Fridge / Futurama

Per wiki policy, this page is Spoilers Off!

Fridge examples for Futurama.

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Fridge Brilliance

• In the pilot episode, Leela gets angry, not when her eye gets made fun of, but when her nose is insulted. At first, this can be seen as just another gag, but it's eventually revealed that she's been made fun of for being a cyclops and so is used to it.
  • Related, why does Leela get made fun of and insulted because of her one eye even when everyone thinks that she's an alien? Well, look at all the other aliens in the series: even the humanoid ones are clearly not human. Leela on the other hand is only distinguishable by her one eye. She's ostracised because she's too human to be accepted by other aliens and too alien to be accepted by other humans.
• Hedonismbot's design and actions. Notice that you never see him drinking alcohol, despite the fact that all robots are stated to run on it. Notice how he is always carrying grapes and eating them (despite robots having no sense of taste), and his giant belly. He's eating grapes, turning them into mush, then fermenting them into wine inside his belly which he then uses to power himself.
• Fry's "grandfather" was never really his grandfather. Think about it: would Fry's father's Mom really want to tell her son his father was the first man she met that reminded her of her fiancé, just after he died in a tragic accident? I know it still raises the typical confusion with time travel, but that would at least make it a Stable Time Loop, and explain why he seemed to get his orange hair from his mother.
  • Consider also that said father of her child knocked Fry's grandmother up and then vanished. There could be quite a bit of resentment involved after said father apparently abandoned his family.
• "All My Circuits". The hit-show beloved by robots everywhere in the universe. Most renowned for two aspects: Calculon's over-the-top acting and its seemingly illogical overusage and exaggeration of TV drama cliches. Every episode we see is apparently unrelated to the previous ones shown, and even then, how could viewers possibly be expected to keep track of how many characters have amnesia, or split-personalities, or even heptuplets? Simple. They use their memory banks. Humans might be able to grasp part of "All My Circuits", true, but in the end its target audience is robots! Robots who record the episodes they watch and can easily remember all of the intricacies of the plot! To us, "All My Circuits" is an overhyped mess, but to the robots, it's just as amazing as lauded. Provided you've downloaded all the episodes.
  • So why does Fry like it? Because of the over-the-top acting. Calculon's a Large Ham, and we remember Brian Blessed or William Shatner very fondly (Or at least on the Tv Tropes page for Large Ham). Admittedly, you'd find it pretty funny too to see a robot act so ridiculous as well.
• In "The Luck of the Fryrish", Yancy Fry, Sr. (Philip Fry's father) is depicted as being incredibly paranoid about nuclear war. Though this initially comes across as him simply buying into the Y2K panic, we discover in "Roswell That Ends Well" that the man he thought was his father was killed from a nuclear blast in a testing range. As such, it makes sense that he would have gone his whole life obsessing about that fact, to the point that he would construct a nuclear shelter.
• In "The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz", Bender's interface resets to Human mode after Leela shoots him. Since hers is the first face he sees on waking up, this makes sense, because she's a mutant (mutated human)!
• This one actually involved my refrigerator. It's never bothered me that the Planet Express Ship constantly changes its design from episode to episode. I always figured it was the writer's way of messing with the fanbase. In fact I think Word of God confirms this. However, as I was rearranging the shelves in my fridge, it occurred to me that, in the future, most, if not all, structures might be easily rearranged. Most likely, every aspect of the ship can be switched around or moved with relative ease. This is reinforced with all the in-universe changes they make to the ship (like altering it to move underwater with paper mache)
• Regarding Nixon and why we never see the "fabulous new bodies" he apparently needs to be re-elected as per his arguing that he has a new body and the Constitution clause doesn't apply to him...he doesn't. As per A Head in the Polls, he apparently argues (and everybody acknowledges) that no "body" can be elected twice. As he is a mere head in a jar, he does not need anything to run as many times as he needs. Why people of Earth are voting for him is however a different question...
  • Not to mention that he didn't even need the original "new body", since the old one only got elected to the American Presidency and he was running for Presidency of Earth.
  • They say that "nobody can be elected president more than twice" but never define it as President of Earth. Earth in Futurama is not a single super state but more of a conglomerate of independent states (this is directly stated in one of the commentaries). Perhaps the wording is specific so that you can't get elected President of one of the States or Earth if you've been President more than twice, no matter what Presidency you held. They even say in "A Head in the Polls" that "America is part of the world".
  • Alternatively, it's possible that he just amended the Constitution to allow himself to run again. It'd hardly be the most questionable thing he's done.
• Here's something about Bender's personality in the first episode. Before and during the climactic chase sequence in the head museum, Bender was nothing more than suicidally depressed and alcoholic who went by his programming (he initially refused to bend the metal bars of the window in the Hall of Criminals because he wasn't a de-bender and Fry's motivational speech was having no effect at all). When Bender walked into a lamp and got short circuited, his "mind", or programming, was altered so that Bender would be able to bend the metal grate and become hooked on bending random objects. Near the end of the episode, he breaks out three beer bottles, drinks them all, and snatches Leela's ring off her finger. It's possible that the Bender we know and love today could have resulted from that one jolt of electricity. In essence, from that one accident, Bender's total outlook on life was completely altered!
  • This actually happens again in The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz where Bender is rebooted and because he is with penguins he essentially becomes a penguin. Perhaps whenever he reboots his programming makes him become whatever his environment says he is. As his in the hall of criminals, he becomes a criminal.
• Here's a Fridge Brilliance moment about Leela. Specifically, why she's gone back and forth on Fry's obviously sincere love for her. Think for a moment about one of Leela's first focus episodes. It opened with her going on a date and rejecting the man in question because he had a lizard tongue. Hypocritical, but telling. The episode goes on to show us that Leela's main problem with finding love is that she's very picky. She has standards and she sticks to them. All the men she's dated have been good looking men with high positions in society, or at least a decent income. The Mayor's aide, the doctor that gave her two eyes, even Lars was earning good money at the head museum. Now what does this all mean? Why does Leela need such high standards? Because if she has high standards, she's the one doing the rejecting. Think about it. If she wasn't the one being picky, she would be rejected at every turn by men not interested in dating a cyclops. Somewhere deep inside her mind she's still that little orphan girl hearing "One Eye! One Eye!" over and over again. She needs to find a good man, one who is handsome and successful and talented, or else she has given up and settled for less. She just can't do that. Apply that mindset to a man who works a dead-end delivery job, is childish, and has almost no responsibility to speak of, and you get a flat rejection every time, moments of romantic brilliance or no. And even then, at least half of those moments (saving the world, proposing with the Stars, writing the Holophonor symphony) were either wiped from her memory or utterly ruined by what happened afterwards.
  • Interesting thing about it is that she doesn't seem completely against Fry. Unlike her usual rejections with other men, she doesn't express disgust in his advances. She even complains about it to Zoidberg in an episode, even mentioning that she thinks he's very sweet and likes his boyish charms. So she really does like Fry, she just wishes he would be better. She quickly falls in love with Lars, who is an older and mature version of Fry so she does like his positive aspects. Really, her only real problem is his maturity. It isn't exactly known when Leela did fall in love with Fry but it's more hinted at in the last film and even revealed. In the 4th film, Bender wiretaps Fry because he knows Leela will contact Fry as she trusts him. It was pretty obvious then.
    • A large part of this going back and forth could have to do with the creators changing their plans for the show. It was actually the original intention of the creators for Fry and Leela to never get together. It was only supposed to be a side joke about how Fry had no chance with her. What they did not expect was for fans to become so invested in their relationship so they made Fry become less immature and develop so he did have a chance.
• A rather minor example, but an example nonetheless. During "The Luck of the Fryish," it is stated that Philip J. Fry was the first man to step foot on Mars. At first it seems quite minor, but if you put some thought into it, you'll realize that Yancy had named him after Fry so he could carry on his memory. As such, it's entirely plausible that Yancy had in fact directed him in this course, as it was Fry's dream to travel into space. This only makes the episode all the more heartwarming.
• Yancy naming his son "Philip" after Fry isn't just a heartwarming gesture, but also breaks the family tradition of naming every son in the Fry line, a tradition Yancy was shown to dislike since birth. As we see Yancy Sr. passed down some unsavory attitudes to his sons and was generally cold to them even when he did intend to love them, this symbolizes Yancy Jr. potentially Breaking the Cycle of Bad Parenting, wanting his son to branch out of the family's legacy and be an individual just like his younger brother.
• In "A Clockwork Origin", Farnsworth takes the gang to Odulvai Gorge to search for the "missing, missing link between man and ape." While digging up fossils, Hermes accidentally uncovers a flash-fossilized skeleton of what he states is "another one of Fry's dogs." But wait, if Seymour was established as Fry's only pet, and he had no other known dogs, how is this possible? Well, if you remember "Bender's Big Score", the supposedly "paradox-free" method of time travel that the Scammers uncovered created exact duplicates of the person who used the time sphere, and the time duplicate was always doomed to a horrible fate. You could argue that the Seymour that Lars kept company was a time duplicate as well, and that when Bender flash-fossilized him, that was his fate. Thus, the fossilized remains of the dog Hermes dug up could have been a time duplicate.
  • Or he was just making a joke.
  • More likely that everyone who knew Seymour and Fry's relation thinks any fossilized dog is Fry's; information on the 21 century is spotty at best.
• In 'The Lesser of Two Evils', the crew visit the Past-o-rama show, which showcased the world of the 20th/21st century. However, to the viewer, one can see many anachronisms, including Einstein in a balloon, and cowboys chasing mammoths, so obviously, it is not a... perfect rendition. But why? Because over 1000 years has passed, and the information they would have had on our era - at best - would be incomplete due to 1000 years of erosion, weathering and other factors. Do we know really that much about the dark ages?
  • Although some of the icons used in that commercial did come from that time period. Einstein was reaching the height of his popularity around 1945, and the common stereotypes that we associate with cowboys in media like television and movies were first seen in the early 1900's and 1910's.
  • Of course, even if they do have knowledge of the time, at one point, everything flows together in history. Victorian England, for example. If you imagine what it looked like, you are probably thinking of how it looked around 1895, with about 63 years of Victoria squeezed into about an afternoon. Or the Wild West. The Dalton Brothers in gunfights against Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid. Watch out boys, or Hanging Judge Roy Bean will get ya! We imagine everyone hanging out together in the Tombstone saloon, drinking whiskey and playing poker. And in a couple of hundred years, our times will too have flowed together with the last and the next.
  • The two alien invasions in the very first episode, where they were shown destroying the city around Fry (yet missing the cryogenic chamber lab) might have also destroyed some of that information, and plenty of internet databases that would have stored that kind of information, and over the years, people had to try to piece together whatever was left.
  • There's a trope for that!
• Whether intentional or not, there is a beautiful bit of foreshadowing in "Bender's Game". Remember the reason why Titanius Anglesmith didn't bite the big one when Fry tried to kill him? He was doing Gynecaladriel, Queen of the Water Nymphos in her sleeping bag. Then comes Season 6. Apparently, Bender was already attracted to Amy somewhere in the depths of his subconscious!
  • There's also the "Anthology of Interest II" segment where Bender becomes human and is instantly attracted to Amy (and vice-versa). Keep in mind that the canon Bender and Amy both watched this, so even if they'd never thought of it before, the seed could have been planted right there.
