The Couch Potato Presents: Trollheart's "Futurama" Journal

[Trollheart]

GOOD NEWS, EVERYBODY! IT'S TROLLHEART'S JOURNAL OF

How do you follow an act like The Simpsons? I mean, the show that redefined animated comedy, opened "cartoons" up to adults and even forced some new words into the dictionary (D'oh!), surely becoming the most popular animated show of all time? So when Fox approached creator Matt Groening in the mid-nineties for a new show to bolster up sliding ratings for the later seasons of The Simpsons, he had to think hard about it. No point in doing a Seth MacFarlane, taking your main show and simply transposing all the characters, with the tiniest of amendments and tweaks (look, Stan IS Joe, all right? He's the same guy and nobody is going to tell me otherwise!) and calling it a new show. So this show would have to be completely different, and yet retain the quirky, off-kilter sense of humour that Groening and The Simpsons had become famous for.

Step one then in disassociating it, or at least distinguishing it from the flagship show: set it in the future.  A thousand years, in fact. Step two: no family. Well, other than the workmates, who kind of function as a generic family, the same way people who work too much and spend too much time with their colleagues see them as their family. But no lazy, crazy father. No well-meaning mother. No mad, uncontrollable kids. And definitely, no dog. Or cat. Meh, maybe a lobster.

Futurama concerns the exploits of Philip J Fry, (who for several seasons was known only as Fry) a delivery boy who gets accidentally trapped in a cryogenic chamber and ends up being thawed out a thousand years later. Only seconds have passed for him, but the world he has known is gone forever. Earth is a far different place. Trying to find his way in this futuristic world, he looks up his only relative, his great-great-great-something-grandnephew, who is running a delivery company, and joins the crew. Here he meets the strange characters who work for his nephew, the hundred-odd-year-old Professor Hubert Farnsworth, and tries to adjust to the new world he is basically now trapped in.

Futurama successfully melds science-fiction tropes with comedy and also with PCRs (Pop Culture References) that give the show a sharp, witty and knowing feel. Much of the technology is, as you would expect, not explained, but most of it sounds if not feasible at least possible. Fry then embarks upon many adventures, some of the space type, some more close to home, but always hilarious. Well, almost always.

Having been cancelled in its fifth season and then renewed, Futurama is not above taking sidelong pot-shots at Fox, who quickly realised there was a bigger market for the show than they had thought, based on DVD sales (sound familiar? They never learn), and at one point in an episode the network executives are portrayed as cold but stupid robots. Take that, Fox! Futurama eventually ran for nine seasons, before Fox's itchy fingers grasped that axe again and it was finally cancelled forever. So far anyway. In typical nudge-nudge fashion, the final episode opened with a message: "Avenge us!"

CAST AND CHARACTERS
Philip J. Fry, voiced by Billy West

Fry is a pizza delivery boy from the twentieth century, who on delivering a pizza to Applied Cryogenics on New Year's Eve 1999 falls into a cryo tube and is preserved in suspended animation for a thousand years. On emerging he realises (slowly) what has happened and tries his best to build a new life for himself in the future. Sadly, as a pizza boy he was a failure and that failure has carried through with him to the future. Coming in at the lowest level in Planet Express, the cargo company owned by his only descendant, he is basically a delivery boy again, and not great at his job. He soon falls for Leela, the one-eyed alien girl, but she is not interested in him. He also befriends Bender, the antisocial robot on the crew, and the two become comrades in arms, though Bender treats Fry most of the time more like a pet.

Turrange Leela (usually just Leela), voiced by Katey Sagal

A cyclopean alien* with purple hair, Leela is the pilot and captain of the Planet Express Ship, and Fry falls instantly in love with her. His love, however, is not reciprocated, as he is basically a slob and Leela wants better for herself. They do form a friendship though, which progresses to a kind of relationship. Leela is the smart one on the crew, always ready with a sharp retort to Fry, or Bender's reluctance to do their jobs, and dedicated to her own position.

Bender Bending Rodriguez (usually just Bender), voiced by John DiMaggio

Fry meets Bender when the robot is trying to use a suicide booth, but the boy from the past convinces the robot there is something to live for, and they both gain employment at Planet Express, though truth to tell Bender does as little work as possible. Like all robots, Bender runs on alcohol, with the result that he drinks a lot, and also smokes cigars. He has contempt for just about everyone and everything, human alien or robot, and is also an inveterate thief. He enjoys living life on the edge, and is always one for the ladies.

Professor Hubert Farnsworth, voiced by Billy West

One hundred and sixty years old, Professor Farnsworth makes Mister Burns look like a callow teenager, and is Fry's only living relative. He runs the Planet Express Company to fund his increasingly eccentric experiments, and is happy to provide Fry and Bender with jobs, as he is not exactly inundated with applications for the positions, Planet Express servicing some of the more dangerous sectors of space.

Doctor John A. Zoidberg (usually just Zoidberg), voiced by Billy West

A lobster-like alien, Zoidberg is a doctor but knows little about humans, or indeed anything. He is always short of food, due to being poor, and despite being Farnsworth's best friend is treated like dirt, not just by him but by everyone. He is the staff physician at Planet Express, probably because he works for fish heads and whatever scraps the professor tosses to him.

Hermes Conrad, voiced by Phil Lamarr

Hermes is the accountant of the company. A strict bureaucrat, he likes nothing more than a full in-tray and a big rubber stamp. Jamaican by descent, he does not take part in the deliveries but audits everything, trying to save money and cut corners anywhere he can. If he could ration the crew's oxygen, or cut it out altogether as an "unnecessary expense", he would.

Amy Wong, voiced by Lauren Tom
An intern at the company, Amy's parents are the richest people on Mars. They basically own the planet. Amy is gaining work experience at Planet Express, and does much to show Fry what's cool and in here in the thirtieth century.

As with most other shows, there are other characters, some of whom become semi-regular, some just popping in and out, and as these are introduced I'll talk about them. But for now, this is the main character list.

And so, if for some weird reason you haven't seen this amazing series, lock the bar and make sure it's securely in place before the ride begins, as the management will not be held responsible for patrons ejected from the cars and catapulted into space during the ride.

Welcome to the world of tomorrow!

* There's a twist, but I ain't giving it away.

[Trollheart]

1.1 "Space pilot 3000"

Fry is a pizza delivery boy, working on New Year's Eve 1999. He's not happy with his lot. Who would be? As he heads out to a delivery he comes across his girlfriend in a taxi, who says she is leaving him. Even more disconsolate, his mood is not improved when he arrives at his destination and it is deserted, and he realises he has been played. Philosophically, with midnight approaching he stays where he is, which is the cryogenics centre, and through a bizarre series of circumstances falls into one of the cryo-chambers, set for 1000 years. He awakes in the year 3000, to find he is alone in a strange new world of which he knows nothing.

Taken to his career assignment officer, a one-eyed sexy alien called Leela, he is dismayed both to find how long he has remained in the cryo tube (though he thinks it's a million, not a thousand years) and also that his assigned career is ... delivery boy! He can't believe it! He's in a totally new millennium, a thousand years in the future, and he's still a loser! He decides to go on the run, avoiding the implantation of his career chip, which will forever label him as only good for the job of delivery boy, and Leela pursues him. He gives her the slip and, having found out that he has one relative or descendant here in the future, decides to give Professor Hubert Farnsworth a call. Unfortunately for him, there are no phone booths in the thirty-first century, and what he enters is a Suicide Booth, where people go to, well, be killed. For twenty-five cents a time.

Here he meets a disgruntled robot called Bender, who tries to help him use the Suicide Booth, but they both back out at the last moment. Bender introduces himself and tells Fry that he wants to die because he is a bending unit, and has learned that the girders he bends for a living are being used to make these booths. Fry offers to get him a job with his nephew, and the two head off to find him. However before they can they are spotted by Leela, who has been tasked to return Fry for implantation. Bender suggests hiding in in the Head Museum, where the heads of famous people have been preserved along with their brains, so that they can talk and interact with people. But when the police officers she's called for backup start beating on Fry Leela steps in and they escape.

