what am i even doing

In one of the (terrible) later season Futurama episodes, someone travels back in time from the even-more-distant future to stop a robot uprising. They succeed in doing so, only to then be wiped from existence because, if they stopped the robot uprising, they future they came from wouldn’t exist, so they wouldn’t be able to travel back in time to stop it in the first place, creating a paradox that erases them from existence.

The thing is, it’s explicitly shown that they travelled back in time using the machine language time code. And the whole point of the machine language time code, as established in a previous season, is that it negates paradoxes.

Live-action Hot Rod may be one of the most utterly worthless fictional characters I’ve ever seen.

You see, he has the power to stop time. This makes him so overpowered that it completely breaks the rest of the movie.

Seemingly, the writers also realized this. But, instead of rewriting the movie so that one of their protagonists doesn’t have a movie-breaking superpower, they instead wrote the rest of the movie so he has this power but never uses it when it would actually be helpful. 

There are so many points throughout the film where stopping time would be the most efficient solution to whatever is happening. But, whenever those moments roll around, Hot Rod is either not there or busy with something else. They made their character so brokenly overpowered they have to write him out of his own movie.

The fact that he’s a walking French stereotype (for some reason) doesn’t help matters.