  • There's also a scene in the 4th season's "Love and Rocket", where Bender and Fry are ogling a bikini-clad Amy washing the Planet Express ship (which recently gains a sexy female voice and enters into a relationship with Bender). The suggestion is that the human Fry is enticed by Amy while Bender is aroused by the ship, but this could have been a two-fer for Bender...
• Attack of the Killer App: With the ending of the 3rd movie rendering dark matter inert and the 4th movie reviving extinct animals that presumably include the anchovy, which would be able to shut down her robot oil empire, how exactly does Mom plan on keeping her fortune? By emulating one of the most profitable companies of the twenty-first century and selling shiny gadgets that the population will flock to like sheep that are as overpriced as they are arguably overrated.
• In "Roswell That Ends Well", Zoidberg says he has four hearts. Then later, in "A Taste of Freedom", it suddenly changes to three. Continuity Snarl? Not if you remember that the Roswell scientists took one. By Bender's Game, he only has two. That's probably a result of being Zoidberg.
  • In Bender's Game, it's technically Zoidberg's Cornwood counterpart who's said to have two hearts, so it could just be another instance of one of Cornwood's discrepancies towards the regular universe, considering that Cornwood Zoidberg is a giant monster and Hermes' counterpart is a female centaur named Hermaphrodite.
• In "I Second That Emotion", when the doctor took out Nibbler's fang, Fry noticed that there are rings on it, and the doctor suggested that it probably indicated Nibbler's age. Fry then said that it would take a genius to count all those rings, right before the doctor told him that, according to the rings, Nibbler is five. The joke is probably that Fry was too stupid to count five rings, but later in the series, we found out that Nibbler is older than the universe, and Fry has a "special" brain. It could be that Fry actually saw billions of rings, while the doctor only saw five, because Fry is the only one who is supposed to know that Nibblonians are an ancient race, and therefore only he sees billions of rings.
  • Note that the joke could also be the complete lack of logic in the vet's "If he's anything like a tree" argument. Also note that the doctor had just received a head injury and wasn't thinking clearly. Besides, the vet didn't even know what species Nibbler was, what would he know from teeth rings?
  • Same episode: Leela "learns" to have No Sympathy, but she's not like that in other episodes. Maybe that's the bright side of the fact that in this show no lessons stick, even the negative ones. So on the downside, Bender will always be mean, but on the upside, Leela will always be nice.
• At one point, Bender claimed that his father was killed by a can-opener. Considering that his mother is a robot arm, could it be that his father is a big can containing "material" to build a robot, which his mother "receives" and then assembles?
• You know all the jokes in "All My Circuits" about the various Soap Opera cliches like "Fourth Evil Septuplet"? Thing is, Calculon is a robot. He could have seven identical models that are unusually close enough to consider themselves family.
• Bender's name: not only is it representative of his job ("I'm a Bender. I went to Bending college. I majored in Bending.), it's also representative of his character. Bender is seen almost continuously drinking, smoking, gambling and whoring. In other words, he keeps going on benders. Or rather, he is constantly on one big bender.
  • As a Brit (where 'bender' is slang for a gay man), I illogically assumed for many years that it was a dirty joke. Cue dumbfounded expressions from American friends a few years later...
  • Well, Bender does have a lot of subtext with Fry, if we're being honest here. And it's canon that all of the crew have had orgies together/hot tubbe together and what not. So, not so illogical after all....
• In one episode, Fry says that Everybody Loves Hypnotoad has been going downhill since season 3. Fry has immunity to any kind of mental control thanks to his "superior, yet inferior mind", which means he has watched Everybody Loves Hypnotoad without being hypnotized! Which means that h-ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD!
• In "The Beast With A Billion Backs", Bender has to trade his first born son to the Robot Devil for an army of robots to conquer the Earth. Why does the Robot Devil ask for Bender's son instead of say his soul? He asked Bender in an earlier episode if he came back to Robot Hell to resume his eternal punishment, meaning Bender's soul (or the robotic equal) is still condemned to Hell and the Robot Devil already has it.
  • According to Conan O'Brien, Bender doesn't have a soul... Or freckles.
• In "Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences", the crew build a new Statue of Liberty. Why was this one not in "The Late Philip J. Fry"? It was a consequence of Fry's doing. Fry didn't exist in that future.
  • Or the people of New New York got rid of the statue as soon as Ndnd and Lrrr left, because the statue was ugly and reminded them of slave labor.
  • Episodes after "The Late Philip J. Fry" maintained consistency with its timeline by showing that certain events which might have altered or threatened the mundane existences of the remaining crew were dependent on the absent parties. For instance, "Decision 3012"'s Bad Future, in which robots have driven humanity into hiding by 3027, is caused by Bender, who leads the uprising and becomes ruler of Earth. In "The Inhuman Torch," Bender saves the Earth from being turned into a miniature sun by a "psychotic flame creature"...but Bender also is accidentally responsible for the creature's presence on Earth in the first place, meaning that the planet wouldn't have needed saving if he weren't there.
• In "The Why of Fry" we learn that the reason why Fry can save the universe is because he is his own grandfather. This wouldn't have happened if he went into the future. Previously, in "Anthology of Interest" the "what if" universe gets destroyed because Fry didn't go into the future.
  • Not getting frozen caused space-time to tear in the What-If simulated universe. In "Bender's Big Score", another time paradox causes a space-time tear.
• Considering how small Nibbler is and how much he eats, all the food that enters his body must be compacted to an incredible density... so it makes sense that he poops Dark Matter.
• Why do robots get high off electricity and why do they have a religion? Because they were programmed to develop a moral code and if all the robots of the world ran on electricity we'd run out, so they programmed them to feel bad after they did it.
  • And that argument doesn't apply to beer because...
    • Simple, actually. Beer costs money but electricity doesn't. You can't charge a toaster for the electricity it runs on; you charge its owner. Robots need beer to function and electricity to run. It's easier to make them more prone to something more profitable, so a backup program was installed in all robots to have deteriorating effects to electricity abuse so as to not give them leverage over humans, and robots who can't afford beer can't live solely on electricity.
    • Also if you remember the episode where the robot church was first properly introduced and Bender joined it, Bender gave up alcohol in favor of Mineral Oil, suggesting that 1) Alcohol isn't the only thing that can power robots (though it may be the cheapest option) and 2) The church also frowns upon alcohol.
• Earth's position in the universe has never been explicitly stated, but the show has averted Earth Is the Center of the Universe nonetheless. Not only is Planet Eternium at the exact center, Earth must be very, very close to the edge - the Planet Express ship was able to reach the nearest edge of the universe (the one facing the cowboy universe) within an hour. However, it took them two weeks to get to the part of the universe that ended immediately after Dog Doo 8, and they were in danger of going so far away from Earth it would take a lifetime to get back when they went through the Panama Wormhole.
• At first it seems like some parts of the series are subject to Technology Marches On, for example Lucy Liu's data is copied onto a floppy disk in the 3000's...But then you realize that after Earth was successfully invaded twice, technology probably has been left a little... funky. Confirmed via Word of God.
• A minor example: in "Why must I be a Crustacean in Love?", why does Fry have an Oh, Crap! look on his face upon hearing the Decapodian anthem? Because he is a massive fan of Star Trek (as seen in "Where No Fan Has Gone Before") - and as such, has seen all of the episodes, including the episode "Amok Time", which includes, amongst other things, Spock fighting Kirk to the same music.
• In The Beast With A Billion Backs, Bender gives a speech about how love is selfish, needy, and greedy. This has a ton of Fridge Brilliance when you think about how, during the course of the movie, Bender has been jealous of Fry's lovers and trying to spend time with him, unsuccessfully, while Fry's romantic relationships were getting in the way. Bender spends ridiculous amounts of effort to get Fry to spend time with him, and tries to get revenge on humanity as a whole when he doesn't, even giving his firstborn son to get an army from the robot devil! So when Bender was talking about love, he was referring to his feelings toward Fry. He loves Fry, though not in a romantic way, even if he won't admit it.
  • The title of the film refers to an Unusual Euphemism most famously used in Shakespeare's Othello. The major theme of both stories is jealousy, which Bender ultimately concludes is an indispensable part of love. What other common idiom do we owe to Othello? The Green-Eyed Monster.
• The end of The Beast with a Billion Backs had this effect on me. At first, I thought they just couldn't think of a satisfying way to end the movie, and felt kind of cheated. Then I realized two facts that made me love the ending: 1) It was a satire - maybe a borderline Deconstruction - of the Christian apocryphal idea of the Rapture, which pointed out all the unfortunate ethical and moral implications inherent in the concept. 2) It showed off the true Crapsack World setting of Futurama. Fry's future is such a dystopia that not even "heaven" is safe from the underlying suckiness of existence. In any other show, it would have been depressing, but it perfectly fits the characters and setting of Futurama, so I found it funny. Make of that what you will.
  • Especially considering Fry's line "I'm sorry, Bender. Robots don't go to heaven."
• In the second episode: at first, Fry and Leela's adventure on the moon seems like it's contrived. Why would a park make full functional rovers for a ride almost nobody goes on? But thinking about it, it showed the stupidity of the future world, or alternatively, the adaptivity by using the rover that built the base.
• In Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles, I was annoyed that they would consider the Professor being really really old worthy of voiding a lifetime discount. But in that episode, he was 161, and a year earlier had been rescued from the Near-Death Star because people are retired (from life) at the age of 160. His lifetime discount really did expire, and it was both a Continuity Nod and showing how things might become less simple now that he's not supposed to be among the living!
  • Nope! It was revealed that The Professor was legally declared dead as a tax dodge (and/or taking a nap in a ditch) in "The Route Of All Evil".
  • At the same time, the Professor might've had to deal with that given his reaction to it, so either or could be the true reason behind that.
• So I'm sitting at my desk, reading Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, and I think, "This would be impossible to adapt to film. How could you transfer the contradictory and bizarre descriptions to a visual medium (e.g. "The ships hung in the air in exactly the way that bricks don't" from Hitchhiker's Guide)? Then I thought of Futurama, specifically when Fry had to jump out of a plane. An exchange like that wouldn't have looked out of place in a Douglas Adams book. To summarize: Futurama is the best adaptation of Douglas Adams' work ever.
• The "Retcon" (most fans will know the one as soon as I mention the episode in conjunction with Bender's Big Score) had to have been planned at least as far back as "Jurassic Bark", since Seymour almost definitely had to have been flash-fossilized while still alive and what are the chances that a dog would die of old age and immediately get flash-fossilized as early as 2012?
  • It does sort of ruin the Tear Jerker-ness of Jurassic Bark's ending however. But it does make the ending overall better. Fry was right in that Seymour lived a long and full life, but he was wrong in that Seymour had Fry, a chrono-duplicate, but still the same Fry, right by him until his death and probably never forgot his master.
    • Considering that it involved paradox-free time travel, the Retcon was Lars!Fry changing it for the better. Lars!Fry spent the twelve years filling the hole in his family due to Present!Fry being frozen. Even though they likely believed he was killed when Panucci was blasted, they'd at least have closure and the twelve years with Fry.
• In Bender's Game, Bender creates a Dungeons & Dragons character. The character's name? "Titanius Anglesmith". 'Titanius' is an obvious reference to metal, but it takes a second to notice the nuance of the surname - Angle-smith -> maker of angles -> bender.