They make it into the sewers but Leela follows them. Fry gives in, but Leela, impressed by the young guy, instead removes her own chip. So they all go to see the professor. It turns out he's about ninety years old and somewhat the dodderer, but he does have one redeeming quality: a spaceship! They use it to flee from the police, and the professor then tells them he need a crew to fly the ship, which he uses as a delivery service to fund his wild experiments. Fry is a little less than happy to find that, after all he's been through, his destiny is, and always has been, to be a delivery boy! But hey, it's a big universe out there, and they'll be delivering to quite a lot of it. Anything could happen...

QUOTES
Fry, on awakening in the year 3000: "My god! It's the future! My parents, my co-workers, my girlfriend: I'll never see them again! (Pause) Yahoo!"

Leela: "You've been assigned the career you're best at, just like everyone else."
Fry: "What if I refuse?"
Leela: "Then you'll be fired."
Fry: "Okay then! I refuse!"
Leela: "Out of a cannon, into the sun!"

Farnsworth: "Are you three by any chance interested in becoming my new crew?"
Bender: "What happened to your old crew?"
Farnsworth: "Oh those poor, sons of ... er, that's not important right now!"

SIMPSONS REFERENCES
To be fair, there aren't that many, as Groening obviously wanted to make this show as different to his blockbuster success as possible, but they inevitably creep in from time to time, mostly in the first season. Here, as Fry hurtles through the transport tube we see the ocean wherein swims one of the three-eyed fish from The Simpsons episode in which Burns ran for governor.

PCRs
As you might expect in a show like Futurama, it's absolutely littered with clever in-jokes, comments on society, references to movies, TV shows, books and other media, and just a lot of sharp, witty observations. The spoken ones you'll get, but some of the more subtle, clever ones may pass you by as they are often gone in the blink of an eye. Here I'll do my best to point them all out.

A particularly clever one, glimpsed only for a moment, is a couple who walk by naked, but their private parts are covered by floating black bars, like the censoring bars popular on some TV shows. But these are real, and can I guess be seen as a fashion statement.

Bender drinks "Olde Fortran" malt liquor. This is appropriate, as he is a robot and Fortran is a computer programming language.

The pub they drink in is called O'Zorgnax's, which is hilarious, in that it shows clearly that it's owned or run by an alien, but there is obviusly some Irish ancestry there, tracing probably back to Old New York, and at the same time making the old but never boring joke about Irish people being drunks.

Leela's callsign is Officer 1BDI - geddit? One beady eye! Yeah I know it's not a PCR really but I just think it's cool! It's also funny that she calls for backup, and the two officers, standing right behind her tell her they'll be there in five minutes!

THE HEAD MUSEUM
Guest stars became a staple of The Simpsons, though some would say that in the latter years they began to become more important than the storylines themselves (witness Kiefer Sutherland's first appearance and also that of Sarah Michelle Gellar), but how to do so in Futurama, where everyone you might ever know should be dead a thousand years? The answer is the Head Museum, where the heads of famous people are kept preserved for posterity. They still have life of a sort, and can talk, crack wise, rant and make jokes and observations. Many a guest star will show  up in Futurama as a "head".

The first we meet is Leonard Nimoy, good old Spock himself, and as Bender and Fry try to blend in with the Heads to avoid detection, we also briefly see the Heads of Barbara Streisand and ... Matt Groening! Later we also see the Head of Dick Clark. Some are not the actual people voicing the heads, admittedly, and some play a more recurring role than others - the Head of President Richard Nixon shows up several times, often in storylines - as does that of Clinton and others.

BAD IDEAS?
You can see from the first episode that there were things intended to run through the show, catchphrases that for one reason or another ended up being dumped. Here we see two of these.

"You gotta do what you gotta do". This is a slogan Leela points to on the wall, a poster which essentially shows a not very happy worker giving a weak thumbs up, declaring that whether you enjoy your job or not you have to do it. This did not progress beyond the first episode.

"I am already in my pajamas!" Professor Farnsworth says this twice in the pilot, and it's pretty obvious that this was intended to be his catchphrase. It was quickly changed to "Good news everybody!", possibly because it was realised that having the professor permanently in PJs might be impractical to the storylines.

1.2 "The Series Has Landed"

Each episode is preceded by a tagline which runs under the opening credits. As the series wound on and was threatened with, and eventually hit with cancellation, and then reborn, many of these poke sly digs at Fox, the channel that cancelled the series. I'll be referring to each tagline here, and if necessary commenting on or explaining it.

(Tagline: "In Hypno-Vision!" This will become more appropriate down the line, when we meet the Hypno-Toad)

In this episode we meet the remaining employees who work for Professor Farnsworth's company, which we learn is called Planet Express. First up is Hermes Conrad, a Jamaican bureaucrat who is the accountant, HR manager and general pen-pusher in the company. Next is Doctor John Zoidberg, whom everyone will end up just calling Zoidberg, an alien lobster-like being who serves as the company's medical officer, though he seems woefully inadequate to the task. He is also permanently poor, scavenging through bins for food and often acting more as a pet than a humanoid. We also meet Amy Wong,  a young rich intern whose parents own half of Mars.

The first job for the Planet Express Ship is a delivery to the Moon, and though Fry is excited about this the others are not: they've been there plenty of times. In fact, they reach their destination in less time than it takes for Fry to do the takeoff countdown. He finds that the Moon has been turned into a huge amusement park, and it's as humdrum to the people of the 31st century as we find Butlins, or Bush Park, or Disneyland. As they prepare the freight for delivery, Amy fails to notice that she has dropped the keys to the ship into the crate. Their delivery made, their mistake unnoticed, they go to visit the park.

It's not how Fry imagined it though: commercialised, sanitised, Disneyfied. He learns that  magnets mess up Bender's circuitry and make him start singing folk songs! Leela takes Fry on a trip onto the Moon's surface, to try to show him more of the Moon he remembers or knows of, while Bender and Amy are horrified to see the keys to the ship be tipped into one of the crane-arm machine games that are so frustrating. Amy squeals that Leela will kill her, but Bender grumps that she'll probably make him do it! Amy tries to win the keys while Fry, still not happy with being on the surface of the moon - as it's another animated construct with the car on carefully-set guiderails - takes the rover off the track and heads off across the real surface of the moon. Unfortunately he's never driven on the Moon before (something we could all admit to!) and he plunges the car into a crater. Leela has to rescue him by flying out with a jetpack that uses up their oxygen and leaves them in danger of dying on the Moon's surface,  no way back to the park and little air left.

Back at Luna Park, Bender is thrown out of the place for trying to get the keys with his own robotic arms inside the machine, and storms off. Leela and Fry are lucky enough to run into a hydroponics farmer, who gives them shelter in return for working for him. He says till sunrise, which seems a fair deal to Fry until Leela points out that night lasts two weeks on the Moon. While they're working and waiting for the sun to come up, the farmer chases Bender out of his house with a shotgun! Bender has been a-messin' with his three robotic daughters! They rob the farmer's moon buggy but he jumps into the Crushinator, which is a huge bus-like vehicle, and follows them. However when they jump over a large crater the Crushinator refuses to go any further, saying "No paw! I love him!"

As night falls on the Moon and temperatures plummet to bone-freezing degrees, the trio come across the original landing craft from Apollo 11. Taking refuge inside it they wait out the night, but they don't have enough oxygen and don't see how they'll be able to survive. Just then, as Bender comes running, chased by the farmer again - "You hadda come back for the Crushinator, didn't ya robot?" - Amy appears with the ship, rescues Bender and takes the lunar lander up too; her experience with the crane at the amusement park has made her an accomplished pilot. The farmer stares in anger as they escape, and Bender suddenly feels the urge to start folk singing again!


QUOTES
Zoidberg: "Open your mouth and let's have a look at that brain." (Fry opens his mouth) "No no no! Not that one!"
Fry: "I only have one mouth!"
Zoidberg: "Really?" (Consulting chart)
Fry: "Is there a human doctor I can see?"
Zoidberg (offended): "Young lady! I'm an expert on humans, now pick a mouth, open it and say Bwaa-da-dah-da-dah!"
Fry: (Makes the closest noise he can)
Zoidberg: "What? My mother was a saint! Get out!"

Farnsworth: "Ah, to be young again! And also a robot!"

Worker: "A wise guy, huh? If I wasn't so lazy I'd punch you in the stomach."
Fry: "But you are lazy, right?"
Worker: "Ah, don't get me started!"

