Fanfic / Blame It on the Brain

Blame It on the Brain by coldangel omega is a "continuation" of Futurama (written after the series originally ended but before Bender's Big Score). Starting with the return of the Brainspawn when MomCorp and Wernstrom break the quantum interface breach that banished the Brainspawn, allowing one of the evil brains to return to the universe. As this solo Brainspawn becomes an ever-escalating threat, Mom tries to capture Fry and Nibbler for her own ends, forcing the rest of the Planet Express team into a desperate race against time to re-learn the history of the Nibblonian/Brainspawn war and prepare Fry for the final stand against an even more devastating foe.

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Blame It on the Brain provides examples of:

• Ass Shove: Referenced; Hermes, Scruffy, Mom and Zapp Brannigan each independently wonder at various points where exactly one shoves things when dealing with a flying brain, and Bender informs Nibbler to 'cram it wherever you three-eyed critters traditionally cram things' when he believes he will have to walk across a narrow bridge over a deep pit.
• The B Grade: Continuing their vendetta, Farnsworth gives Wernstrom a B Plus grade for his role in Onespawn being unleashed on the universe.
• Berserk Button: The question of why a dead man had fallen out of Fry’s apartment drives Leela to immediately return to Earth despite taking an important test, but the discovery that the man in the morgue who has been identified as Fry is actually Walt prompts her to mount a one-woman assault on Momcorp to find the answers.
• Big Damn Heroes: The rest of Planet Express join the final stand against Onespawn to give Fry the chance to deliver the killing blow.
• Bittersweet Ending: While Earth is saved, the mutants are now publically accepted, and Fry isn't dead, the Nibblonians are gone, Earth has sustained serious damage, and Mom, her sons, and Zapp Brannigan are dead (they might have been jerks and idiots, but they did their part for Earth on a larger scale), even if Earth's new state of peace may help with the reconstruction.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Occurs to varying degrees, most notably with Onespawn’s mutation allowing it to perceive its fictional nature.
• Call-Back: Fry, Leela, Bender and Zoidberg learn the truth about the Brainspawn and Nibbler near the same location in Old New York where Leela removed her career chip on the day she first met Fry and Bender.
• Chain of People: The Planet Express crew use this to get Fry up into the sky for the final confrontation with Onespawn, through methods including Amy’s party-board, Scruffy’s hoverbike, or Zoidberg in a jetpack
• The Chew Toy:
  • Ultima takes several beatings over the course of its hunt for Leela.
  • Fry suffers serious damage when he takes his glove off his spacesuit to try and use the Lance of Fate in deep space, although 31st-century medicine on the Planet Express ship is able to treat all of Fry’s injuries up to potential brain damage without immediate access to even Zoidberg to act as a doctor.
• Combat Pragmatist: Fry manages to knock Walt out in their first confrontation by letting Walt shock him with a nervejam stunner- a futuristic taser- while simultaneously grabbing Walt, with the result that both of them get shocked.
• Comically Missing the Point: Used on a few occasions on the part of Professor Farnsworth, as his senility causes him to misinterpret what everyone around him is talking about at first.
• Contrived Coincidence:
  • Referenced by Larry, when he wonders if it’s odd that Fry should turn out to be so important after the brothers’ previous encounters with him; Walt dismisses it as ‘cosmic providence’.
  • Also referenced by Farnsworth and the rest of the crew when Farnsworth can prove that Fry couldn’t have been the victim who fell out of his apartment as Planet Express’s surveillance proves Fry visited the Professor half an hour after he ‘died’. Hermes initially considers it human error, but Amy points out the absences of Leela, Bender and Zoidberg, as well as a recent power blackout, and Farnsworth confirms that this is too many coincidences to be a coincidence.
• Determinator: Robot 1-X Ultima is determined to fulfil its prime objective and capture Leela.
• Deus ex Machina: The entire crisis ends when Fry stabs Onespawn with the Lance of Fate, a weapon forged from the fabric of the universe itself, with its destruction merging the Brainspawn and Nibblonians and giving Fry the temporary power to remake reality.
• Disney Villain Death: Walt dies when he falls out of Fry and Bender’s apartment during a fight with Fry.
• Disability Immunity: As in canon, Fry’s missing Delta brainwave leaves him an idiot, but also makes him immune to the Brainspawn.
  • Partially used for Wernstrom; after being subjected to Onespawn’s mind control to such an intense degree that he’s left mentally crippled, he develops a degree of resistance to it, able to hold on to what remains of his mind even if his body briefly falls under its control.
• Don't Touch It, You Idiot!: Wernstrom opens the rift that banished the Brainspawn even when one of his research team suggests that whatever was banished was sent away for a good reason.
• Downer Ending: Seems like this at first, until Leela realises the meaning of Fry’s last words to her and is able to find him.