  • Amusingly, there are 18 letters in the name 'Titanius Anglesmith'. Of the full 18 letters, 8 of them - just over 40% - are a reference to titanium. Bender is 40% titanium.
• When Leela was a baby, she was left with a note penned by her mother in order to convince the orphanarium that she was an alien, not a mutant. But a note written in Alienese, a language seemingly understood by many people on Earth, is untranslatable by Professor Farnsworth's translation machine? Leela's mother's exolinguistics skills meant that she could write complete nonsense on the note in a made-up language that looks deceptively like Alienese to a lay-person, but without actually meaning anything in Alienese. This would be like arranging Cyrillic characters randomly on paper and passing it off as Russian text to someone who is unfamiliar with the language and its script. The reason for this is so that no-one will discover that Leela is not an alien, the lack of backstory adding further credence. That way, when an abandoned Leela and the note are found outside Cookieville Minimum-Security Orphanarium, Mr. Vogel has no reason to doubt that Leela is an alien, and so won't attempt to translate the faux-Alienese. This is also why Professor Farnsworth is unable to translate the note: it doesn't actually mean anything in a real language.
  • Actually, the note can be translated. It says: "Your parents love you very much."
    • It's possible to combine both: the note is literally nonsense, but Leela's mother is being poetic or metaphorical or whatever when she says the note meant that they loved her.
    • Or it's a language she designed, and without any reference anywhere, means complete gibberish to anyone not Leela's mom.
    • Actually, it can be translated just like any other alien-language sign throughout the whole show, and it literally says "Your parents love you very much." if you translate it. This means that it couldn't be a language she designed, because it's the same common alien language, it's not gibberish, because it actually means something, and Leela's mom wasn't being metaphorical or anything! My guess is that the common alien language is not so common, and there are people who couldn't read it, like Farnsworth. Also, Farnsworth's machine probably doesn't work properly.
    • Maybe it's French, an incomprehensible dead language
• In the preview of the first 90 seconds of the new season airing on Comedy Central was a joke where Fry asks Professor Farnsworth why he's suddenly covered in severe burns. The sight gag reveal was funny, but the extreme extent of the injuries left you wondering why Fry isn't in agonizing pain. When the premiere episode "Rebirth" aired, you learn at the end that the Fry with the burns, whom the viewers watched the entire episode was actually a robot Leela made out of grief because she thought the real Fry was dead. It then turns out the real Fry was still undergoing the rebirth process in the Professor's vat of stem cells. It explains why the Fry in the beginning didn't feel any pain from the burns. He was a robot!
• I only just this instant realized that Zoidberg's accent, and, indeed, name, are supposed to be Yiddish. I know, I know... I know.
  • Speaking of Zoidberg, the second X Mas episode when he came in after everybody claimed they were Santa Claus while dressed as Jesus became much funnier when I realized that Jesus himself was originally Jewish so for the lone Jewish (or something) character to say that is more hilarious.
    • It's even more hilarious when you remember that Zoidberg is the only person who fits Robot Santa's incredibly high standards. Robot Santa considers even the tiniest of wrongs equal of punishment. Guess who's the one person who would've never been naughty.
    • He lived in relative poverty and always did everything he could to protect people. He was flawless, Jewish, honest, and celibate. He enjoyed being with his friends and loved helping and taking care of people. Even though he had a skill that enabled him to make money, he chose a life of poverty to be with the people he loved. Despite being horribly mistreated by many people, he genuinely had a great deal of affection for everyone he met.
    • Now, was that about Jesus or Zoidberg?
    • Jesus, obviously. Zoidberg doesn't have any skill to speak of at his job. The reason Zoidberg is in poverty is because he's an incompetent doctor.
    • Actually, Zoidberg is shown to be a relatively competent doctor, he just has no knowledge of human anatomy.
    • More specifically, he is competent, but only when operating on aliens.
    • And when Zoidberg got his 300 dollars, he realized that happiness comes from people, not things. Sounds like something a certain carpenter taught...
    • Occam's Razor: the Robot Santa is far more motivated by the idea of punishing people for even the tiniest of transgressions than rewarding them for any reason. As Zoidberg is Planet Express' (and maybe even New New York's) resident Butt-Monkey, he's the one person that Robot Santa can trust to meet his high standards of punishment.
• Anyone got any good Fridge Brilliance theories as to why there's "Just the one" alternate universe in "I Dated a Robot", but then the Professors manage to accidentally create gateways to a bunch of different universes in "The Farnsworth Parabox"? I feel like that's one that could benefit from some good fan-crackpot-theories.
  • I believe Word of God has it that "I Dated a Robot" features a parallel universe while "The Farnsworth Parabox" featured "perpendicular universes". Sounds good to me.
  • On that note, at first it sounds like David X. Cohen trying to be an ass, but it does make sense that those universes are not parallel universes, as the boxes are effectively intersection points, something parallel lines do not have with one another, so neither would parallel universes.
  • It would also explain why, even though they try to make it sound like either of the main universes from the episode could potentially have created the other, all the other universes (which are accessed from Universe 1, the one we don't normally see) are variations on Universe A (the universe every other episode is set in). That would make Universe A the prime universe and the others slightly altered copies rather than points of divergence in the timeline (as is typical of parallel universes).
    • Of course, that's assuming Universe 1 hasn't gone on to have its own "The Farnsworth Paradox" storyline, with its own set of perpendicular universes. For all we know, there's an infinity of universes in the Futurama cosmos, all equally valid, and the only reason we're watching Universe A instead of some other one is because it happens to be similar enough to our own to make for good stories.
• I never had a problem with the "Luck of the Fryrish" episode's ending, but it just suddenly became more meaningful to me. It is revealed at the end that the tombstone of one 'Philip J. Fry,' whom Fry thought was his spiteful brother Yancy after taking his name, contained a heartfelt engravement on it saying that this Fry had been "named for his uncle." It was Yancy's son. Anyway, this becomes more meaningful when you think of how the name "Philip J. Fry" for the Fry we know was itself a real-life tribute to the late Phil Hartman.
• Bender is named "Bender" because he "bends" things; girders, bars, people, right? Maybe, but, if he has to stay drunk to function correctly isn't he on a constant beer "bender"?
  • Yep. The funniest part is that when Bender does not get his booze, he develops a rust "5 o'clock shadow" and acts drunk. So basically, every time you see Bender acting normally, he's actually drunk off his ass.
    • Not just him! Every fully-functioning robot on Earth, if not the Universe, is by design completely brick-faced!
• In "A Pharaoh to Remember" the people of Osiris IV claim to have been taught Pyramid building, Space Travel, and How to Prepare their dead to scare Abbot and Costello. Initially this looks like a reversal of ancient astronaut hypothesis and highly comical, then in the new series episode "That Darn Katz" it's revealed the cat people of Thuban 9 visited ancient Egypt. Obviously one of the things the Egyptians would have picked up from the cats is Space Travel. Still no clue who told them about Abbot and Costello though.
  • Well Bender certainty could have influenced the Abbot and Costello part. He must have hung around ancient Egypt when he went back to steal that sarcophagus in the timesphere. The timesphere could only move back in time not forwards. And Bender has a history of enjoying using monster disguises to scare unsuspecting humans, from his stint at the cyrogenics lab. It'd be very interesting, if true, as that would mean Bender had two major influences on the planet Osiris IV from the past and the present.
• Also in "A Pharaoh to Remember", Pharaoh Amenhotep's funeral includes entertainment by an Elton John stand-in, who sings a selection of Soundalike Elton John songs before being entombed himself. Notably, he does not sing the one hit most appropriate: "Candle In The Wind", which the real-life Elton John did once re-record for a royal funeral (Princess Diana).
• In "Bender's Big Score", why would the Robot Devil perform at Leela and Lars' wedding, even though he's their enemy? Because he knows how devastated Fry would be after Leela and Lars marry.
• Bender has a thing for Asian human women. Both humans he's ever had a romantic relationship with (Lucy Liu and Amy) are Asian.
  • That's because he's a robot. What are Asians stereotypically known for? Being good with technology.
  • Don't forget this bit from the second episode ("The Series Has Landed"), when Amy is struggling to retrieve the starship's keys from a claw machine. Bender tells Amy that manipulating the claw is "just like making love- "left, down, rotate 62 degrees, engage rotor", and Amy immediately snaps back "I know how to make love!". Oh, yeah- they're on the same sexual page.
• In "Time Keeps On Slipping", why is Fry so confident about his Basketball skills even though he obviously sucks? Two possibilities; either he's that much of an idiot, or that it's been a while since he's played Basketball without his Seven-Leaf Clover.
• When you find out at the end of "Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?" that Zoidberg's species dies right after mating, you realize why (a) they have no concept of romance (who cares about pair bonding when it only lasts for one mating?); and (b) why Zoidberg's genes are favored over his status as a doctor (and it has nothing to do with him being poor; if both parents die right after mating, the only thing their kids get from them are genes).
  • If you are going to die you'd want it to be for someone you really loved right? Also, wealth can be seen as a sign of success, and to some this would suggest intelligence. Thus, good genes. Also, it's possible you inherit the estates of your deceased parents.
  • Except that Zoidberg's people mate en masse in the ocean and leave no visible indication of who is whose child. On the other hand, those that don't reproduce like Zoidberg's great-uncle are left around to identify who sired who.
• Also in "Why Must I Be A Crustacean In Love?", we're introduced to Claw Flock, a fight to the death between two males for the hand of a contested female. It seems stupid to us humans, but it makes total sense given that Decapodians die after mating. A male that goes courting and seems to have found a receptive female is basically getting ready to die, and therefore ends up passing the point of no return some time before the mating frenzy. If they lose the courtship, they're at a point where they didn't expect to live, which could ruin them as surely as going Out with a Bang.
  • Also, it's mentioned that the ceremony is only 18 years old. Why? Because a substantial portion of the population dies every generation, actually passing on traditions is difficult at best, and a lot of their ceremonies wouldn't make the cut, especially in the case of a tradition wherein all the participants die.
• In A Farewell to Arms, the world ending prophecy foretold that Mars will be destroyed due to sun flares, and Earth will not be affected. However, when Mars was dying, it almost collided with Earth. Why? Well, because Earth's orbit was changed during Crimes of the Hot, and the prophecy did not account for that change.
• In "Where No Fan Has Gone Before" has Nichelle Nichols say she kissed Shatner after Melllvar calls them actors who only play heroes. The way it was shot, it seemed like a crack about Shatner being a bad kisser but remember, for the time period it was a controversy that a white man kissed a black woman.
• Somehow, the Applied Cryonics building survived two attacks that destroyed New York and stayed standing until the year 3000. How did it manage that? Simple. We saw in Bender's Big Score that Bender was the one leading those attacks. At least he lead the first one, but the second one had the same kind of ships. Bender deliberately avoided attacking that building because he knew Fry was in there.
  • Alternatively, the second attack was a result of the second coming of Jesus (as a zombie). Zombie Jesus would probably know that shooting down Applied Cryonics would result in a universe-destroying paradox.
  • One wonders why the Applied Cryonics lab kept being a viable buisness for a thousand years, or managed to maintain power that long. Then you remember that the Nibblonians were responsible for Fry being frozen, and thus would've kept it going all that time with their super-advanced technology.