And later: Amy: "Excuse me Sir, could you get those keys for us?"
Worker: "What do I look like? A guy who isn't lazy?"

Bender (on being thrown out of the park): "Yeah, well, I'm gonna go build my own theme park! With Blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the theme park!"

and later, when the guys forget to let him into the lunar lander
"Ah, no room for Bender eh? Well forget it! I'm gonna go build my own lunar lander, with Blackjack! And hookers! In fact, forget the lunar lander and the Blackjack!"

Fry: "Oh Bender! You didn't touch the Crushinator, did you?"
Bender: "Of course not! A lady that fine you gotta romance first!"

Leela: "Fry, look around. It's just a crummy plastic flag and a dead man's tracks in the dust!" Don't think I've ever heard a more eloquent argument against the Moon landings and its cost.

PCRs
On the Moon, there are loads. Even the title, which refers to NASA's announcement of the landing of the Apollo 11 lunar lander on the Moon in 1969: "Mission control: the eagle has landed!" However the first  proper PCR is Fry's contention that "Wow! I'll be a hero, like Neil Armstrong and all those other brave guys that nobody knows!" A cutting commentary on the fact that everyone remembers the first man on the Moon, but after that nobody cares. Can you name any other lunar astronauts other than he, Aldrin and, er, anyone else? Glenn? Anyone after that? Me neither.

When Fry steps out onto the surface of the Moon for at least his first time, he intones breathlessly "That's one small step for Fry..." and is sneered at by a guy in line with the rejoinder "... and one giant line for admission!" Seriously, nobody needs this contextualised, do they?

Fry tells them about Luna Park, and Amy returns "It's the happiest place orbiting Earth!" Obviously not wanting to get sued by robbing Disney's slogan!

Bender is approached by a guy called Crater-Face, who tries to confiscate his beer. The guy wears a flat large head in the shape of the moon, into which Bender pushes his empty beer bottle, near the eye socket. This refers back to the 1920s film, A Trip to the Moon, where the rocket lands in the "eye" of the moon. Very clever.

The Goophy Gopher Revue is sponsored by the Monsanto Corporation, one of the largest and most villified pharmaceutical corporations. They make aspartame.

Over a thousand years and with the Earth having been invaded by aliens at least twice, history has got a little screwed up. The story of the Moon landings now seems to be centred on "one man, who had a dream", and that man was ... Jackie Gleason! The creators of the park use his segment where he threatens his wife "One of these days, Alice: bang! Zoom! Straight to the moon!" as the prediction that man would one day walk on the Moon. Fry knows this is not the case, but Leela ignores him. This has been "common knowledge" for a millennia or more. Why should she doubt its truth now?

Another hilarious misconception is that because there is a Sea of Tranquility on the Moon, it must have been a real sea, with real water, and ... real whales. And where there are whales, there are going to be whalers. And so we have, "Whalers on the Sea of Tranquility". Good grief!

The Whalers sing a song, called "Whalers on the Moon", and when Fry goes "off-road", he yells "Crank up the radio!" Guess what tune comes out? Yup! Wonder why they didn't call the group Bob Marley and the Whalers? Sorry, sorry...

One of the arcade machines behind Amy is called "Mortal Kooperation". Not quite "Mortal Kombat", is it? Another is called (I had to freeze frame a lot to get this one!) "Gender neutral Pac Person"! Brilliant!

That old joke about the farmer and his three daughters is updated here, as the hydroponics farmer warns Leela and Fry not to be a-messin' with his three beautiful robot daughters - Lulubelle 7, Daisy-May 128K - and the Crushinator! Daisy-May 128K is a real in-joke for those who used the old Atari Spectrum, when 128 kilobites (NOT megabytes, KILObytes, ie 1.28 MB) was the top of the line in memory! Oh, and the Commodore 64 too I think. Well before the rise of the modern PC.

When Fry sees the US flag at the landing site, his first thought is "Hey! There's that flag from MTV!" Sigh.

He also rejoices that his bootprint is larger than that of the thousand-year-dead Armstrong. Size isn't everything, Fry!

The motto on the farmer's hat reads "The moon shall rise again". A brilliantly clever reference to the old Southern creed after the Civil War, and also the fact that, well, the moon does rise, every night.

[Trollheart]

A ROBOT CALLED BENDER
One of the things that works well in any programme, be it drama, horror, comedy, sci-fi,  is a good relationship between characters. The best and indeed funniest relationship in Futurama is without question between Fry and Bender, with the latter treating him occasionally as his best friend but most of the time more like a pet. One thing Bender does not do is disguise his feelings (discuss to your heart's content how a robot can have feelings, but he does) or hold back when he has something to say. He is the original "tell it like it is" merchant, and here I'll be detailing some of his better observations.

Bender hates doing work of any kind. Maybe this is because having quit his job as, well, a bending unit, he now thinks he should not have to work for anyone. Or maybe he is just lazy. Either way he will do anything to avoid work. When they arriveon the Moon and he hears they have to deiver the package they came here to deliver he greets Fry's suggestion that they just drop it in the sewer and say they delivered it with "Too much work! Let's burn it and say we dropped it in the sewer!"

He has really very little time for humans and their frailties. When Fry and Leela worry that they may freeze in the sub-zero lunar night, he quips "Whaddya mean "we", mammal?" He will make this point, in many and in interesting ways, all through the series.

In that context, however, it's hard to accept his reason for trying to commit suicide. I have thought about this many times (yes, I'm that sad!) and it just doesn't stack up. If Bender really has the contempt for humans that he obviously does, why would he care that he was helping to manufacture Suicide Booths? What difference would it make to him? It certainly would not drive him to want to end his own life. And as we will see as we get to know him, if there's one person Bender loves, it's Bender. I think it was something of a clumsy plot device, another perhaps badly or not fully thought-out idea, but given the general overall superlativity of Futurama, I think we can forgive the writers this small slip.

We learn here too that Bender seems to harbour an unconfirmed desire to be a folk singer. This will, to some extent, recur in the episode "Bendin' in the wind", but other than that it's kind of a throwaway line, as indeed is the idea of magnets interfering with his circuits. Again, not really that well thought out or followed through. Damn funny though!

From this episode, and the end of the pilot too, we see that Bender is also an incorrigible thief. He doesn't seem to steal because he needs things (he's a robot after all) but simply because he can. He's sort of like an android version of the Artful Dodger, and he has no compunction at all about who he steals from, including his employer and his so-called friends.

There's no doubt Bender considers himself superior to humans, and has no problems about saying it, loudly and often. Yet his own past can, like that of any human, come back to haunt him, as here he meets a robot on the Moon whom he used to go to college with, and is embarrassed, ignoring him.

Bender is also a romeo, a casanova and in the best tradition of love-em-and-leave-em never stays long enough with anyone to form any sort of relationship. Over the course of the series his contempt for women will be explored in various ways, some of them rather eyebrow-raising. Here we see him ignore the warnings from the farmer and "mess with" his three robot daughters. We see too that as ever, girls love a bad boy, as the Crushinator has fallen in love with him to the point that she will defy her father in pursuing him. Bender obviously has a weakness for hookers, too, as he mentions them several times.

[Trollheart]

1.3 "I, Roommate"

(Tagline: none)

With nowhere to live in the 31st century Fry has been crashing at the office, a situation that has begun to wear thin with his work colleagues. After all, just how many owls can you trap? When he refuses to take the hint, both he and Bender are kicked out of the office and Fry realises he must look for a place to stay. Bender comes to the rescue, telling him he can stay with him, but it turns out Bender, being a robot, only needs the tiniest, narrowest space to sleep in. It's fine for a robot but way too cramped for a human. So Leela helps them look for a new place together. But nothing suits.

Then a colleague of Professor Farnsworth dies, and the pair move into his spacious, upmarket apartment. Things go great until it's discovered that Bender's antenna is disrupting not only their TV reception but that of the whole block. Faced with having to leave if they can't sort this out, Bender tries to convince Fry just to leave the apartment and go back to his place, but Fry likes it here. So being somewhat selfish he asks Bender to leave while he stays. Leela is furious: Bender is his friend. How could he treat him so? Fry is unmoved.

