[FistfulOAwesome]

Ant10708: Originally Fry completely disappeared after his freezing on the stroke of midnight on January 1, 2000. However, thanks to the time-code a version of his spent 12 years in the past (the one who ended up becoming Lars). He reconnected with his family and his dog (Seymore).

As a fan I don't appreciate this change, especially in an episode that few would consider better than series classics The Luck of the Fryrish and Jurassic Bark. I know that it seems like I'm saying it was better when Fry's family was in pain over the loss of him (they never found out what happened to him), but to a fan it was.

Those two episodes were brilliantly written and allowed us to see that Fry had a life in the past, and not necesarilly a bad one. It also did a pretty good job of showing how people (and a dog) deal with the disappearance of a loved one. To say that it all now didn't happen and give us the "happy" ending that the writers so ballsingly skirted in the original episodes is a strange choice to say the least. It doesn't offer the growth his family originally experienced. Sure, Yancy still loves his brother (even in the separate timeline he names his son Philip (though I don't know why) and Seymore is still fiercely loyal but now those characters didn't have to have those traits tested in the canon.

The worst part is that the change might have been okay had they focused a little bit more on Fry's reconnection with his family. Instead we get a glossed over montage. Worst yet, Seymore is left alone, again, when Fry goes on his crazy search for Leelu (admitingly I like that story). Worse than that (I lied), when Fry finds out he's Lars he runs off to freeze himself without any thought towards Seymore (who he would have known would be at the front) or how his family would cope with the "death" of their son (even more surprising to them would be that a body was never discovered).

I do realize that BBS didn't make it so I can't watch those episodes again but it does lessen their impact (if you accept it into canon). How sad can you be for Seymore if his entire storyline is now non-canon? How sad can you be for Yancy when he now had a chance to reconnect with Fry?

It's like how before BBS, The Devils Hands Are Idol Playthings was the series finale. Fans assumed for many years that Fry and Leela got together after the Opera. Once BBS happened and didn't reference at all it became simply another F/L episode, subject to the mighty power of the reset button so should the writers command. It's still a good episode but it doesn't carry the same emotional impact it did before. I feel the same way about the two mentioned series episodes after BBS (or at least I would if I didn't consider anything relating to Fry's family in that episode non-canon).

So, yeah. I don't appreciate those changes. I will say that if the writers manage to do something brilliant with the changed timeline that wouldn't have been possible in the original timeline I will eat my words. Until then...