• In "The Tip of the Zoidberg", Mom is one of the few people who is kind to Zoidberg, with the latter even calling being allowed to call her by her first name. This seems odd, but there are several explanations:
  • Zoidberg is actually skilled in alien medicine. Mom is definitely a rotten person, but a good businesswoman like her knows that you shouldn't alienate someone of that talent.
  • Mom could be legitimately touched by the fact that Zoidberg gave up her riches to help the Professor. That kind of loyalty is something any employer would only dream of.
• In "The Thief of Baghead", Calculon plans to actually die in order to make his performance as accurate as possible-however one wonders why he didn't just get a new body, which all robots are capable of. Then you remember that Calculon was built in 2019, long before proper A.I was mass produced, meaning he would never have been built with a back-up chip.
• In "Ghost in the Machines", the Professor says that before Parade Day in New New York there was a parade everyday, and how dark those days were. Then it hit me: at every parade, streets get blocked off and some places close for the day. So with parades everyday, people probably couldn't get to work and lost their jobs over it.
• In "That Darn Katz" it's said that Amy's been a grad student for a decade, which seems like a Lampshade Hanging. In "A Clone of My Own" during Professor Farnsworth's birthday video, it's said he spent 14 years in grad school. This seems to be the norm in the future, as opposed to 1 or 2 years in the 21st century. A millenium has passed, so the norm for education has changed.
  • 1 or 2 years? Maybe for a Masters, but certainly not for the Ph.D. that is almost certainly what Farnsworth and Amy would both have been going for (and which is generally necessary to be called "professor"). In the 21st the preferred length is usually 4 or 5 years, but even up to 9 isn't unheard of. The situation in the 3000s is an exaggeration of that, not a wholesale change.
• In "My Three Suns", Bender makes a dish with salt that is 10% less than a lethal dose, but Zoidberg has seconds and is fine. This might seem like just Rule of Funny, but it makes sense when you realize that Zoidberg is a crustacean, and crustaceans have much higher sodium tolerance than other life forms.
• The group attends a Beastie Boys concert at the beginning of "Hell is Other Robots" and they sing "Intergalactic" which includes a line about Mr. Spock. The line is not heard in this episode at all, because Star Trek is illegal in the future.
• It's established that Bender was built only a couple years before the start of the show. This explains why he doesn't know about robot reproduction in "The Bots and the Bees." By that point in the series, he's technically a teenager, and at the age where a human teenager would learn about that stuff in real life.
  • It doesn't explain how he had a firstborn son in The Beast With a Billion Backs or how he had a clear understanding of how sex works in many episodes.
    • As far as Bender understanding sex goes, there could be a difference between him understanding how to do it and understanding the consequences of it.
• The episode "A Big Piece of Garbage" has Ron Popeil's head reveal that he created head-in-a-jar technology. It was basically a throwaway gag, but it explains why almost all the heads are from the early 21st century - becoming a head in a jar was most likely a fad when it was new and has since gone out of vogue with the technology being used rarely since then.
  • We do see some people, such as U.S. Presidents prior to the late 20th century with heads in jars. Since The Headless Body of Spirrow Agnew has been established to be a clone, these heads are more than likely cloned as well.
• There are many examples of Failed Future Forecast in the precancellation episodes, like Conan O'Brien losing his legs in the War of 2012 or gas costing $100 a gallon by the year 2012 in Bender's Big Score. Considering there was time travel in episodes like "Roswell that Ends Well," "Bender's Big Score" and "The Late Philip J. Fry," the changes made in the past could've had a butterfly effect that changed those events as well.
  • Not really, since the first two are explicitly Stable Time Loops, and the last one is only into the future.
  • Some of it could be the result of the 31st century's inconsistent knowledge of the 21st.
• Between the fountain of youth in "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles" and the earth's orbit being changed in "Crimes of the Hot," this could explain why the characters don't age very fast despite the fact years pass. Notice that Fry ages normally when he goes back in time in "Bender's Big Score" but he looks the same in the final season as he does in the pilot.
  • "Crimes of the Hot" resulted in the year becoming one week longer, so a single year actually covers a larger amount of time (marginally—53 weeks, rather than 52). This would result in people aging faster, not slower, as a 53 year old after the Earth has moved further from the sun is effectively aged as much as a 54 year old before the sun moved (so if "160" was the average death age before the move, it would have been 158~ years old after the planet moved further from the sun). If the Earth had moved closer to the sun, it would have been the case that this caused people to "age slower," since the amount of time covered by "one year" would have decreased. Granted, that wouldn't have done much for the planet's temperature, though.
  • Probably also has to do with anti aging tech available in the 30th century: currently, scientists consider that 150 years is basically the absolute max on the human lifespan without a way to slow or stop aging: since people can live past 160 withou too much issue, seemingly, the medical care is probably responsible for more longevity. And even AT 160, old people are stored so they can live as long as possible in suspended animation. Could be, the anti aging medicine makes you age pretty quickly once you get to a certain point, so you could look 20 ish in your 40s, but by 50s, 60s, it can catch up kinda quickly - iirc pics of 50 year old Farnsworth look more like a 30 year old with deep wrinkles setting in. Additionally, there were photos of him around 100 years old, he didn't look like one would expect a 100 year old to look. A direct comparison of their ages to our age expectations would be inaccurate.
• In "Bender's Big Score", Fry's plan to stop the wedding failed, because Lars had a spare pen with him. Oddly convenient, don't you think? Remember that Lars is Fry, so he knew it was just the kind of thing he would do.
• One of the Professor's catchphrases is "Sweet Zombie Jesus!" In "When Aliens Attack" he mentions the second coming of Jesus, in which all videotapes from the 20th century were destroyed. Is it possible that the second coming involved Jesus coming back as a zombie?
  • Also in that episode, when Zoidberg (referring to McNeal's husband-to-be) recites the line "My God, he's dead," Farnsworth can be seen in the background checking his pulse. While it seems like he's just being his typical Cloudcuckoolander self, after learning about his and Zoidberg's history in "The Tip of the Zoidberg" and the promise the latter made for Mercy Killing the former, it makes sense that this would give Farnsworth a little déjà vu.
• In "A Leela of her Own", we see that Leela has issues pitching in blernsball: she can't get anywhere near the strike zone, and never fails to hit a player instead. But this makes absolute sense - as a cyclops, she wouldn't have proper depth perception, and this would affect her aim.
  • Leela actually comes right out and says this in the episode. After her first "bean," she apologizes to the Cygnoid she hit in the face: "I have some problems with depth perception!"
  Cygnoid: Yeah, me too, now.
• A minor example, but nevertheless...In the episode when Fry, Bender, and Leela make their own beer inside Bender, the 'swelling with beer' is an obvious pregnancy allegory. However, it also works as a Stealth Pun: he's got a beer belly.
• We see that Zoidberg is still alive in 3030 in "The Late Philip J. Fry." That means he didn't go through his species' mating ritual from "Why Must I Be A Crustacean In Love."
  • Zoidberg has aged more than one would suspect in 3030, if you compare his 80 year old flashback in "The Tip of the Zoidberg". Given he's lost at least one heart, and started living in a dumpster just before the series, one can expect him to age faster.
  • Despite the 30th century lifespans, the Planet Express crew seems to be aging at a modern rate. Which isn't that surprising given their circumstances; Leela is a mutant instead of a long-lived human, Cubert is a clone (and thus victim to Clone Degredation), and Hermes generally doesn't take good care of his body.
• We all remember the Professor's claim that there are only two parallel universes, our own and the cowboy one. Yet in Farnsworth Parabox we see plenty more, which Word of God Hand Waves as "perpendicular" universes. A few moments' cognition will suggest that this makes PERFECT SENSE. All universes in that episode DO intersect with our own at some point in space-time (represented by the boxes which "contain" them) and therefore can be fairly called perpendicular.
  • It's still just a handwave, since the one parallel universe (The cowboy universe) technically intersects with ours, as well, since light clearly travels between the two (otherwise Fry and the gang wouldn't be able to see the cowboy versions). By that reasoning, the cowboy universe is also perpendicular.
• "Game of Tones" reveals that February (now known as Flomurary) has at least 39 days. Given "Crimes of the Hot" and most likely the near-Mars collision altered Earth's orbit, the year being that longer isn't so shocking.
• Present-day media is just reaching Omicron Persei 8. This explains how Fry, who's missed out the 21st century, has the same knowledge as us on pulp-culture.
• Bender's pretty content and happy waiting in a cavern for centuries. There are hundreds of other Benders there, so no wonder he was cool with it.
• Professor Farnsworth told the crew not to worry about the garbage ball they sent in space coming back, since it's hundreds of years from now. When he travels to the year 10,000, New New York is in ruins.
• It always bothered me that the Aliens Steal Cable aspect of the Omicronians decayed over time. In their first appearance, they were receiving broadcasts from Fry's time, but in "Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences" and "T: The Terrestrial," the characters on Earth are able to control what programming the Omicronians can get; President Nixon even refers to it as a "cultural export!" But then I realized that at least ten years have explicitly passed since their first appearance. Both technological and diplomatic advances could have been made, so the Omicronians can now receive their television shows more quickly and legally.
• A Real Life example: The Simpsons has been compared to The Flintstones for reviving the concept of prime time animation. The Flintstones had a Spiritual Successor, The Jetsons which was a show set in the future. Futurama is set in the future, and basically is to The Simpsons what The Jetsons is to The Flintstones.
  • The main difference between the two shows is that whereas The Jetsons is about a future were everything looks the same but things are actually much better, Futurama is about a future were everything looks different but things are actually the same.
• In "I Second That Emotion" the mutants mention worshiping the unexploded nuclear warhead is a Christmas and Easter thing. In the future, Christmas is known as Xmas but the mutants aren't allowed on the surface. They must be behind the times when it comes to cultural changes and terminology.
• Fry gets cryogenically frozen after trying to make a delivery to one "I.C. Wiener". The viewer is supposed to initially parse this punny crank call name as "I see wiener", but it also sounds like "icy wiener", which is appropriate given Fry's characterization because that can be interpreted as "frozen loser". Alternatively, it could refer to the actual icy wieners in the lab.
• In "The Late Philip J. Fry", one of the fallen civilisations is based on cows... except waaay back in season 1, Amy said cows were extinct. Obviously the Encyclopod brought them back.
  • The three other fallen civilizations were apes, birds and slug-looking creatures. All three have appeared as intelligent races before, as Simian 7, the Hyperchicken and Wormulons (yeah, they're worms, but they look a lot like slugs), so them ruling the Earth in 7000 interim isn't out of left-field (the cows are still a mystery then)
  • With the universe endlessly being recreated, the Nibblonians existing before the Big Bang makes a lot more sense.
• From "Bender's Big Score", Bender has no problem sitting in a cavern for millennia at a time. Of course he doesn't. As "Fear Of A Bot Planet" shows, robots find tedious repetitive tasks enjoyable.
  • Either that or he just turned himself off until it was time to get up.
  • In "Roswell That Ends Well", Bender takes being buried underground for over 1000 years pretty well. He's shown to be happy with being in a cramped closet/apartment, so being stuck in the ground would feel pleasant for him.
• Despite being frozen for 1000 years, Fry's tube is off by several hours. The Gregorian Calendar has an error of one day every 3300 years, so him waking up in December 31 2999 instead of Jan 1 3000 makes some sense.