The next day Bender turns up a work - stinking sober! For a robot this is the worst way to be, as they need alcohol to function properly. Bender acts drunk, with five o'clock shadow and slurred voice. He misses Fry, and has let himself go completely. Bender has caustically suggested to Leela that he cut off his antenna, as this appears to be the root of the problem, but robots looks on their antennae as us guys might look on, well, a certain part of our anatomy, and he doesn't want to do it.

After spending a night cold stinking sober and waking up in an alley though, he comes to a hard decision. He makes his way to Fry's aprtment and threatens to cut off the thing. Fry doesn't realise what the antenna means to him, and so doesn't see any big deal in cutting off "Little Bender", so despite the show Bender makes of doing so - "I'm gonna do it, don't try to stop me - he just doesn't understand.

Once it's cut off the TV comes back on and Bender can now stay. However he seems very down and Fry finally realises what he has done. They recover the antenna and reattach it, and the two move back into Bender's old apartment where Fry discovers a "closet" that is huge enough to make a very comfortable living area for him. Bender bemoans the stupidity of humans, who would be happy to live in a closet, but secretly he's delighted they're both back home.

QUOTES
Hermes: "As this shocking graph indicates, our water consumption has tripled in the last month." (Off shot of Fry heading with a towel towards the Emergency Chemical Burn Shower unit) "I notice Fry has been here a month, I'm appointing him as head of a committee to find out who's responsible!"

Bender: "I need lots of nutritional alcohol. The chemical energy keeps my circuits charged."
Fry: "So what's the cigar for?"
Bender: "Ah, makes me look cool!"

Bender: "Why don't you just move in with me?"
Fry: "That would be great! Are you sure I wouldn't be imposing?"
Bender: "Nah, I've always wanted a pet."

Bender (asleep): "Kill all humans ... kill all humans .. must kill all humans ..."
Fry: "Bender! Wake up!"
Bender (waking): "Aw, I was having the most wonderful dream: I think you were in it." (Going back to sleep after a quick conversation with Fry) "Hey sexy lady! Wanna kill all humans?"

Bender (on the idea of looking for a new apartment): "Ah, I dunno. I got a lot of great memories of my old place." (Opens his chest, hits a button) "And now they're all gone!"

Farnsworth (on the phone): "Oh how awful! Did he at least die painlessly? To shreds, you say? Well, how is his wife holding up? To shreds, you say?"

Bender: "You know, Fry, of all the friends I've had, you're the first."

Leela (to Bender): "Look at that five o'clock rust! You've been up all night not drinking, haven't you?"

PCRs
As Fry wakes up - on the boardroom table! - he reaches out to knock off the alarm on his clock but hits Bender on the head instead. Angry, Bender takes the clock and folds it, sticking it on the side of the desk, where it now emulates the famous "melting clocks" painting by Salvador Dali.

And speaking of artists, one of the apartments they look at is that old "stairs that go every direction" thing by Escher.

As Bender and Fry move into their new apartment, cue the music from "The odd couple"... They even do the picking up the cigar with an umbrella bit. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you're too young.

In the Robot Arms (does anyone know if there's a joke or clever reference there? I've been thinking for years there is one but I can't get it) as the apartments are all for robots, the rooms are all numbered in the machine code binary system. Perhaps Bender's room says something clever, but I can't translate binary code.

Speaking of binary, the picture on their wall reads: "10 Home 20 Sweet 30 Goto 10", BASIC code which of course any computer nerd worth their salt knows means that the third line sends you back to the first, so it's Home Sweet Home. Excellent!

There's a great montage that pays homage to those old movies where the hero hits rock bottom and signs like "24 hour drinking" and "all night off licence" slide by in a drunken haze to slow jazz music, but in Bender's case he should be drinking but isn't, so things like "Bible study", "No alcohol here" and suchlike float by.

CALCULON/ALL MY CIRCUITS
One of the top soaps on TV is "All my circuits", starring the dashing robot actor Calculon, whose ego makes Bender look like a shrinking violet! This is the first time we're introduced to it, but it, and its star, will play a role throughout the series. Here, Fry is addicted to watching the thing. So is everyone else, as they all come over to Fry and Bender's new apartment to watch the episode with Calculon's wedding, which is when things begin to go wrong.


A ROBOT CALLED BENDER
Here we find out that it isn't that Bender is a drunk, but that he - like, as we will later be told, all robots - runs on alcohol. If he doesn't intake booze he will start to malfunction. We also learn that his contempt of humans manifests itself, at least in his sleep, as hatred. More to the point, we hear about the importance a robot attaches to his antenna; very personal, very intimate. We're shown that robots don't need much space to sleep in - the apartments in the Robot Arms are all tiny little cubicles - and feel it odd that humans do. Also, we see firsthand the terrible consequences of a robot failing to drink enough alcohol, which basically mirror the effects a human undergoes when drunk.

But more importantly, we see here the first little cracks in Bender's armour of toughness. When Fry moves in with him he looks upon him as a pet, at best a flatmate, but by the time they've settled in their new apartment they've grown to be more like friends, and when Fry cheerfully suggests Bender should leave the robot is crushed (not literally, of course). You wouldn't expect this from an android who professes to hate humans, but we'll realise Bender is something of a dichotomy. He often hides his feelings under snarky behaviour and aggressive tendencies, jokes and insults. In some ways, he's as human as you and I. Except that he could tear your or my arms off without breaking a sweat. Not that robots sweat.

It takes Fry some time to realise how much Bender actually depends on him, how close they've grown and how badly he has treated the robot. This is first because Fry is fundamentally thick and also very self-centred (so a perfect companion for Bender) but also because he finds it hard to assign emotions to a machine, as I suppose any of us would. Data in Star Trek: the Next Generation underwent the same sort of casual prejudice at first, and Kryten in Red Dwarf to an extent. People don't think robots, androids, automatons or machines have feelings. Of course, they don't, but on TV or in film they can, and often do. This is not to say that Fry treats Bender as property or as a machine; to him, Bender is a guy, and guys don't cry or show their feelings. In fact, he tells Leela loftily, guys don't have feelings. So he assumes Bender has none. But he learns a little late that he has hurt his friend, and makes in ways the ultimate sacrifice, giving up the big plush apartment and moving back in with Bender in his tiny cubicle. That's friendship for you. If a little late.

1.4 "Love's Labour Lost in Space"

(Tagline: "In BC (Brain Control) where available" - with the BC logo made to look like the Dolby symbol)

Leela bemoans the fact that most men can't see past her single eye on a date, so the guys decide to take her out to see if she can meet someone. However it's a bust: again, nobody can get past her cyclopean feature, and those that can (including an entity of pure energy) don't interest her. She soon has other things to concentrate on though, when the crew are sent to rescue some doomed animals from a doomed planet in a doomed ... you get the idea. The planet was once a source of Dark Matter, but as that is highly-prized as starship fuel in the thirty-first century, the planet has been stripmined and will now collapse within three days. Before that happens, Leela and her crew have to rescue two of each animal from the planet and take them to safety.

However Vergon 6 is a quarantined world, and the blockade is being patrolled by Captain Zapp Branigan, whose ship, Nimbus, forces the Planet Express Ship (yeah, that's what they call it) to heave to. Leela is besotted with tales of Branigan's bravery and legendary prowess in space, and asks for his help in saving the animals, but when he hears they intend breaking the quarantine set up by DOOP, the Democratic Order Of Planets, of which he is the supposedly finest captain, he snarls refusal and places them under guard. Leela's admiration of and infatuation with him deflates like a balloon. When she goes to reason with him though she finds him so pathetic that she ends up engaging in pity sex with him (the champagne may have had something to do with it too, and her own desperate desire for intimacy) and is horrified when she wakes in his bed.

Trying to conceal her self-loathing, Leela leads the crew down to the planet, Branigan now being too full of his own ego to even bother stopping them. They collect all the animals on the list the Professor gave them, and come across an extra one. A small black creature like a monkey crossed with a cat. Leela decides that even though he's not on the list she'll take him, and calls him Nibbler. It quickly transpires though that, cute as he looks, Nibbler has a voracious appetite and can eat things many times his size, including the animals in the cargo hold!

