most recent season of the series. They also reveal some surprising details about next year’s specials.

Images: 20th Century Studios

Before getting into the finale, I’d love to discuss the second-to-last episode, which was a crossover with Disenchantment, Matt Groening’s animated fantasy series. How did that come about?

David X. Cohen: Matt pushed really hard for it because both things are close to his heart. It was very difficult because the shows are on different streamers — Netflix and Hulu — and we generously were granted permission to do it. My role was mainly to just make sure it played as an episode of Futurama, even if we brought in the Disenchantment characters. It worked out very nicely, because the nature of Futurama is, we’re going to explore unknown planets and universes, so we can go to Dreamland. That makes sense in Futurama. It actually works better than crossovers normally work.

Claudia Katz: Matt really wanted to unite that Disenchantment trio at least one last time for fans. That was a big driver for him, to give that back to fans of Disenchantment.

Image: 20th Century Studios

Getting to the season finale, did you know about the upcoming specials when you wrote it?

Cohen: One thing we take pride in at Futurama is that we have a lot of practice writing last episodes ever, which very few shows can say. At the time we wrote the season finale, we did not know if the show would be going on again. So in our minds, that’s a last episode ever, and we wrote it accordingly. This was the sixth one that we’ve written in that form and we are now working on the seventh one.

But because we’ve done it so much, I’ve thought a lot about endings of stories, endings of series, and so this one is really an ending about the concept of endings. It’s based on this idea I have that human beings actually evolved to need to know the ends of stories. The example I’ll give you is, hundreds of thousands of years ago, when early humans started telling stories, if someone started to tell a story about a forest, some of the people in the troop wanted to hear the rest of that sentence, and some didn’t care. Well, the ones who wanted to hear it could find out if there was a bear in the forest who was going to maul them to death, or if there was a tree that was covered with nutritious mangoes. So, I think that is an evolved need, like eating and breathing and reproduction, that humans have, to hear the end of stories.

Image: 20th Century Television

The episode has a nice nod to “Meanwhile,” the 2013 series finale. I kind of took that as, Futurama may have many finales, but “Meanwhile” is the real finale. Is that how I was supposed to interpret that?

Cohen: I’m not sure how to answer that. That’s a favorite and the emotion of that is just so intense and believable and it’s one of our best. A thing you’ll notice about that one, and what we try to do in general in our last episodes ever, is that I want people to think, if it is the last episode ever, that the world is still going on. Interesting, beautiful things are still happening and we may not see them, but they’re still happening.

Katz: We were getting these two-season orders of 10 episodes each. So the finale of that first 10, we know is not going to be what might be our final series finale. But the finale of the second batch of 10, we often don’t know and the writers do such an elegant job with that. With this finale, there’s a bittersweetness to Futurama, which is really anchored in Fry disappearing. His whole family went on without him. They don’t know what happened to him and never saw him again. So the ones where we throw back to that have an extra sweetness to them.

Cohen: There’s something very emotional about time travel. If you go into the future, you leave things behind, and that’s life. There are things you can’t go back and fix or people you can’t go back and see. It’s intrinsically emotional.

Image: 20th Century Studios

With these upcoming specials, is this a bit of a return to the direct-to-DVD era of Futurama from 2007 to 2009?

Cohen: It’s a little different. When we wrote those DVD movies, we had our dual mandate: they had to be movies and they also had to break into perfect episodes. They rarely aired that way, but we had to write them that way.

We have more freedom this time to just make it a really big, cinematic, epic Futurama story, which is kinda nice because we’re always trying to cram a movie into 22 minutes, and now we can actually spread things out and just do something that couldn’t be done in 22 minutes. We are a little freer this time in the writing.

Was this new format desired in place of another season? Or was this more of a compromise?

Cohen: It was the outcome of a discussion with Hulu and Disney of, “What is good for the Futurama franchise at this point?” We have a lot of episodes, so the general outcome of the discussion was, “We want to have some special events to call attention to Futurama.” Like, “Hey, this gigantic thing is here. If you’re a longtime fan, this is a special thing, or if you don’t know about it, it is worth your time.”

Katz: I think it’s the ability to “eventize” — which is not our word — these specials.

Cohen: That way we get three premiere-type events, rather than getting the attention one time for a new season. And to mix it up after four straight seasons of doing the same thing.

Katz: Futurama is the perfect vehicle for features — like, real features — so what’s exciting to me is, if that opens the door to features, even better.

Image: 20th Century Studios

You guys have adapted to a number of different storytelling styles over the various revivals. Is there anything unique about the upcoming specials?

Cohen: Yes. For the first one, we’re taking on the whole idea of holiday spectacular movies, and we’re able to mash it together into a huge thing. Bender has a romance with a talking snowman, for example, and we get to have a big, emotional farewell to Kwanzaabot, which incorporates the real-life fact that Coolio, who played Kwanzaabot, passed away. It’s our first real big, epic holiday thing. We know we’ve had a chance to do some smaller ones, but this feels like a real holiday movie, and Rough Draft Studios is doing some out of the box animation techniques for it.

Katz: Yeah, there will be a little nod to some very classic Christmas special animation that is going to be pretty cool.

Cohen: There’s a bit of a running theme through them, too, which is kind of the long-term, epic story of Fry and Leela’s relationship and where that’s going and what’s getting in the way of it. So we are going to deal quite a bit with that in a way that, pays off the many years that we’ve been leading up to what’s really going on there.

I don’t want to give away too much because we’re still writing the last one, but it’s good.

Image: Hulu/Disney/Everett Collection

For this past season that just ended, were there any episodes that felt like big personal accomplishments for each of you?

Cohen: The return of Marianne, Zoidberg’s love interest. To me, that’s a biggie and was very difficult. She’s a fan favorite, so we had to handle it very carefully because we don’t want to wreck something that people care about. We thought really long and hard about that. That’s one I’m super proud of. That’s one of my all-time favorite episodes in the history of the series. It’s a beautiful, emotional story with Zoidberg and Marianne where we also learn more about why we haven’t seen her that much. She’s been off doing her studies and Zoidberg has been secretly supporting her with his few pennies. But there’s also a second beautiful story about Hermes and his dad, so it’s a very emotion-packed episode. Whenever we can pull off sci-fi craziness and bring a tear to people’s eyes, those are the ones I’m proudest of.

Katz: I have to say, I love that Catfish Hunter episode. I grew up watching Every Which Way But Loose and Smokey and the Bandit movies. If I could have had Clyde the Orangutan as a pet, I would’ve given anything for that. So I just love that one.

Image: 20th Century Studios

This season, Nibbler got his first big story in a while. Can we talk about that?

Cohen: There’s always a danger with Nibbler because, when Nibbler’s involved, it’s like the universe is at stake and we want to be careful not to go to that well too much because what really matters to us is our characters’ emotions and interactions with each other. When Nibbler comes in and it’s this grand thing, it also has to be a personal story that we really care about emotionally. You really can’t pull that off every week, so we want it to be a special event when Nibbler gets involved.

With this one, this was such an event where we get to enjoy Leela’s affection for her pet, while also caring about the fates of universes, which is Nibbler’s business.

And if you’re a Nibbler fan, rest assured the next series finale that we are at work on now will deal with the tie-in between the grand plan for the universe, and our characters’ hopes and dreams. That’s the perfect opportunity for Nibbler to step in, and he does.

Katz: I didn’t even know that yet!

Cohen: Well, the script will be coming in any minute now.

Last question. What does Slurm taste like?

Cohen: It tastes like addictive.

Futurama is streaming on Hulu and Disney Plus.