• Area 51 is mentioned in "Roswell That Ends Well", which is the 51st episode of the series.
• In the pilot the "you gotta do, what you gotta do" rule was treated as a realy big deal referenced frequently in dialogue and constantly seen on posters implying the whole society of the future is based around that rule. But after that it was never mentioned again is this an Aborted Arc or was the rule enforced by President McNeil.
  • A pity: its error potential makes a great explanation for why Zapp Brannigan is so supremely terrible at his job, and quite possibly almost everyone else. Things might be maintained by the robots and a few competent humans, and jobs unnecessary except as a mechanism of social control…much like today.
• In "Anthology of Interest" the Professor yells "take that everyone that's never won a Nobel prize, than includes you Amy" and she runs of crying. Amy is studying for her PHD and it's taken her many years so it makes sense she took it harder than everybody else, he was rubbing in that she hasn't achieved her dream.
• In "Leela's Homeword" Hermes tastes the toxic waste, suffers no after effects and actually enjoys it, minutes later it completely obliterated a tree then a car then makes a huge hole in the pavement. This would seem weird until "The Six Million Dollar Mon" where it's shown that his favorite meal also has this property and because he's eaten so much of it so dose his skin. The show actually gave a logical(?) reason why Hermes is capable of digesting toxic waste.
• Another one from "Leela's Homeworld" the balloon they used made of old parade floats featured part of Bart Simpson, since then there's been a Crossover with The Simpsons which would be an issue, except if you remember "Bart Vs Thanksgiving" the Bart Simpson Macy's parade float actually exists In-Universe.
• The end of Wild Green Yonder had an offhand joke about Calculon running Windows 7, promptly crashing. In The Honking he revealed he was a ware-car who was infected with a virus in 2019 when he was just a robot arm in a factory. Big companies have a very bad habit of never upgrading their computer systems even when support runs out for them so of course a machine running Windows 7 in 2019 let alone 3009 would be susceptible to crashing.
• In "I Second That Emotion", why doesn't the crew turn into mutants when they hit the water? Well, in the episode "Leela's Homeworld", Bender begins dumping toxic waste into the mutant lake, thus making it more toxic, mutating humans. This didn't occur until after the events of the former episode.
• Why does Zapp Brannigan's outfit include a skirt, besides Star Trek: The Original Series? Because at some point, women were allowed under his command. Presumably, he wanted women under his command to wear miniskirts, but was unable to get a female-only uniform in place. So he decided to make it the standard uniform - and when women were banned from serving under him, the miniskirt became The Artifact.
• In "Amazon Women in the Mood," the ruler of an all-female society describes Kif as being the most attractive of all the men. At first, it just seemed like a humorous joke, as Kif is a goofy-looking alien, and not exactly the epitome of masculinity. But this panel◊ from the comics gives a decent explanation as to why the women of Amazonia were so charmed by Kif. Being effeminate and girlish are traits that are typically seen as undesirable in men on Earth- but would definitely be desirable traits in a society populated entirely by women.
  • As an additional note, Kif coming through the experience relatively unscathed while Fry and Zap need medical attention initially just appears to be a minor detail, but later episodes establish that Kif's species don't actually have bones and are supported by a system of hydrostatic liquid-filled bladders, so Snu-Snu wouldn't be as damaging to him as it was to humans.
• In the season one episode "A Big Piece of Garbage" it's implied Fry won't have a long lifespan to the point some of the Planet Express crew don't think it's too early to call dibs on his stuff while in the season seven episode "T: The Terrestrial" an Omicronian Veterinarian says Fry would likely live another eighty years at most, at first glance it seems like the two episodes contradict each other, you remember that in the 31st century the lifespan of an average human has advanced to the point where someone would have to be 150 to be considered elderly, while Fry is from the 21st century and therefore has a shorter lifespan than everyone else.
  • The short lifespan is also explainable with the fact Lars is Fry, who dies about seven years after the episode. Plus Fry is technically way over the normal human lifespan, so it might confuse the device.
• The Robot Devil is generally a Butt-Monkey, but he's frighteningly competent in The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings, where his 'ridiculously circuitous' plan to get his hands back goes off without a hitch. How is this possible from the robot version of The Devil Is a Loser? It's because the Robot Devil is the Robot version of the Devil. Robots are supposed to be the best at their chosen tasks, at the cost of everything else. The Robot Devil is great at things that the Devil is supposed to do. Playing music? He mastered the violin and holophone, and the Robot Hell song is very catchy. Ruling over Robot Hell? Look at the massive army of the damned in Beast With A Billion Backs, and think of how much maintenance would be required to make them all combat ready after all that torture. Supernatural powers? He makes plumes of fire appear from nowhere. Punishing sinners? He pours out a huge list of Bender's crimes with very little time to prepare; either he started researching the moment Bender threw away the tracker, which would give him one night, or when he converted, which would mean that he keeps tabs on every member of Robotology. Of course that Gambit Roulette worked; every step involved a Deal with the Devil, which he was designed to excel at. However, the Robot Devil is not necessarily supposed to be a good fighter; so Leela easily kicks his ass, he's not supposed to be good at resisting arrest; so he gets arrested, etc.
  • And if the Robot Devil is so good at deals with the devil, how did he lose his hands in one of those deals? Easy. It wasn't one. A Deal with the Devil usually runs at one of two costs to the mortal: either they give up something precious in exchange (Bender losing his crotch plate), or they're asked for something seemingly innocuous that leads to their downfall (Leela giving up her hand). Fry getting an equal exchange, one set of hands for another, isn't pricey enough for a standard deal.
• Small one regarding Robotology: their emblem is the schematic symbol for a resistor, which functions to impede the flow of electricity; an appropriate choice for a strict Scary Dogmatic Religion.
• In the comic "The Cure For the Common Clod", Fry catches a "cold" and spreads it to everyone except Bender, Zoidberg, and Prof. Farnsworth. However, it makes everyone revert to their primal states. At first, the Professor thinks that it has this effect on Leela since she's a mutant and that Hermes and Amy got it from Leela (and therefore they got a mutated version), however, when Fry accidentally contaminates New NY's water supply with his germs, everyone who drinks the water reverts to their primal state. When you look back, you realize that Fry's disease was never quite like a normal cold: when he had it, his eyes watered (which is generally more a symptom of allergies), his tongue turned green and his pee turned red. He also got the disease from an alien— it's possible that he had an alien disease that Leela diagnosed as a cold because it had some cold-like symptoms and they hadn't experienced colds for hundreds of years, and that's how the disease behaves. I mean, it's not like all the New New Yorkers were going around peeing and sticking their tongues out, so we couldn't tell if they had the same symptoms, and for all we know, Fry's primal urges are just "lie around and ogle women".
• In the pilot, Leela's code number as a security officer is 1BDI, a pun on "one beady eye". When she says it out loud, she has a slight pause between "1B" and "DI", making the joke more subtle. In-universe, she's probably grown accustomed to pronouncing it that way because she knows what it sounds like - she's pretty self-conscious about being made fun of for her eye, and probably resents having been assigned that number.
• Fry forms an immediate connection with Bender. This perhaps, this could be because Fry's support system (until it was retconned that he got along very well with his family) consisted mostly of Mr Panucci, his employer at the pizza parlor. Bender sounds a lot like him (both are voiced by the same actor)
• The useless/ownerless robots struck me as odd until I saw ''The Bots and the Bees." If the robots can reproduce, who owns that offspring, and what would be their direct purpose? Nobody and nothing. They have to get jobs and figure out what they're good for, just like biologicals.
• In "The Late Philip J. Fry," Fry, Farnsworth and Bender never actually found out about the upcoming disaster at Hedonismbot's bachelor party, which the latter two had planned to attend while Fry was on his date with Leela. So why didn't they get killed? Because Bender had to bury their dead time-paradox selves. Farnsworth was only going as Bender's plus one and wouldn't have attended without him.
• Why is Amy the only character in the show to use Future Slang? She grew up on another planet. It's probably not Future Slang—it's Martian slang. Spluh.
• The jokes about Leela's lack of depth perception seem like stock Rule of Funny for a one-eyed character. After The Reveal regarding her origins, though, they start to make a lot more sense. Leela's condition appears to be a handicap because it is—it's not a trait distinctive to a species but a genetic abnormality. Essentially she's no different from a "normal" human who lost vision in one eye.
• "Rebirth"'s B-story, in which Bender is forced to constantly party to burn off the steadily building energy from a Doomsday Device that's powering him, softens its implications of idiocy a bit. The entire cast save Farnsworth were unaware that Fry had been replaced with an identical robot covered in a sheathe of fake skin. With Leela in a coma and likewise replaced by a robot, the most obvious candidate for figuring out the truth was Bender, who unwittingly lived with the robot as his roommate for at least a couple of days...but given that he was unable to even stand still at the time for fear of being blown up, you can't really blame him for not sniffing out the fake.
• In Bendin' In The Wind, a magnetised Bender sings the song "Jimmy Crack Corn". For those who don't know, "Jimmy Crack Corn" has origins with the Virginia Minstrels during the rise of the blackface minstrelsy. The song (which was originally called "Blue Tail Fly") is about a slave who was tasked with fanning flies away from his master's horse. One day, while the master was riding his horse, the horse was bitten by one of these flies, causing it to buck. This lead to the master's death when he cracked his skull on the ground. In celebration of his death, the slave drank a brand of corn whiskey called "Jimmy Crack" (originally called Jim Crack). Considering Bender's bigotry towards non-robot beings, this is fitting.
• In "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back," when Fry thinks he's about to get in trouble for having a messy locker, he blurts out, "This is the other Fry's locker—I'm Fry with a P-H!" Four episodes later in "The Problem With Popplers," we find out his first name: Philip. He really is Fry with a P-H—it's just not in the "Fry" part of his name. This may well be his go-to excuse.
• In "The Series Has Landed," when Leela expresses concern that they'll freeze, Bender cracks, "Whaddya mean 'we,' mammal?" At this point Leela's biological species is unknown and presumed extraterrestrial, but for someone as crude as Bender her biological class is a no-brainer.
• In one of many examples of Bender gratuitously using the word "ass" in "War is the H-Word," he compliments his friends on their quick thinking by saying, "That's using your ass." Five seasons later, "Assie Come Home" reveals that Bender in fact has a secondary "hind-brain" located...exactly where you'd think.
• Hermes actually has a Meaningful Name. In Greek mythology, Hermes was the god of sports and athletes and Hermes (the character) in his younger years was an Olympic level athlete. But there's an additional meaning! Hermes was also the messenger of the gods. In the show, Hermes often delivers message to and from Professor Farnsworth, who as owner of the Planet Express, is essentially their "god" (in name only).
  • Really, having an employee named "Hermes" in a delivery company is fairly on the nose in general.
• While they missed the first time due to bad baloney, it's odd that Fry's parents never tried to re-check once other leads dried up. We later learn he was only go for about 30 minutes (technically), and when Panucci's was destroyed 12 years later there's little to assume he wasn't killed.
• "Murder On The Planet Express" has Bender steal Fry's kidney to give to the Professor, though a mishap leads to him getting Hermes' manwich instead. Given organ donations are more compatible with relatives, it'd make sense for Bender to pick Fry as the donor.