• Drama-Preserving Handicap: It is explicitly stated that Fry's nature as a temporal paradox acts as a kind of buffer to Onespawn's attempts to unmake existence. As a result, Onespawn can only achieve its goal after it kills Fry, giving Fry the chance to lure it back to Earth for the final battle.
• Enemy Mine:
  • The threat of Onespawn prompts Lrrr to agree to join forces with Mom to try and stop the greater threat.
  • Also invoked with the Nibblonians bringing the Brainspawn back to this universe to help against Onespawn, but this plan significantly backfires when Onespawn takes control of the Brainspawn.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Goes both ways for Mom; despite her treatment of her sons in canon, she shows escalating grief when Walt, Inger and Larry (in that order) are killed in the course of the story.
• Everyone Has Standards: Bender tries to act self-interested, but he still shows some concern for Fry, Leela, and even the Nibblonians when he learns the scale of the threat facing them.
• Godzilla Threshold: Invoked in various ways, ranging from some Nibblonians choosing to bring the Brainspawn back to stop Onespawn to the Omicronians joining forces with Earth to try and attack the main threat.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: Referenced due to Fry’s defeats of the Brainspawn being unknown, and also implied at the conclusion of the storyline, as Fry’s role in the defeat of Onespawn and the salvation of the universe in general and Earth in particular is only explicitly known to a few key people.
• Heroic Suicide: In a sense; when the AI of the ship Brezhnev realises that it has been subverted by Onespawn, it activates an emergency channel that causes a shipwide system burn with the goal of preventing Onespawn accessing its databanks.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Nearly happens to Fry; when he almost falls onto the Lance of Fate, he wonders idly what kind of temporal damage would have been caused by such an action.
• Humans Are Special: Invoked; Nibbler often mentions that Leela's compassion represents the qualities that make humanity, and the rest of the universe, worth preserving.
• Idiot Houdini: Finally inverted for Zapp Brannigan, who dies when the Nimbus crashes in the final showdown with Onespawn.
• Iron Butt Monkey: Doctors examining Fry note his long list of twisted injuries- temporary decapitation, multiple amputations of his hands, arm and nose, etc.- to the point that they’re amazed he’s even alive
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Particularly for Bender; while he tries to act aloof and uninterested, he still panics and shows grief when he thought Fry was dead, and shows some sympathy for the situation when Nibbler explains what will happen to the Nibblonians if they use the Lance.
• Lethally Stupid: Zapp Brannigan nearly completely misses playing any part in the showdown against Onespawn because he thinks Pluto isn’t a real planet, and nearly compromises Earth’s new alliance with the Omicronians by not showing them respect
• Let's You and Him Fight: When Ultima attacks the sewers in search of Leela, it is delayed by a confrontation with El Chupanibre (although not for very long)
• Lovable Sex Maniac: Invoked with Scruffy, starting when he suggests that Amy get ‘nekkid’ when the two of them are left in a cell with Hermes after Mom captured them as hostages to ensure Farnsworth’s assistance. Later on, he comments that he’s strangely aroused by being beaten up by Mom when she’s feeling frustrated during the battle with Onespawn
• Metaphorgotten: Fry’s thoughts upon waking up after being captured by Mom;
  It was the kind of awakening that marched into the foyer of consciousness, insulted someone's mother, and then proceeded to urinate on the nearest pot-plant
• Morality Pet: Bender pushes through his programmed love for the 1-X robots when faced with a ‘choice’ between the Ultima 1-X robot and his genuine love for Fry and Leela
• More Expendable Than You: Comically used when Zoidberg volunteers to distract the police guarding Planet Express on Mom’s orders so Fry, Leela, Bender and Nibbler can steal the ship; he points out that the other three are needed at this point where he isn’t, and Leela even explicitly states that nobody actually wants Zoidberg.
• Morton's Fork: Invoked when Lrr contacts the Momship when it enters the Omicron system;
  Lrrr: Hear me now! You have ten seconds to surrender and be destroyed- or we will destroy you!
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: Zoidberg participates in Fry and Bender’s efforts to rescue Nibbler from Mom, and is present when Nibbler explains the nature of Onespawn’s threat to Fry, Leela and Bender in Old New York. However, the other three easily let Zoidberg go to distract the police at a crucial moment, and the rest of Planet Express don’t even wonder about his absence after Mom abducts the others until they return to Earth for the final showdown.
• My Own Grampa: Referenced explicitly due to Fry’s actions in 1947. This is brought up by Nibbler in the course of explaining how it technically applies to the Nibblonians and the Brainspawn, as the two species are connected to each other through a complex temporal anomaly tied to the origin of the universe that prohibited each from destroying the other.