As they prepare to leave though, now without any animals saved other than Nibbler, the planet begins to implode, but Leela finds to her dismay that Bender has failed to fuel up the ship, and the tank is now empty! With no alternative, and having had to admit to the guys that she slept with him, she has to call Branigan in to save them, which superinflates his already massive ego and makes Leela feel even smaller than she does already. Zapp however refuses to help unless they put Nibbler off the ship, which Leela will not do. Nibbler then poops, and lo and behold! It's pure Dark Matter that he excretes, allowing them to collect it and escape without Branigan's help.



QUOTES
Amy: "Let's take her out tonight. There's plenty of good places to meet people."
Hermes: "The Federal Sex Bureau!"
Bender: "Saucy puppet show."
Zoidberg: "The rotting carcass of a whale!"

Leela: "They say Zapp Branigan single-handedly saved the Octillion System from a whole horde of rampaging killbots."
Bender (shaking his head sadly): "A sad day for robotkind." (Brightening) "But we can always build more killbots!"

Fry: "I bet Leela's holding out for some really nice guy with one eye."
Bender: "That'll take forever. What she should do is find a nice guy with two eyes, and poke one out!"

Leela: "I might have liked Zapp Branigan if he wasn't a pompous dimwit who threw me in prison."
Bender: "You really are too picky!"

Zapp: "Kiff! I have made it with a woman! Inform the men!"

Leela (defending Nibbler): "Leave him alone! It's not his fault that he's an unstoppable killing machine! Is it, Snookums?"

Leela: "Bender! I told you to fill the tank before we left!"
Bender: "Ah, I'll do it when we get back!"

Leela: "You know Zapp, once I thought you were a big pompous buffoon, then I realised that inside you were just a pitiful child. Now I realise that outside that child there's a big pompous buffoon!"

NEW CHARACTERS!
Like The Simpsons before it, Futurama has a core cast of characters who are in most if not all of the episodes - Fry, Leela, Bender, Scruffy (what?) - but others are introduced gradually, some of whom become regular or semi-regular (think Krusty, Mo, Lenny and Carl, Chief Wiggum) while others only crop up occasionally (Mayor Quimby, Professor Frink, Snake). As these are added I'll talk about them and let you know what they mean, if anything, to the series as a whole.

Here we meet the man who will become the on-again-off-again bane of Leela's life, the egotistical Captain Zapp Branigan. Although not in every episode - far from it - Zapp will become so integrated into the mythology of the show that it will be hard to imagine it without him. He's so special that I've started a new section especially for him, see below.

We also meet Kiff Kroker, his long-suffering second officer and adjuntant, who Branigan basically treats as his slave. Kiff will figure prominently in the lives of one of the crew, later on. Kiff is an alien who looks sort of like a squashed lizard, but we will learn more about his people in later seasons.

PCRs
None really this episode, but it's quite obvious that the character of Zapp Branigan is based loosely around a certain captain of the USS Enterprise...

Also, the title is again a PCR, referring to Shakespeare's "Love's labour lost".

ZAPP: WHAT A GUY!
Possibly the only other character to make such nonsensical statements other than Fry and Bender in the series, a man who makes every utterance George W Bush made sound like the pronouncements of a wise old man, Captain Zapp Branigan's speeches, eulogies, comments and just about everything he says is pure comedy gold.

"In the game of chess, you must never let your opponent see your pieces!"

"Killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men in at them until they reached their limit and shut down."

"It's a little thing I call Branigan's Law. I don't pretend to understand Branigan's Law, I merely enforce it."

"Sham-pag-en?" (Poor Zapp is so uncultured he doesn't know how to pronounce the word champagne!)

"So, crawling back to the big Z like a bird on its belly!"

A ROBOT CALLED BENDER

This is primarily a Leela-centric episode, and there's not too much new we learn about Bender, but he does as ever impact the storyline in some ways:

Bender's soon-to-be-legendary reluctance to do any work manifests itself here in what could be a deadly oversight, when he doesn't bother to fill up the ship before leaving Earth. He nonchalantly says he'll do it when they get home, but the ship has no fuel to get home and the planet is tearing itself apart. Even so, he doesn't seem bothered.

Bender advises the crew he possesses what he calls Gaydar, and proceeds to prove it by removing a small transmitter/receiver from his chest cavity, though he does accept that he could be getting interference from a gay weather balloon!

[Trollheart]

1.5 "Fear of a Bot Planet"

(Tagline: "Featuring gratuitous alien nudity!")

The crew at are a game. Not baseball, but something called blurn. Basically baseball with some crazy extra rules added. Bender gets annoyed about the subservient role robots play, not just in sport, but everywhere. Before he can get too upset though they are summoned back to the office, and the job is to take a package to a planet run by robots, who are known to kill humans on sight. Because of this, Bender is the only one who can deliver the cargo. Unfortunately, Bender is captured when the other robots somehow find out he works with humans, and it's up to Leela and Fry, dressed rather unconvincingly as robots, to try to rescue him.

When their cover is inevitably blown (what human could convince as a robot for any length of time?) they duck into a movie theatre to throw off the pursuit, and as it lets out find themselves caught up in the Human Hunt! Amazed, they find that the head of the hunt is none other than Bender! Of course he's using the situation to make a fast buck, and human hunts on a planet where there are precisely no humans - unless you count Leela and Fry - are particularly pointless, but in addition to that Bender has been feeling mightly cheesed-off about his treatment to date, so it's not too surprising that his sympathies might lie with his fellow robots.

When Bender meets up with them and realises they're on the planet he worries they will be caught, but tells them he does not want to go back to Earth with them. He likes it here. When they are caught, he can do nothing to defend them, having professed hatred for all humans, and made quite a pile of cash out of it. He listens while they're found guilty, and sentenced to live as robots do on Earth, performing menial tasks until they can be replaced with better models. This verdict, however, it turns out, was only for show, as the two humans are dropped into a pit wherein wait the Robot Elders. Handcarved from meteorites by the original robot founding fathers over four hundred years ago, they are the real power on the planet, and they order Bender to execute his friends!

He can't do it of course, and admits that much, if not all, of the propoganda put about concerning humans is incorrect. The Robot Elders tell him they know this, but humans are useful as a scapegoat and to keep people from concentrating on the other political issues on the planet. Fry uses the proprganda to his advantage though, threatening to breathe fire on them, as he has seen in the movie they went to that this is one of the things robots believe - or have been led to believe - humans can do. Confused for some moments as to whether humans can actually do this, or if it's something the Elders made up, the robot rulers are distracted long enough for the trio to make their escape. Now there is a real human hunt on, and the robots are about to catch them when Bender throws down the package they were to deliver, which as it happens contains the one thing they have a shortage of here: lug nuts.

Delighted that the famine is over, the robots praise their new human friends as the Planet Express crew fly away from another successful, and safely completed mission.

QUOTES
Zoidberg (at fast food stall): "I'd like a jumbo squidlog please."
Vendor: "We don't sell those."
Zoidberg: "All right, all right! Let me have one of your young on a roll!"
Vendor: "We're outta rolls."
Zoidberg: "Fine! Just give me something crawling with parasites!"
(Vendor hands him a hotdog)

Bender: "Admit it! You all  think robots are just machines built by humans to make their lives easier!"
Fry: "Well, aren't they?"
Bender: "I've never made anyone's life easier and you know it!"

Robot guardians: "Which of these would you prefer? A puppy, a flower from your sweetie, or a large properly-formatted datafile? Choose!"

Robot: "What kind of robot turns down an offer of searing hot resin?"
Leela: "Excuse me, my friend and I have to go perform some mindless, repetitive tasks."
Robot: "Uh-huh! Sounds like a romantic evening! I won't keep ya!"

Fry: "But Bender! We're your friends!"
Bender: "Friends? That activates my hilarity unit!"

PCRs

This one is a nerd's Paradise!

On the wall as they enter the robot city is a poster showing a robot dressed as Uncle Sam, with the legend, "I want YOU for the Anti-Human Patrol!"

Another sign, further in, says "Got milk? Then you're a human and must be killed!"

Some construction robots are working on a Tetris-like building. As they lower one section down they get distracted and the rest of the structure vanishes into the ground, to the foreman's groaning annoyance. Just like the game.

When Leela is revealed to be a human (all right, humanoid!) by sneezing, the robot points at her and screams, as happened in the remake of the classic Sci-Fi movie "Invasion of the bodysnatchers."