• "The Why Of Fry" has Nibbler waiting under the table when Fry sits down on the chair he eventually falls into the cryo-tube in, which seems to contradict "Jurassic Bark" as Nibbler's eye stalk is seen poking out of the garbage at that moment. However "Game of Tones" reveals he wasn't the only Nibblonian present, so it's likely that eyestalk belonged to Digby.
• In "Less Than Hero," Leela, Bender and Fry all come up with hasty excuses to leave the mayor's office so that they can return in their superhero identities. Fry, whose powers include flight ability, declares "I can't take life anymore!" and jumps out a high window. Given the ridiculously casual attitude toward suicide in the future, it's perhaps hardly surprising that nobody reacts.
• Bender's reproductive instrument is his antenna, which is on his head. Basically, he's a dickhead. It also explains why he keeps comparing it to a certain male anatomy, given that it has the same primary function.
• At the start of "Rebirth," the Professor states the wormhole is "Earth's central channel for shipping." The obvious setup is that Zoidberg chuckles and Professor calls it a "Comedy-central channel" for some Leaning on the Fourth Wall humor, but the last thing that happened before the crew entered the wormhole was Fry and Leela kissing, solidifying a Relationship Upgrade. In other words, the wormhole is the center for shipping of both kinds. If intentional, Zoidberg's laugh could be drawing attention to the double meaning.
• At the end of "A Fishfull of Dollars" Fry offers everyone anchovies, but except for Fry and Zoidberg they find it disgusting. It could be a Take That! at the foodstuff, but anchovies have been extinct for centuries so the Planet Express cast probably isn't prepared for the kind of salty flavor they provide compared to Fry. Zoidberg ends up loving the stuff because his race comes from saltwater so their saltiness would make them a lot more palatable. It's probably why his saltwater-based race was the one who drove the anchovy to extinction in the first place; they'd find it more appealing than humans who are used to fresh water.
• In "A Taste of Freedom", a hyper-patriotic country-western song ("Don't Mess with Earth") extols the Earth flag (an obvious riff on the American flag) and says it proudly flies "from Dallas to Fort Worth". That's clearly meant as an extreme parody of the parochialism of country music — far from symbolizing the planet, those two cities hardly represent their shared state of Texas, being only thirty miles apart. However, because the Earth is round, one can interpret the "from... to" as a very long trip southeast from Dallas instead of directly west, looping around the Antarctic into a northeast line before crossing some northern latitudes, becoming southeast again, and arriving at Fort Worth — thus making for an "Earthican" equivalent to American lyrics like "from California to the New York Islands".
• In the very first episode, Professor Farnsworth presents new employees Fry, Leela and Bender with career chips dumped out of an envelope marked "Contents of Space Wasp's Stomach", suggesting the previous crew had been devoured by the space wasp and serving as a nod to the future episode "The Sting". Only prob is that the insects are now bees rather than wasps, causing an apparent Continuity Snarl. But this apparent discrepancy can be easily explained away by one simple fact: the Professor is a senile, amoral crackpot who either a) made a simple mistake labelling the envelope or b) gave so little a shit about the wasted lives of his old crew that he didn't even bother confirming the exact species of the space insect that ate them.
• Futurama and robosexuality
  • Robosexuality is treated as a gay metaphor, especially in "Proposition Infinity". The anti-robosexual propaganda uses the claim that robosexuality is bad because it'll prevent reproduction. Sounds a lot like homophobic propaganda using the claim the same sex can't have kids to justify their bigotry.
  • Despite being mad at Fry being a robosexual in "I Dated A Robot", Bender hooks up with Lucy Liu's head. Seems hypocritical on his end, but as his main complaint is Fry dating a robot specifically made to love him. Throughout the series Bender is frustrated at when robots are treated as tools and appliances rather than having full agency, so of course he'd be mad as he'd see it as something like that. He also told Fry to "stay away from our women", but never said he was against a manbot and human woman dating.
  • Most of the characters thought that Robosexuals Are Creeps to a degree in "I Dated A Robot" drop it by "Proposition Infinity". The latter episode takes place several years after the former and the crew is used to having a robot as a friend, so they later dropped their old bigotry, and Bender has completely changed his views as it's been millennia since that episode. The exception is Professor Farnsworth, who was only motivated to get back at his ex robot girlfriend for leaving him and grew up long before anyone of his crew but Fry was born^note maybe Zoidberg, but he's from an alien culture.
  • Despite robosexual marriage being illegal at that point, nobody tries to bring it up when the Robot Devil tries to take Leela's hand in marriage as part of his Deal with the Devil. However because he has Fry's hands attached to him the Robot Devil is technically a cyborg, and there's no law stated a cyborg and full person can't marry.
• Way back in "Where The Buggalo Roam", Kif twice expresses the belief that kissing Amy is "making love". At the time it seemed like another example of his naivete, as if he doesn't know what sex actually is. But "Kif Gets Knocked Up A Notch" subsequently proves that, where conception in Amphibiosans is concerned, any direct physical contact can suffice if genuine feelings of love are involved. So, he wasn't confused at all.
• The montage of Fry, Bender and Farnsworth attempting to travel forward in time in hopes of finding an era where a backwards time machine is invented in "The Late Phillip J. Fry" is accompanied by a parody of the song "In the Year 2525". It may seem like a random choice, but use of the song parody makes a lot more sense when you consider that the episode establishes that the universe goes through an endless cycle of ceasing to exist and being recreated, while the original song ended with the first verse repeating, as if to indicate history repeating after the universe eventually ends.
• Zapp Brannigan's hatred for the Neutrals in "Brannigan, Begin Again" makes even more sense when you consider that their neutrality means they'd essentially sit on the sidelines and be completely indifferent to other species or planets committing atrocities in front of them. Considering a lot of Zapp's missions are done out of a (horribly misguided and selfish) sense of justice, it makes sense that he'd dislike them just as much as the "evil" planets he loves to fight against.
  • He also likes to antagonize alien races that he knows he can win a fight against.
• Why does Roberto keep trying to rob the same bank in "Insane in the Mainframe" when even Fry knows how stupid that is? Because the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results!
• Leela's parents appear in a crowd shot in "I Second That Emotion" when Dwayne begins to sing about "El Chupanibre," but they're no longer visible in the following scene, when the mutants turn against Leela and the gang. It's likely they didn't want to be a part of the hate mob on their little girl, even if they also couldn't let her know her true identity just yet.
• In "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles," a running theme is the de-aged Leela getting frustrated that her parents don't discipline her enough, as they offer her tequila and let her stay out late with Fry. While there's obvious explanations of "they know she's mentally an adult so they don't take this seriously" and "they love and miss her too much to be strict with her," there's also a third possibility of Deliberate Values Dissonance. Mutants are relegated to a Fantastic Ghetto that consists mostly of the trash flushed down people's toilets, including a library full of crumbled porn. It makes sense that they'd have lower standards of what's appropriate for children.
• Leela being a Friend to All Living Things, including animals that are straight-up deadly, makes sense when you consider her history as an orphan. While she can get rough with other sentient beings, she has a big soft spot for animals she perceives as helpless. Due to her own abandonment issues, she may have a soft spot for those who have nobody else to care for them and seemingly can't take care of themselves.
• Lars is beloved by the heads at the Head Museum because he understands the 20th century, whereas most other people have misconceptions about it such as mammoth hunts on flying scooters; and because Lars practiced feeding water-dwelling creatures.
• In season 1, the Mona Lisa gets destroyed. In "Bender's Big Score", we learn that there is a time-paradox duplicate and that one of the two paintings was doomed.
• In "Colorama" segment of "Reincarnation", there's a short sequence where Fry is hopping around in low-gravity on the diamondium comet and it's very obvious that the backgrounds are all CG-animated. That seems jarring, but remember: this is based on early animation and Fleischer studios in particular. Fleischer was actually quite notable for what's called the Stereoptical Process, which was accomplished by having hand-drawn frames of animation overlaid on footage of a three-dimensional background and panning across it so that Popeye, Betty Boop, and so on would appear to walk through it. Exactly like what's done in this sequence, albeit using modern computer animation to do so.
• Zoidberg introducing himself as "Norm and Sam and Sadie's boy" in "That’s Lobstertainment!" makes sense considering that Decapodians die when they mate. He’s referring to his two deceased biological parents as well as whoever actually raised him.
• At first, it might seem strange that most 31st-century humans would have no trouble getting along with aliens, but insist on keeping separate from mutant humans. But remember that the mutants were created by exposure to toxic waste in New New York's underground sewers. Given their environment, they probably carry a lot of diseases which would make them dangerous for normal humans to interact with.
  • It could also be guilt - as established in a couple of episodes, it's the waste which regular NN Yers create on a daily basis that is causing the sewer mutants to mutate.
• Why are the Robot Mafia the entire Robot Mafia? Because as with many other sectors, technology has created massive leaps in efficiency!
  • Also, with a very small group, it'd be much easier to root out an informant or betrayer.
• The scenario where Fry's never frozen in "Anthology of Interest I" is a lot more accurate than what Professor Farnsworth expected, however it still has an inaccuracy of Bender and Leela somehow knowing each other despite Fry being the reason they met. The end of the episode reveals the whole thing took place in another what-if where Farnsworth invented the fing-longer, so the inconsistencies of the scenario could easily be down to the machine telling them also being part of a simulation.
• Zoidberg being a vampire squid in the elephant seal segment of "Naturama" makes sense on a deeper level; vampire squid are detritovores, which is similar to Zoidberg's habit of eating food out of garbage cans.
• Why was Kif, ordinarily a friendly, affable guy, such a dick to Fry as soon as Zapp makes Fry his assistant in "War is the H-Word"? Maybe because he found out that Fry had a relationship with his crush Amy a few episodes earlier, as depicted in "Put Your Head on My Shoulders", and this was his way of getting back at him....
• Regarding "Zapp Gets Cancelled": The abuse Kif faces in this episode isn't much worse than what he's faced before (including Zapp killing him and sleeping with his widow), so what changed that allowed him to stand up for himself and finally report Zapp? It's likely because he now has a family, and even if he struggles to value himself, he can't let Zapp do anything so drastic that it could leave his children without a father. Having children also often makes people more willing to point out dangerous people in general, as they're inclined to be on the lookout to keep their young ones safe. This tracks with how he takes a leave of absence to be with his family.
• In "I Know What You Did Next X-Mas" Zoidberg laments not having a family to meet up with despite having an uncle and he ended up bonding with and a girlfriend. Considering he was elderly when we met him in an episode set 20 years ago he could've passed away off-screen, and his relationship with Marianne could've broken up because the episode after they got together, Zoidberg and the other Planet Express skipped a decade due to how the Professor fixed the time stop.
• In two episodes, Leela makes remarks about stomping puppies. It sounds wildly out of character for an Animal Lover like her... until you remember that, according to "I Second That Emotion" and "Parasites Regained," Nibbler loves to eat puppies. Perhaps this is just a way to feed her own pet.

