First I'll just say, man, this season's episodes are really nailing it. The last three have had an incredible fast-paced blend of sci-fi concepts, satire, sight gags, one-liners, and character development. The show is so good, we (and FOX) have got to keep it on the air.
One thing about tonight's ep, I would have changed Bea Arthur's voice once Bender discovered the secret, which would also have kept more with the Wizard of Oz parody. The pacing of the plot was also slightly, slightly jumpy, but ever other aspect was, in the words of Ferris Bueller, so choice.
Examining the season guide document on frcr.com, I see that they have skipped a few episodes in the production run order: http://www.experiencemardigras.com/frcr/library/season3.html
The next episodes are:
02/11 - Bendless Love [3ACV06] Description: Bender demonstrates that robots have feelings when he falls for a shapely fembot named Anglelyne. Guest voice: Jan Hooks.
02/18 - The Day the Earth Stood Stupid [3ACV07] Description: Fry is strangely immune when flying brains invade Earth and reduce other humans to imbecility. (Interesting note here is that we can be sure this is the episode involving the origin of Nibbler, which the document referenced above knew about but had not linked to a title.)
We have skipped A Tale of Two Santas [3ACV03], The Luck of the Fryrish [3ACV04], The Birdbot of Ice-catraz [3ACV05].
I think it's safe to say the Christmas ep is going to be one of those unusual times when an episode intended to air in one season has been held over for a later one. It happened to Newsradio once, it happened to Seinfeld once, I don't think it ever happened to The Simpsons... Now all Futurama needs to suffer every standard network series indignity at least once is one of those episodes that the network agrees never to air again after being criticized by special interest groups. Better get cracking on that latino community parody, Futurama writers.
With the romance episode airing in time for Valentine's Day, I guess we'll be seeing three episodes originally intended for sweeps month (When did this go from sweeps week to a month anyway? Next year I guess it'll be sweeps season.). For the 4th week it should be That's Lobstertainment in that case, with the fairly promotable Hank Azaria cameo, although David Cohen said that one would air around the Oscars and I can't remember when those are. So maybe we'll see them get The Birdbot of Ice-catraz out of the way to cap off sweeps instead. I imagine with all the delays they'll just hold onto The Luck of the Fryrish until St. Pat's Day.
At any rate, next week we get Jan Hooks, woohoo! Finally this brilliant comedic actress gets some good material to perform again.