As the robots pursue the pair, they call in the language used in Robotron, the video game: "Get the humanoid! Get the intruder! Intruder alert!" A joy for those of us who used to play the game.

The signal to get the Human Hunt underway is one of the old Windows start file sounds

The computer judge in Leela and Fry's trial -who is a computer, an old Mac or something - hangs in the middle of "Judging" with a message "Sorry, a system error occurred!" and everyone shouts things like "clean the gunk out of the mouse!" "Jiggle the cord!" "Turn him off and on!" "Try control, alt, delete!" and Fry's "Call technical support!"

Again, even the title is a PCR, referring back to Public Enemy's album Fear of a Black Planet (and, to a lesser extent perhaps, Porcupine Tree's Fear of a Blank Planet).

A ROBOT CALLED BENDER
Bender is an advocate for mechanical equality - though obviously not if it means he has to work as hard as a human! He loathes the fact that robots do all the menial tasks. He asks how many robot managers there are in the blurn Leagues - which of course is none, though Fry guesses eleven - and when a tiny robot cleans up the broken bottle he has dropped he snarls "Oh who's this cleaning up my crap? Is it a human child? I wish!"

Nevertheless, when he arrives on the robot planet and sees a chance to make some easy cash (why do robots need money? Anyway...) he grabs it and then decides he wants to stay where robots are in charge, and no humans boss them around. But in the end his friendship with Fry - and to a lesser extent, Leela - wins out and he helps them escape. He's known to invent "robot holidays" to get out of work, like Robonza, Robonaka and Robodon; nobody believes they're real and they just indulge him. Why they do is not certain (if you were to take this seriously and not as a cartoon) because he does little work, adds no value and complains all the time. Hardly the model employee!

He's certainly not above becoming something of a zealot when the other robots look up to him for his human-hating, pretending he has killed "a million billion humans", but essentially as we see it's all to push sales of his latest album, "Bender lets loose". When it comes to Bender, cash is most definitely king!

His protestations at being the only one who can deliver the package border on ridiculous, as Leela reminds him this is the only work he's ever been asked to do. Doesn't stop him complaining and grumbling about it though!

1.6 "A Fishful of Dollars"

(Tagline: "Loading...")
NEW CHARACTERS!

Here we meet Mom, the wealthy industrialist who rules the robotics industry with an iron hand. She presents a different face to the world, that of a kindly old grandmother, but in reality she's a fire-spitting, ball-breaking, chew-em-up-and-spit-em-out hardnosed tycoon, colder than ice and who makes Mister Burns look like a philanthropist. We also meet her three idiot sons, Walt, Larry and Ignar.


This is also the first time we see Scruffy, who we will later learn is the janitor at Planet Express. He's working at this time in "Le Spa", which is - anyone? - a spa, and he's giving Bender a backrub with a sander. We're not told who he is at the time, but it's interesting that this is in fact the first time he's shown. Never noticed it before.

Fry finds that advertising has progressed to the point where ads are now directed into the brain, so that they can become part of your dreams, and instil an unconscious desire to buy their product. It's while responding to such not-so-subliminal messages that Fry and his friends are out shopping, while Bender prefers to shoplift. But he gets caught, and the guys are fifty cents short of the money to pay his fine. Fry goes to the bank to get money, and is amazed and delighted to find that, due to compound interest, his meagre savings that he squirreled away in the twentieth century have blossomed into a fortune, and he is now a very rich man indeed.

He takes his friends out to dinner, for pizzas but is annoyed and dismayed that he can't have his favourite topping, as anchovies have been extinct for over eight hundred years now. Coincidentally, this is the time apparently that Zoidberg's race arrived on Earth... Anyway it's while at an auction to buy all the twentieth century relics he can for his new twentieth century apartment that Fry comes across an unopened can as one of the lots. He puts in a big bid, but then Mom appears and a bidding war erupts, with Fry eventually raising the stakes to "One jillion dollars", until he's told there's no such number. In the end he outbids Mom, who gracefully accepts defeat. In public. In reality she's fuming.

The thing is that she wants the anchovies to prevent them being used for their natural oil, which if extracted and synthesised could put her out of business, as the producer of the world's favourite brand of robot oil. She thinks that Fry knows this, but of course he doesn't. She decides to bankrupt Fry, so that he'll have to sell the fish. Having heard that Fry's PIN is the same as the price of a pizzas and soda in Panucci's Pizza, where he used to work, she sends her sons to setup an elaborate reconstruction of the place and convince Fry he's back in his own time.

In reality, it's  pretty poorly handled. Larry keeps saying things like "This is a thousand years ago" and "Anchovies aren't extinct yet", which would give anyone with half a brain a clue something wasn't right. But unfortunately for him and fortunately for them, Fry has never possessed anything close to half a brain, and he falls for it. When they bring in Pamela Anderson to order a large pizza and soda (don't ask me why they chose her!) he tells her she owes him ten dollars and seventy-seven cents - 10.77 - and then goes on to clinch the award for stupidest person on Earth by unnecessarily mentioning that this figure is the same as his PIN!

With all his money stolen, and back to being poor, Fry is visited by Mom, who offers to buy the anchovies from him. He refuses to sell though, telling her that he is going to put them on a pizza so that his friends can enjoy them. Seeing that he truly doesn't have any designs on her robot oil empire, Mom leaves him to it.

QUOTES
Leela: "Didn't you have ads in the twentieth century?"
Fry: "Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ballgames, on buses, milk cartons and t-shirts and bananas. And written in the sky. But not in our dreams."

Voiceover: "Mom, Love and Screen Door are all registered trademarks of MomCorp!"

Leela: "You're Fry's relative. Do you have any idea why he's so crazy?"
Farnsworth: "Wha? Oh they say madness runs in our family! Some even called me mad! And why? Because I dare to dream of my own race of atomic monsters? Atomic supermen with octagonal shaped heads that suck blood out of..."

PCRs
When Fry tries on the Lightspeed (TM) Briefs, he sees himself as a lot hunkier, and with two girls hanging onto him. Then he looks up and sees on the mirror the warning: "Objects in the mirror are less attractive than they appear". You know where that comes from.

Not really a PCR but it's a funny sign outside the New New York Police Department station: "Ask about our generous brutality settlements!"

Fry puts on a CD of "Big utts" and Leela tells him he can't sit here listening to classical music!


1.7 "My Three Suns"

(Tagline: "Presented in DoubleVision (where drunk)")

NEW CHARACTER!

Elzar, an alien celebrity chef, is introduced via the cooking programmes that Bender watches, and he will become a recurring character in the show, mostly on the sidelines though. He has four arms, is purple and has a face sort of like a squished hog. His trademark catchphrase is "Let's kick it up a notch! Bam!"

Bender is embarrassed to admit he likes cooking, but is able to put his hobby to good use (sort of) when Hermes tells him that he can't continue getting paid unless he does something within the company, and so he is hired as the official onboard cook. Trouble is, he's terrible. He has no idea how to cook, much less cook for humans. After all, he doesn't eat, or have to eat, so how can he know how to feed people who do? His first meal does not go down as he would have hoped. In the words of the poet in Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, he was "disappointed" by the meal's reception. But the gang have been sent on a mission to the Galaxy of Terror, and they're already en route, so they have to live with it.

Unfortunately for Fry, the delivery point lies across a baking desert (why they couldn't have landed closer I don't know) and with the almost fatal dose of salt still in his system, it doesn't help that this planet has three suns, so that when one goes down, two more rise! He makes it to the palace of the emperor, where he delivers his package, but while he waits for someone to show up he can't resist the cool, clear bottle of water sitting on the throne, and drains it, only to find that this crazy planet is peopled by beings made entirely of water (why? On a desert world? What kind of evolution is that?) and he has just drunk the emperor!

As a result of the "assassination" of the emperor, Fry is crowned in his place. This seems to be the way the Trisolarans choose their ruler: the one is drunk by the next, and so on. Therefore there seems nothing odd in this very odd method of ascension to power, even if Fry is a human and not made of water. As he prepares for his coronation - with his new prime minister, Bender, at his side - he is told he must recite the royal oath flawlessly from memory, or he will be killed. This is not good news for Fry, who can barely remember his own name, let alone a lengthy and ancient oath!