Fridge Horror

• I recently watched the episode God Fellas and an interesting notion occurred. When Fry uses the radio telescope to communicate with the God Galaxy, it would take thousands (if not millions) of years for the radio waves to get all the way out there. So that would mean no matter how fast God chucked Bender back to Earth he'd still get there in the future right? Except, the God Galaxy has access to those little time bubbles from Bender's Big Score. This means that he could pop Bender back on Earth at the exact moment when Fry and Leela leave the monestary. What makes this horror is that Bender was essentially stuck in space from anywhere between a few thousand to several billion years. (And potentially all of that time was not spent with the God Galaxy) So Bender's age is (Time between creation and Roswell That Ends Well) + (Time spent buried in New Mexico) + (Time spent in limestone cavern waiting to return to the future) + (One trip to the end of the universe) + (One trip through the entire lifespan of the universe) + (one trip back to the future) + (Time spent waiting for Fry's message to get to the God Galaxy) = Bender is, by far, the oldest creature in the universe.
  • Actually, no. In an earlier episode, the Professor said that scientists sped up the speed of light, which is how space ships are able to travel around the universe so fast. This would naturally also apply to the message that Fry sent to the God Galaxy.
• In Futurama, there is Nibbler, whose role as Leela's small brainless pet is in fact all a charade to hide his undercover work watching over the planet. Keeping in mind some of the stuff he has done while acting as Leela's supposedly unknowing pet (repeatedly hindered or outright endangered the crew's lives, eaten an entire preservation of animals and thus dooming an entire planets worth of species to extinction, stolen a Christmas dinner from a starving orphan, ripped off and stolen Amy's bikini, literally bitten Bender's shiny metal ass) come off as far less cute when you realize he's been doing all of it on purpose.
  Leela: It's not his fault he's a killing machine.
  • Is it really not Nibbler's fault he's a killing machine, Leela?...
  • Though, In "The Why of Fry" it was shown that the Nibblonians are naturally big eaters, as they had a feast of full animals, all of which were devoured in seconds, except Fry's, which he didn't eat and was asked by another if he was going to eat it.
    • Being a Big Eater doesn't really make Nibbler's consumption of an entire biosphere any less horrific, given the Nibblonians are supposed to be dedicated to the protection of the universe.
    • What's one endangered species compared to the whole of creation!? (For full effect, read in Nibbler's voice.)
    • Nibbler eating the whole biosphere may be justified. Remember that him pooping out some dark matter was the only way the crew was able to refuel the ship and get off the planet before it collapsed. He probably needed to eat a big meal to be able to make enough. Maybe it was just a coincidence, but Nibbler was probably already familiar enough with Fry to know that he might forget to refuel the ship, and so he (Nibbler) decided he couldn't risk the fate of the whole universe on whether Fry acted responsibly.
  • In "Bender's Game", Nibbler (while being held captive by Mom to make dark matter) was reminded that after the whole "time code" incident he forgot to wipe people's memories. This is both horrifying and shameful to him, since it meant he did a slew of embarrassing things in front of them while they had the full knowledge he was a sentient and intelligent being. He may have done some nasty stuff for his cover, but he's clearly not proud of it.
• The crew went into the Wormhole around February, 3009. They came out at Earth in "Rebirth" in June, 3010. THEY SPENT MORE THAN A YEAR FLYING THROUGH THE WORMHOLE.
  • Or it sent them a year into the future.
    • Wouldn't be very practical for use as a cargo transport system then, would it? Imagine if you shipped something, jumped into the Panama Wormhole, then popped out it of a year PAST the due date of the item you were shipping.
    • Maybe that's why the Planet Express crew never used it before. Their packages are time-sensitive, the Panama Wormhole is used when you don't care exactly when it arrives, just that it does eventually.
    • Actually, thinking about that there's an extra bit of Fridge Brilliance. They traveled one year into the future through the wormhole, but to everyone on the ship the jump in time was instantaneous. This is a giant reflection on Futurama's cancellation. We waited the entire time for the 5th season to return, but as far as the series is concerned, no such time has passed for the characters. It makes perfect sense and is even lampshaded by the Professor.
  • Or Into The Wild Green Yonder already takes place in 3010, given the lyrics of the opening song.
• Scientists raised the speed of light. How can you change a fundamental constant like the speed of light? It would be possible if our universe was a false vacuum: that is, if the apparent minimum energy state that can exist in our universe was not actually the minimum and if it was possible to go lower by the creation of sufficiently energetic particles. If this was true, the creation of such particles would cause the energy state of the entire universe to decay to one where physical laws, including physical constants, are different. The Fridge Horror comes in when you realize that, in order for the new universe to exist, the current one would have to be destroyed.
  • Rule of Funny. Just change the equations so c equals a higher number.
• In the Alternate Universe story, they get a box in which their own universe is in. And only they know of it. What happens when Earth is destroyed? Shouldn't the universe end?
  • It's stated that it's needed a power like "sun itself" to be able to destroy it. Even if earth is destroyed, i doubt the box could be destroyed too.
    • Still, think about that: spaceships exist where you can jettison stuff into the sun. You have an object that contains the universe. Anyone with the box could effectively ransom the entire universe, if not just destroy it. It doesn't help that the guy who owns it is Professor Farnsworth...
  • If the Earth were destroyed, without the gravitational pull it would probably just float into the sun.
    • That is not how orbital mechanics work. It would still be moving with the orbital speed of the Earth, so it would continue on in the orbit it was following before.
  • Related: the threat of Hermes destroying the box containing Universe-1 was bad enough, but remember that the two Farnsworths had already created many other universe boxes in their attempt to find a replacement box for Universe-A/locate Zoidberg. If Hermes had thrown the Universe-1 Box into the Sun, he wouldn't have accidentally destroyed just Universe-1, but every universe existing in a box within Universe-1, including the main universe due being in a box in Universe-1. And every boxed universe that Universe-1 is theoretically capable of interacting him, for that matter.
  • Fry and Leela aren't together but their alternative counterparts are married. Keep in mind that the alternative universe, for the most part, has opposite approaches, like flipping a coin would be heads in one universe and tails in the other. Now, with that in mind, now that Fry and Leela are dating, what happens to the alternative Fry and Leela?
    • The only thing treated as opposite was the coin flips—everything else was apparently the same, down to peoples' personalities. Alternate Fry and Leela are probably still married, barring any coin-flip related incidents.
    • It's actually explicitly stated that the only difference was with coin flips.
    • No, they explicitly say the key difference is coin flips. There are other differences, such as the sky in Universe 1 being a colourful swirl instead of blue, or people's skin and hair colours being different. It's likely Universe 1's Fry and Leela are still together, regardless, since Universe A's Fry and Leela didn't use a coin to determine going out together.
• Fry once attempts to swallow a softball, and apparently succeeds, leaving him with one explainable, softball-sized lump on his abdomen... and another, completely unexplained softball-sized lump nearby. Except the softball would almost certainly have been dissolved in his stomach before entering his intestinal tracts... meaning he has two unexplained, softball-sized lumps on his abdomen.
• Remember what Torgo's Executive Powder is? Ground up executives. A head in a jar even eats some!
• "The Tip of Zoidberg" near the end where They're using the Rube Goldberg machine to kill the Professor Bender chops the salad with the Cyanide axes... Which the professor later eats...
  • The salad was chopped by three of the axes, and since there were six axes total and two of them had been poisoned, there's a 40% chance that the salad wasn't poisoned. Sure, that was totally irresponsible of Bender, but it wasn't necessarily going to kill the Professor. Especially considering that he's alive in the next episode.
  • Probability was actually 20%. It would be a 66% that the first axe was not poisoned, then a 60% that the second axe was not poisoned if the first was not poisoned, and finally a 50% that the third axe was not poisoned if the first two weren't either.
• The writers have said that the Futurama universe is basically our world, except sci-fi and with more stuff. Futurama is a Crapsack World. Make of that what you will.
  • This was probably intentional, however.
• In The Late Philip J. Fry, Future!Amy is with Future!Cubert. Where is Kif?
  • He has probably aged to the point where he has become a colony of flying hookworms.
• At the end of "The Beast With A Billion Backs", we learn that Yivo has Gonorrhea. And for a good chunk of the movie, Yivo was having (unprotected) sex with the entire universe.
  • Yivo contracting Gonorrhea and the ability to have sex with the entire universe means that shklee is in some way biologically compatible with humans and possibly the rest of the universe. Since shklee lives in an alternate universe where shklee is the only living organism, shklee must have picked up the disease from someone in this universe. Meaning shklee probably contracted a lot of other illnesses as well, and since gonorrhea is still around, some other well known STD's may have made to the future as well. Also, since Yivo is the only natural organism in shklis universe, shklee may not have ever developed an immune system. So all the diseases shklee contracted are likely to kill shklim and shklee has no way to fight them off. Also, why has gonorrhea not been cured. Laziness (working on dog make-up), greed (but think how much we make in treatment), inability (some things can't be done), or necessity (people have to die somehow)?
  • One more thing: Yivo was explicitly mating with the entire Universe. Everybody in the Futurama Universe might be pregnant with an Eldritch Abomination.
    • Or Yivo is impregnated by everyone in the universe.
  • The fact that Yivo can mate opens up a rather disturbing possibility: the only reason why a being like Yivo would develop the power to mate is if there are others like it. The idea that there could've been multiple versions of Yivo is creepy enough, but it leads to a far more disturbing question: given how Yivo so godlike in power it can invade an entire universe, just what or who killed shkler species so greatly it led the sole survivor no evidence that shkler race existed?
  • Leela said that living in Shkler universe makes you immortal.
• In the episode "The Cyber House Rules", Leela gets a synthetic eye surgically attached to her face so she can live a normal life, and subsequently starts going out with a childhood crush named Adlai. Later on in the episode, she and Adlai consider adopting a child from the orphanarium they both grew up in and have trouble deciding between the children, until Leela sees a little girl with a third ear on her forehead being taunted by the other kids in an all-too-familiar way. When Leela suggests they adopt the three-eared girl, Adlai is alarmed but warms up to the idea when he realizes the ear could be surgically removed, but Leela indignantly tells him the little girl is fine the way she is. She then forces Adlai to restore her cyclops eye, wrapping everything up in a neat little Aesop... until you realize that the little three-eared girl still doesn't have a family and probably never will. As important as it is to know how to value yourself for who you are, rotting in an orphanarium is probably a less effective way to learn that lesson than having a family that actually loves you. The odds of adoption are substantially lower for an orphan past infancy; add a vestigial ear to that unhappy formula and you have a little girl who's probably doomed to a life of misery, poverty, alienation and bitterness... just like a certain cyclops.
  • Now that the series has gone on this has turned into a weird sort of Heartwarming Moments: The three eared girl and all the orphans now have jobs and stable lives with ample food.
  • Even if they did adopt her she wouldn't be going to a loving family: she'd be going to a Jerkass who wouldn't accept her unless she got surgery and he and Leela were obviously going to break up eventually. She was better of without that family.
  • Not necessarily. Leela, fully understanding how hard it is growing up with what society considers a deformity, would of a certainty be a most loving and understanding single parent. And the Planet Express crew (especially Fry), with their love and acceptance of Leela, would be a great support system for the little girl.
• The episode "The Late Philip J. Fry" has the Professor build a one-way time machine. Fry, the Professor, and Bender test it just before Fry and Leela have a date. The crew goes forward through time and finds that time is utterly cyclic, winding up two universes ahead of their own. The only difference is that the universe is ten feet below and five feet to the right of the old universe, so the Professor's time machine arrives in a nearly identical universe. It falls on the alternate Bender, Fry, and Professor, killing them. Fry happily goes on the date with Leela. Except, you know, he has been involved in the deaths of three people, wordlessly stepped into his alternate self's life, and the Leela he loved aged and died alone two universes ago. Not only that, she wound up in a loveless marriage to Cubert as a Fry surrogate before an ugly divorce. Leela, in her old age, actually blasted a love note to form small stalagmites from water dripping into the "Cavern on the Green" for Fry to find many years in the future.