• Noodle Incident: Fry compares claiming the Lance of Fate to the time they had to steal the Spear of Destiny from the Louvre, although this may never happened considering the Lance’s unique relationship to space/time and Fry himself.
• Not the Fall That Kills You…: Referenced with Fry during his fight with Walt; the two fall out of Fry’s apartment, but Fry survives because Walt’s bloody corpse broke his fall.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Onespawn’s final goal is the destruction of all reality as its ability to perceive its fictional nature causes it to believe existence is pointless.
• Only Sane Man: At one point Fry has to take the Planet Express ship through a mass of Brainspawn and a dangerous dimensional anomaly while Leela, Bender and Nibbler have become so stupid Bender's trying to climb inside himself and Nibbler's trying to eat his third eye (although Fry is briefly distracted when the now-stupid Leela says "Me love Fry").
• Paradox Person: Fry’s status as his own grandfather is important for more reasons than just his lack of the Delta Brainwave. As revealed by Nibbler, the Brainspawn and the Nibblonians are essentially the same race; the universe was created by a ‘mass-inversion event’ that turned the nothingness of pre-universe into the ‘something-ness’ of the universe, so the Brainspawn are the inversion of the Nibblonians who came before it/the Nibblonians are the pre-reflection of the Brainspawn. As a result, Fry, the Nibblonians and the Brainspawn are linked as a complex cosmic trinity due their shared state of self-manifestation; when Onespawn starts to change its nature, this link affects the rest of its race and the Nibblonians, while Fry's anomalous status means that Onespawn must eliminate Fry before it can unmake existence.
• Portal Book: Onespawn both pulls villains out of books to fight Fry and tries to trap him and Leela in various other stories to stop him.
• Pre Ass Kicking One Liner: Fry tries to deliver these when taking the Planet Express ship through a wave of Brainspawn, but he feels it doesn't count as he delivers the lines when Leela, Bender and Nibbler have been affected by the stupefication field so they're too idiotic to understand him.
• Ramming Always Works: Subverted; with the Nimbus’s weapons useless, Zapp Brannigan resorts to trying to ram Onespawn with the ship itself, but the collision does nothing more than cause so much damage that it kills Brannigan himself.
• Reality Warper: Due to its mutation, Onespawn gains the ability to warp reality by manipulating its connection to the underlying structure of the universe.
• Redemption Equals Death: Wernstrom asks for this when he sacrifices himself to try and destroy Onespawn, although his actions fail to destroy the monster and it’s never made clear if anyone else actually considers him forgiven for his role in prior events due to this.
• Refusing Paradise: After the destruction of the Brainspawn, Fry uses his temporary connection to the fabric of reality to create a ‘perfect’ world where at least he, Leela, Bender and Scruffy are living in a more idealised version of the twentieth century, but Leela convinces him to restore reality with its flaws and challenges.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: In a loose sense; Fry's status as a temporal anomaly due to him being his own grandfather means that his mere existence limits Onespawn's attempt to unmake the universe.
• Rousing Speech/Shaming the Mob: Nibbler does both when convincing the Nibblonians to let Fry try to use the Lance against Onespawn rather than destroy the Planet Express ship and ally with the Brainspawn against Onespawn.
• Sanity Slippage: Ultima and Onespawn, to varying degrees, as Ultima’s battle-damage and Onespawn’s self-evolution each compromise their mental states in different ways.
• Secret Test of Character: Invoked; Fry basically has to pass one to obtain the Lance of Fate, as the security system protecting it will only open when the person attempting to open it exhibits the appropriate level of stupidity, such as Fry looking for a rock with a key under it.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Played with; the only way to stop the new threat posed by Onespawn erases the Nibblonians from existence, destroying Nibblonian culture after it has existed since before the beginning of the universe, with no way to know what the two races will become when brought together.
• Taking You with Me: Technically used for the Brainspawn and the Nibblonians; the circumstances of their existence mean that neither side can destroy the other without destroying themselves, and the only way to end the threat of the Brainspawn for good would technically destroy the Nibblonians by merging the two into one species
• True Companions: Regardless of whether they see him as an idiotic source of cheap labour, their last living relative or the love of their life, the entire Planet Express crew join Fry for the final stand against Onespawn.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The whole crisis starts when MomCorp, employing Professor Wernstrom, open the quantum interface that Fry used to banish the Brainspawn and allow one to return to our universe.
• Worf Had the Flu: Robot 1-X Ultima would normally be too much for anyone to stop. Leela only has a chance against it at first because Mom wants her alive as a hostage to get Nibbler to talk, and afterwards the robot has taken too much damage to do a good job.
• You Are Not Ready: Implied when Nibbler rejects Mom’s demands for the quantum interface bomb.
  Nibbler: Would you relinquish control of your thermonuclear arsenal to an ill-tempered racoon?

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