Leela's attempts to convince him that he is in over his head fall on deaf ears, and she loses patience with him, leaving him to his fate. She goes back to the ship, but when the three suns set the Trisolarans see to their dismay that their emperor, whom Fry drunk, is still alive! He demands he be removed from Fry's stomach and rethroned, but that's a problem. With several alternative methods discounted, they settle on trying to make Fry cry him out. But Fry believes he is too macho to cry. It's only when Leela, responding to Bender's request for her help, comes to the rescue that he realises what a friend she is, and when Bender pretends she has been killed he begins to cry. The emperor begins to be removed, but then Fry sees Leela is alive and they have to resort to beating him up to get the tears. In the end the emperor is removed and all is well.

QUOTES
Hermes: "Bender, it has come to my attention that the company has been paying you to do nothing but just loaf about on that couch."
Bender: "You call that a couch? I demand a pillow!"

Fry: "Wow! You guys got every type of meat here, except human!"
Shopkeeper: "What? You want human?"

Fry: "Urrggh! That's the saltiest thing I ever tasted! And I once ate a two pound bag of salt!"

Bender: "There was nothing wrong with that food! The salt level was ten percent below a lethal dose!"

Leela: "Half these emperors were drunk at their own coronation!"
Fry: "Hey, I plan on having a few brewskis myself!"

Leela: "Don't you ever stop to think ahead?"
Fry: "Hell no! If I stopped to think I wouldn't be emperor. I wouldn't even be here in the future. It's just like the story of the grasshopper and the octopus. All through the year the grasshopper kept burying acorns for the winter, while the octopus mooched off his girlfriend and watched TV. Then winter came and the grasshopper died, but the octopus ate all his acorns. Also he got a race car."

Zoidberg: "Relax Fry! I'll simply spin you in a high-speed centrifuge, separating out the denser fluid of His Highness."
Fry: "Won't that crush my bones?"
Zoidberg: "Oh right! Right! With the bones! I always forget about the bones!"

PCRs
As the guys walk through Little Neptune, they pass a shop called a Head Shop. Normally this refers to a shop that sells herbal remedies, shall we say, but this one seems to be actually selling heads in jars, like those in the Head Museum!

A junkie tries to get "Refreshing Crack!" from a vending machine. It stops halfway, not falling down the chute, and he slumps against the machine, beating it forlornly with his fists and crying "Come on, man! Don't hold out on me like this!"

Fry passes a big snail-like alien, says "What up?" to which the alien, sliding by, replies "Word!"

One of the cartons in the shop, alongside types of slug, says "I can't believe it's not slug!"

A ROBOT CALLED BENDER
Anxious to be the cook, and both fulfil his dreams of being a chef while retaining his job, Bender doesn't particularly care how well his food is received. When he goes to buy Neptunian Slug for the dinner, the shopkeeper asks him if he wants yellow or purple and he says he doesn't care. The shopkeeper warns him that the yellow one gives "terrible, nightmarish diarrohea", but Bender probably doesn't even know what that is, and isn't bothered.

He's intrigued to learn that Leela likes his "in your face" attitude, and despite his often dismissive tone with Fry is prepared to call in Leela to help them, knowing it's the only way to save his friend.

[Trollheart]

1.8 "A Big Piece of Garbage"

(Tagline: "Mr. Bender's wardobe by Robotany 500")

It's the annual awards ceremony at the Academy of Inventors, and Professor Farnsworth believes his invention this year is unbeatable. However, when he realises that due to galloping senility he is about to present the same invention this year as last, he has to make a sudden change on the fly, and ends up embarrassing and humiliating himself in front of the august assemblage. What's even worse is that his arch-enemy, Doctor Wurnstrum, wins with his invention. But Farnsworth is determined to plough ahead with the invention that was a mere scribbled blueprint at the awards, something he calls a smelloscope, which will allow distant odours to be picked up - why? Then he remembers he already built one!

It's while using this that they discover a stench that is off the charts, and with some research they realise that a massive ball of garbage from the twentieth century that was fired off into space has come back around and is heading for Earth, with what will be disastrous consequences! But when they try to warn the mayor about the impending disaster, it turns out he has hired Wurnstrum as his scientific advisor. Loath to turn down a chance to make his nemesis look bad, Wurnstrum plays down the danger, saying it could be a fault with the smelloscope, but when a report comes in from Neptune that the big ball of garbage has passed close by their monitoring station, there can be no doubt and action must be taken.

Shooting a missile at it won't work as the density of the ball would just allow the rocket to pass right through it, so Farnsworth suggests placing an explosive device upon it, and guess who gets the job? Unfortunately, the professor's senility has again been at work, and where he thought they had twenty-five minutes to get off the garbage ball before it blew, the counter has been put on upside down and they have just over fifty seconds! With no other choice, Bender has to hurl the bomb into space, and they're safe, but now with no way to stop the stinking ball. Farnsworth though comes up with an idea: if they can build a similar ball maybe they can launch it against this one, the one knocking the other out of its path and thereby causing it to miss Earth. It's a stupid plan, but it might just work ... if they can think of something to make the second ball out of.

"Uh," suggests Fry, "how about garbage?" And so the people of New New York have to learn from a twentieth century wastrel how to make garbage all over again. The ball is built, the rocket is fired and knocks the other one into the sun. Leela expresses concern over where the second ball may end up, but nobody cares. As Fry says, it's none of their concern: that's the twentieth century way!

QUOTES
Wurnstrum: "It's time to leave science to the hundred twenty-year olds!"
Farnsworth: "You young turks think you know everything! I was inventing things while you were just barely turning senile!"

Fry: "As long as you don't make me smell Uranus!"
Leela: "I don't get it?"
Farnsworth: "I'm sorry Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620  to end that stupid joke once and for all."
Fry: "What's it called now?"
Farnsworth: "Urectum!"

Voiceover: "The repulsive barge circled the oceans for fifty years but no country would allow it to land. Not even that really filthy one. You know the one I mean!"

Fry: "Hey! You have no right to criticise the twentieth century! We gave the world the light bulb, the steam press and the cotton jenny!"
Leela: "All of those things are from the nineteenth century."
Fry: "Yeah, well, they probably just copied us."

(Note: this does not tie in with the view we had of how the 31st century sees our history, where they were completely confused about how the Moon landings were achieved, and, later, how cars are made by robots now. Bit of a slip there: Leela should barely even know that such a thing as the 19th century existed, much less what inventions were from that time period).

Morbo: "Puny Earthlings were today shocked to learn that a giant ball of garbage will soon destroy their pathetic city of New New York."
Human Female: "Makes me glad we live in Los Angeles, Morbo!"
Morbo: "Morbo agrees!"

Mayor: "It's time to put a real scientist in charge! Doctor Wurnstrum, can you save my city?"
Wurnstrum: "Of course. But it'll cost you."
Mayor: "Anything."
Wurnstrum: "All right then, first I want tenure."
Mayor: "Done."
Wurnstrum: "And a big research grant."
Mayor: "You got it."
Wurnstrum: "Also access to a lab, and three graduate students, at least three of them Chinese."
Mayor: "Err... done. Now what's your plan?"
Wurnstrum: "What plan? I'm set for life! Au revoir, suckers!"
Leela: "That rat! Do something!"
Mayor: "I wish I could but he's got tenure!"

Mayor: "Garbage isn't something you just find lying in the streets of Manhattan!"

Morbo: "Ha ha! Kittens give Morbo gas. In lighter news, the city of New New York is doomed. Blame rests with known human Professor Hubert Farnsworth and his tiny, inferior brain!"

PCRs
The plaque outside City Hall is all one word, and with an "i" used instead of a "y", making it look like the Citibank logo: CitiHall

Farnsworth suggests placing a bomb on the garbage ball between a mass of coffee grounds and a deposit of America Online floppy discs!

On the way to the ship Bender, Fry and Leela do the slow-motion walk from The Right Stuff.

And of course, the whole idea of the mission to stop the ball of garbage references the movie Armageddon, including the plan to blow the thing up by setting explosives on it.

SIMPSONS REFERENCES
The guys find a bunch of Bart Simpson dolls on the garbage ball. Bender picks one up, it says "Eat my shorts!" in Bart's voice. Bender obliges. Fry thinks they're cool - he would! - but Leela tells him this stuff was garbage before it was sent out into space, and it's garbage now.

