The Doctor from Decapod 10
Dr. John A. Zoidberg joined Futurama in its second episode, on April 4, 1999, giving Fry a physical examination that involved a check of his ears through his mouth, and he has been the show's most loved failure since. He is a Decapodian, a species from the ocean world Decapod 10 that resembles a lobster walked upright: a pink carapace, two claws, a pair of eye stalks flattened into a face and, in place of a mouth, a fan of fleshy tentacles that he gathers to speak. He wears a lab coat and sandals, lives in the Planet Express dumpster, eats anything, and practises medicine on a staff whose bodies he has never learned; his diagnoses are guesses, his surgeries are catastrophes, and the crew keep him because the Professor, for reasons the series took twelve years to explain, will not let him go. Billy West voices him with a wet Yiddish inflection modelled, he has said, on George Jessel and Lou Jacobi.
The character was designed as the show's Bones McCoy, the ship's doctor, and became its Job. The 2011 episode "The Tip of the Zoidberg" revealed that Farnsworth had met him on a scientific expedition to the planet Tritonis decades earlier, that Zoidberg had contracted an incurable disease on that trip, and that the Professor had promised to help him die if it ever surfaced; Zoidberg had stayed on as a doctor, unpaid and unwanted, to be near the one friend who had made him the promise. The episode ends with the disease diagnosed, wrongly, in Farnsworth instead, and with both of them fine.
Decapodian Biology: Shells, Ink and the Mating Frenzy
Decapodians are crustaceans in nearly every particular the show has bothered to specify. They moult, and Zoidberg's discarded shells turn up as props; they squirt ink when frightened, from a gland the series locates wherever the joke needs it; they can regrow claws; they scuttle sideways at speed; they have a stink gland; and their internal anatomy, glimpsed in a few episodes, is a bag of organs that no human doctor has ever identified. Their planet is an ocean with beaches, ruled by an emperor, and their culture, as far as Zoidberg's uncle Harold Zoid, a silent-hologram comedian, represents it, is nostalgic and broke.
The species' defining fact is the frenzy. In "Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?" (2000), Zoidberg returns to Decapod 10 for the mating season, a biological compulsion that seizes every adult Decapodian at once and drives them to the beach to fight for partners; the males, having mated, die, which is why Zoidberg has never done it and, by the end of the episode, still has not. Fry coaches him, badly, in human courtship; a rival named Edna is won and lost; and the show's point, which it makes gently, is that Zoidberg has traded his species' one purpose for a longer, lonelier life among people who do not want him. He came to Earth, the series says elsewhere, with a wave of Decapodian immigrants who ate the anchovies to extinction, and he is the last of them we see.
Why Not Zoidberg: The Character in the Culture
Zoidberg's catchphrases outgrew the show. His scuttling exit, with a whooping cry, was the first Futurama sound to become a ringtone; his habit of volunteering himself for anything, on the grounds that nobody else wants him, became an image macro in the 2010s with the caption "Why not Zoidberg?", one of the most reused of the decade; and the pathos the writers gave him, an alien doctor who wants only to be liked, made him the show's stand-in for every viewer who has ever felt like the person the party tolerates. Futurama ran on Fox from 1999 to 2003, returned in four DVD films and on Comedy Central from 2008 to 2013, and again on Hulu from 2023, and Zoidberg has been in every version, always broke.
He is also the clearest case of the show's approach to aliens. Futurama's species are immigrants: they came, they stayed, they have jobs, and the comedy is in the friction between their biology and a human workplace. Zoidberg's medical degree is real; his knowledge of human medicine is not, because he studied on a planet where the patients had shells. The Omicronians are the show's invaders and Zoidberg is its immigrant, and the difference is that Lrrr goes home.
Decapodians, Carcinisation and the Clawed Beings of the Real Reports
A lobster alien is a good evolutionary guess. Biologists have a word, carcinisation, for the observation that crab-like body plans have evolved independently at least five times among the crustaceans, as if the form were an attractor; the argument that alien life might converge on shells, claws and stalked eyes has been made seriously, and Decapod 10 is the joke version. The lore has clawed beings too. The two men abducted from a Mississippi riverbank in October 1973 described creatures with wrinkled grey skin, slits for mouths and pincer-like claws in place of hands, and the Pascagoula abduction remains the best-known report of a crustacean-like entity; the guide to reported alien types lists the others, and the mantis aliens article covers the insectoids the abduction literature describes as the doctors in the room, which is, in its way, Zoidberg's job.
Zoidberg's other inheritance is the ship's doctor of the earlier television future. Bones McCoy on Star Trek was human, grumpy and competent; Zoidberg is alien, sunny and useless, and the reversal is Futurama's method throughout: take the crew roles of the space opera and fill them with the wrong species. His nearest fictional relatives are the crab-people of the pulps and the clawed monsters of the 1950s creature features, and his nearest real one is an ordinary lobster, which, the show notes more than once, is delicious.
Frequently asked questions
What species is Zoidberg?
A Decapodian, from the planet Decapod 10. Decapodians are lobster-like beings with a hard shell, claws, a fan of tentacles where a mouth would be and a habit of shedding their shells and squirting ink, and Zoidberg is the Planet Express crew's staff doctor despite knowing almost nothing about human anatomy. He is voiced by Billy West.
Why is Zoidberg so poor?
Because nobody would pay him if they could avoid it. The series plays his poverty as a running joke, he lives in a dumpster, eats garbage and is thrilled by any scrap, and in a 2011 episode explains that he stays at Planet Express out of loyalty to Professor Farnsworth, who promised, decades earlier, to help him end his life if a disease he carried ever surfaced. It never has.
What happened to the anchovies in Futurama?
The Decapodians ate them all. When Zoidberg's people arrived on Earth they found anchovies irresistible and fished the species to extinction, so that by the year 3000 a single can from the twentieth century is a collector's item; Fry buys one in a 1999 episode, makes a pizza, and Zoidberg, having tasted it, understands why his ancestors could not stop.