SIGNS OF THE TIMES

Separate to the PCR section, this will note the various and hilarious and topical signs that dot the Futurama cityscape.

Pete's TVs: "Letting people watch news reports in our window since 1951!"

NEW CHARACTER!

Soon to become the Kent Brockmann of Futurama, Morbo is a hueg green alien with a head like a gigantic fly and a gruff voice that always sounds angry. He is an anchor for the news channel on TV.

Doctor Wurnstrum is also introduced here, but he's only in it once or twice more, hardly worth noting really.

1.09 Hell is Other Robots"

(Tagline: none. And no intro reel either...)

Attending a Beastie Boys concert (yeah, they're Heads!) Fry is delighted when Bender introduces him to one of his friends who works on the road crew and can get them backstage. The robo-roadie later ducks out with Bender to take him to "the real party", which turns out to be a "jacking-on" den, where robots plug live wires into their sockets to get "a jolt", presumably similar to us humans doing drugs. Problem is, Bender has never done this before and becomes totally addicted to the point where it takes over his life, and his friends begin to worry about him. His addiction is confirmed when he puts the crew's life in danger by steering the ship INTO an electrical storm Leela was trying to avoid.

In an attempt to cure himself Bender turns to religion and enters the Temple of Robotology, where he gets completely caught up in his new belief, making him even harder to live with, but at least he's not Using anymore. However his religion soon begins to bug them as much as his electrical abuse did, and they decide to try to "reacquaint him with a little thing called sleaze". It doesn't take too much persuading to get the old Bender back, and all seems well. Except for one thing. When Bender was baptised he did so on the express understanding that if he sinned he would go straight to Robot Hell. Robotology is not abstract though: they take everything literally and the moment Bender broke their rules the Robot Devil was sent to collect his electronic soul!

He literally takes him from his hotel and to an abandoned carnival where Robot Hell is situated, telling him that he will be held here forever. Nibbler picks up his scent and Fry and Leela head off to try to rescue him, and find that if they can beat the Robot Devil in a fiddle contest they will be able to release Bender, winning back his soul. Of course they can't play the fiddle as well as the Robot Devil, so Leela hits him on the head with it and the trio make their escape.

QUOTES
Fry: "Wow! I love you guys! Back in the twentieth century I had all five of your albums."
Ad-Rock: "Man that was a thousand years ago! We've got seven now!
Fry: "Can I borrow the new ones? And some blank tapes?"

Robo-preacher: "Wretched sinner unit! The path to Robot Heaven lies here, in the Good Book, 3.0!" (The Good Book is shaped like an old 3.5" floppy disc!)

Leela: "Bender! Why are you spending so much time in the bathroom? Are you jacking-on in there?"
Bender: "No! Don't come in!"

Fry: "You made me feel like a jerk for trusting you! Just like when my friend Ritchie swore he wasn't taking drugs, then he sold me my mom's VCR. And later I found out he was taking drugs!"

Robot Preacher: "I see a lot of fancy robots in here today, made o' real shiny metal! But that don't impress the Robot Devil! Cause if you sin, He's gonna plug His infernal modem into the wall, belchin' smoke and fire, and He's gonna download your soul to Robot Hell!"

Bender: "Wonderful! Then you'll all come to my exceedingly long, un-air-conditioned baptism ceremony?"

Robot Preacher: "We are gathered here today to deliver our brother Bender from the cold steel grip of the Robot Devil unto the cold steel bosom of our congregation."

Leela: "Who would have thought that Hell would really exist? And that it would be in New Jersey?"
Fry: "Actually..."

PCRs
Bender spends a night at the Trump Trapezoid.

The fiddle contest in Robot Hell is based on Charlie Daniels' "The devil went down to Georgia", though I have no doubt that song is also based on some folk or fairy tale, but it's the first reference I have to it.



NEW CHARACTER?
Not really, but Scruffy is seen wheeling the three Heads onstage. He's still not named. It's possible he's holding down some different jobs, though robo-masseur to road crew is a bit of a stretch...

The Robot Devil: Oh yes, He exists, as does Robot Hell. It's in Jersey! And he loves to sing in bossa-nova style. Now that's scary!

SIGNS OF THE TIMES
In the Temple: "10 Sin 20 Goto Hell"

A ROBOT CALLED BENDER
This is a great final episode! We find out so much about not just Bender but robots in general. They have their own religion, with a very real and definite Hell that they are dragged to by a very real Robot Devil if they sin. The Fairness in Hell Act of 2263 though requires that any robot's soul can be released if a petitioner can best the Robot Devil in a fiddle contest. We also learn about "jacking on", where robots plug electrical cables into their sockets and consume electricity, in strict violation of their warranties. When done properly, like many drugs, this provides a pleasant "buzz", but when overindulged in it can be dangerous and habit-forming, leading to full on addiction.

Bender finds out for himself that Robot Hell exists, and finds his many and varied crimes all punished in ironic ways, like being rolled up and smoked like a cigar, or having his hard drive scratched by the Beastie Boys! This will not be the last encounter he will have with the Robot Devil, though he won't be jacking-on any more.

[Trollheart]

"Good news everybody!"

Notes on the end of season one.

So the first real question, as we wrap up season one of this series must be "did Groening get it right? Did he differentiate Futurama from his other global brand, the phenomenal Simpsons? I know that's technically two questions but there you go. Well, in the first season you can see that there is some small reliance on the "parent series", but that soon diminishes and Futurama stands steadily on its own two feet. Never really free from the threat of the Network axe, it would in fact be cancelled twice, the second time (so far) holding no reprieve. In fairness, rather like Seth McFarlane's bloated Family Guy, after it was renewed the first time Futurama did really well, like someone given a second chance and determined to prove themselves, but in latter years and towards the end of the  final season it seems to have slipped. But that is a story for a much later time.

For now, we can relax and enjoy the adventures of the weird and wonderful characters we've been introduced to. There are semi-relationships developing between Fry and Bender, Fry and Leela and maybe even Fry and Amy, with others such as Zapp Branigan's hopeless quest to woo Leela and Zoidberg's hapless attempts to gain respect or indeed even recognition from anyone seeming doomed to failure. After the initial shock of waking a thousand years in the future, Fry has adapted rather quickly to life in the 31st century, and in many ways all he's done is updated his old lifestyle. He's still lazy, arrogant, easily bored and easily distracted. He's still in basically a dead-end job and really, nobody respects him. He had hoped to be captain of the Planet Express Ship, but Professor Farnsworth, despite being family, didnt even consider that idea. Not that surprising, as Fry has never flown anything in his life, much less a spaceship! Well, only in video games, and no matter what The Last Starfighter may claim, that's a whole different matter.

Some very cleevr ideas have been advanced in the series, with much more to come. The idea ofthe Moon being a theme park is inspired, while the Trisolarians - although incongruous - are a totally new concept that works quite well. Groening and his team have explored, as do the Simpsons, social issues such as environmental resources, pollution, inequality and prejudice, and will delve into more weighty topics in future seasons, though always with a healthy does of humour and a satirical bent, sometimes at the series itself, utilising the old maxim, if you can't laugh at yourself who can you laugh at?

We've seen, too, the vital role that robots play inthe 31st century, and how it irks Bender that his brethern are, as he sees it, oppressed (though only when it means he can get out of work or make a fast buck, ideally both). Robots will continue to be a huge factor in Futurama. We've already seen a whole planet run by robots - who seem about as incompetent as humans - and been introduced to the Church of Robotology, with its very real Robot Devil. Robots are subject to addictions too we see, though the alcohol Bender consumes, rather than be seen as a vice and something to avoid, is in fact vital for his proper operation, as we assume it is for all robots. Later we will learn of Robot Wrestling, robot doctors and the Robot Mafia - the entire Robot Mafia - and will even encounter robot ghosts!

There are many weird and ofbeat adventures to experience yet for the crew of the Planet Express Ship, and really up to season five and its first cancellation the quality hardly flags once. Even after that, when Futurama comes back after four full-length DVD movies and a fan campaign, it's as strong as ever. Perhaps the series will secure another, alternate channel for future seasons, but for now we have a whole lot to look forward to. To quote the opening episode: "Welcome to the world of tomorrow!"