  • Fry isn't picky when it comes to Leela(s), which is evidenced in "Rebirth". His robot duplicate said he loves Leela, "any Leela". So we can assume this is picked up from the real Fry's mentality. He probably is well aware that the woman he actually fell in love with is lost to the ether two universes back but he's here now and doesn't really care since he can make the Leela of this universe happy as much as he had intended for the one that he had a relationship with in the original universe. The bit about him shamelessly assuming his paradox double's identity is still solid, though. That is a bit creepy and underhanded.
  • Actually, it does make perfect sense for the characters involved. Think about it. They just discovered that the universe is in a constant repeat. When they return, they kill their counterparts, albeit accidentally. Fry wouldn't assume blame and resume his lifestyle because there was nothing else he could've done (it wasn't his fault the universe was off by a couple of feet), and after he had just learned to cope with moving on from a life he felt he'd never get back and losing the woman he loved, this second chance is something he'd more than gladly return to. The Professor is used to mad science like this from a long line of unrelated deaths, and Bender... well, the ending says enough for him.
  • Except that there was something they could do, the future where most humans were women had a backwards time machine, so they had as many chances as it took to stop there and get a time machine to use to get back to their original universe.
  • If the universe was really cyclical, shouldn't the Fry, Bender, and Professor Farnsworth the show follows, been crushed by a falling time machine from a previous universe before even getting into theirs? Or at the very least been replaced after they get trapped in the future, sparing poor Leela the loneliness of the trio disappearing. But if everything is always happens in the same continuum then that would mean that every time a crew moves forward in time they move forward by two universes and kill the resident duplicates before they can get into their respective time machine. So the show's starting universe must have been two universes ahead of a universe where the crew was killed by another older crew. Allowing the show's trio to get into the time machine and continue the cycle without being killed or replaced.
    • Because of this cycle, there is an infinite number of Leelas who will suffer the same tragedy as the "original", and an infinite number of Fry, Bender and Farnsworth who will be killed.
• "The Why of Fry" with Fry being trapped by the crappy escape pod with the flying brains, in another universe. If the "Time Travel causes another universe" theory holds up in the show, it means that there's a universe where Fry never returned. Does that mean Nibbler stopped his masquerade and told the crew what transpired? Would he keep it up and leave a fake suicide note?
  • No, since Futurama time travel functions via Stable Time Loop, which makes no sense if the many-worlds hypothesis is also true.
  • Related; the Brainspawn try to convince Fry to prevent his freezing, allowing them to succeed at destroying the universe. They frame this as an "everybody wins" since they won't destroy the universe until centuries after everyone from the 20th century is dead and Fry can live out the life he left behind. However "Anthology of Interest I" demonstrates that if Fry is frozen he can't become his own grandfather and the resultant Grandfather Paradox would destroy the universe in under a day. Meaning if Nibbler wasn't able to convince Fry to save the future and Leela, not only would Fry be dooming the 31st century, but the 21st as well.
• Most (if not all) robots in Futurama were built for a certain function. Some robots (such as Roberto) become even creepier if you think about that.
  • Actually Roberto acknowledges that he was the result of an attempt to build an insane robot. He thinks they failed.
    • It's possible that the inverse is true-dangerous robots like the Robot Mafia and Roberto could've been created to study and/or counteract what they represent (the Robot Mafia could've been made to outclass the human mafia and then be turned off or bring the mafia down from the inside, and Roberto could've been designed to better understand and cure the criminally insane). They just were too good at their job.
    • The Robot Mafia is arguably an example of it going entirely right; they're a small organization, easily recognized and tracked, and yet seem to be responsible for the majority of the show's organized crime... Which between three robots, can't be very much.
    • Also note that Roberto is implied in his debut episode to have some sort of trauma that fueled his insanity (panicking about his mother welding him to the wall as a punishment). Taking that as canon alongside the later note that he was an attempt to build an insane robot, it's possible Roberto wasn't directly programmed to be insane from the get-go. He was deliberately Driven to Madness through torture.
• In the movie "Bender's Game", Mom tells Walt and Larry that when Inger was born, she flipped a coin whether to keep him or the afterbirth. ... In the episode "Farnsworth's Parabox", the primary difference of the main parallel universe is that coin flips have opposite outcomes...
• In "Into the Wild Green Yonder", the Encyclopod decides to preserve the DNA of homo sapiens. Fry points out that the Encyclopod only preserves the DNA of endangered species.
  • Only the Waterfall family is endangered. They die almost every time they appear.
    • The Waterfall family is not a species. And the comedic subtext makes it clear that the Encyclopod means humanity in general. Not sure it's fridge horror though since it's lampshaded.
• In How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back, we see an old man waiting in line at the Central Bureaucracy for his birth certificate. Cut to Lethal Inspection, aired 10 years later, the old man finally gets to Central Bureaucracy, only to have a heart attack right there. So this really old man has been standing in line SINCE HIS BIRTH only for him to DIE the moment he gets to the front of the line!
  • It's not really that horrific. He explicitly asks for a death certificate just before he dies, so one could come to the conclusion that he got his birth certificate and returned for a death certificate. Still, it is rather shocking that a person can spend their whole life just to get a birth certificate.
  • It's also possible that he just needed a replacement birth certificate. I was seen in line at the DMV to get my birth certificate, but that doesn't mean I spent 24 years there.
• In Fry Am the Egg Man, the bone vampire was born from a random egg that Leela bought from the the Farmer's Market. I am unsure if all of the eggs being sold were from the bone vampire, but imagine what would happen to the family or anyone who bought the eggs would react when they hatched into bone vampires. There is also the fact the planet the farming family gets the eggs from must be populated with them because how they reproduce. It's only a matter of time before any of them become a potential victim from one of those untamed creatures. Worse if one keeps an egg too long in the fridge and finds it hatch to shoot acid in their face.
  • The man selling the eggs to Leela established that the eggs were just collected randomly from the forest. All the eggs were different sizes and colors, indicating that they were all different species, so it's still very well likely that the egg Fry hatched was, in fact, the last bone vampire.
    • Nah there was a herd (a coven?) of Bone Vampires in a zoo on the planet of the apes that Fry and Leela have a holiday on.
    • It may only exist in captivity.
  • They said that just one can lay lots of eggs, so Mr. Peppy presumably repopulated them.
• At the end of Bender's Game, all dark matter is instantly rendered inert. What about all the millions of people in dark matter burning ships? On every inhabited planet there would have been devastating crashes,not to mention the countless number of people stranded in the heart of deep space. It's akin to what would happen if all fossil fuels became inert on earth only on a universal scale.
• If the werecar was built some time in the 2000's, that means its wireless technology couldn't be powerful enough to transmit to everywhere on earth. Does this mean that unless Bender went out of his way to visit the other were cars to distribute the uninstall program, unlikely given his laziness, that it's entirely possible for there to still be were cars.
  • But Bender's wireless is most likely powerful enough to transmit it and, considering the uninstall program was apparently supposed to remove all werecars that originate from Project Satan, the uninstall program itself could just linger in wireless network until it's taken care of all the descendant werecar programs.
• Take a moment to think about the sad existence of the toy Bender the professor put the free will unit in. Having a sort of presence of mind literally no other robot had, and being unable to move or even talk the whole time, right up until it was torn away from him with absolutely nothing he could do about it.
  • Just because he stored it in the toy doesn't mean it was installed in and worked with the toy. That's like saying that the box your wifi adapter came in could get the internet until you took it out.
    • The dialogue of both Bender and the Professor suggest the toy did have free will.
• In Bender's Game, it's revealed that Igner is actually the son of Mom and the Professor. With that in mind, think about Igner's character. Slow, dim-witted, meek, childish, clearly some severe mental deficiency of some kind, but it's never specified. Why? Because Igner is the result of generations of Fry's missing Delta Wave being passed on, and considering the Professor's a genius, it's clear to see that it skips every generation, with possibly even more severe deterioration with every second generation. Which is exactly why Igner is the way he is! He's the Fry of the Future!!
  • Not that I've seen much of him, but Yancy seemed fairly normal, as did his son, the missing Delta Wave was only because Fry was his own grandfather and it only affects him.
    • But then shouldn't Fry's father also be missing his delta wave since he's also his own grandfather?
    • Who said he didn't?
    • Because the whole point of the Nibblonians being forced to freeze Fry was that he was the *only* one without the delta brain wave. If his father also lacked it, then they had no reason to freeze him - just let him reproduce and pass it on through the generations.
    • It wouldn't pass on, it specifically only affects Fry. As for Fry being supposedly the only one... perhaps the Nibblonians just figured his father having it too was unimportant?
    • For the point about his father, the Nibblonians are smarter than that - Fry's dad, with his mentality permanently mired in the late '50s, would be a horrible choice to bring into the world of 3000.
    • In addition to this, Fry was the least adjusted member of his family. His parents were married and had a semi-successful marriage, his brother was popular and eventually went on to get married and have a son and was probably successful in some way financially since we see him in a house in Bender's Big Score, in a time where a gallon of gas is apparently $100. Fry was currently working a dead-end job and had just broken up with his dysfunctional girlfriend. He was the most likely to not be horribly depressed about leaving his past behind because there wasn't much to leave.
• In Benderama, there are so many nanoBenders that when they all combine into one, chunks of the Earth disappear, yet they're still only about the size of a building altogether. How did the Earth get so small?
  • The Omicronian invasions.
• Fry often functions as a Morality Pet/Morality Chain for Bender, and is the first friend he's ever had. Bender is practically immortal, with a maximum lifespan of one billion years (he's already at least a million, and a Holiday Special showed him lasting for half a billion). This means that Bender will outlive Fry by a factor of MILLIONS.
  • That's assuming he doesn't suffer major damage. "Lethal Inspection" establishes that Bender is a defective robot and mortal in a way ther robots aren't. While he can replace his body, his mind or A.I. cannot be saved to a server like other robots, rendering him much more susceptible to a permanent death.
• Dr. Zoidberg finally gets a girlfriend in "Stench And Stenchibility". It seems like a Throw the Dog a Bone moment, but "Why Must I Be A Crustacean In Love?" reveals that when Decapodians pass on their genes, they die. What happens to Zoidberg when the 2 have sex, or decide to have kids?!
  • They could just adopt, or Zoidberg could get neutered to avoid going Out with a Bang.
    • Or it could be that it only works like that when two Decapodians have sex, possibly the fertilization of their eggs release some sort of toxin that's transmitted through water (they all went to the sea to reproduce) killing the parents (most likely to provide nutrients for the children and alternative food for scavengers keeping more children alive). Don't forget that we saw Zoidberg and Professor have sex earlier. Also Zoidberg was obviously in some sort of special state in "Why Must I Be A Crustacean In Love?" which seemed to be tied to their reproductive cycle. So it might be that Zoidberg can never reproduce with another Decapodian again and so doesn't have the sex=death problem.
    • Zoidberg actually mentioned that they'd already had sex in his dumpster resulting in In-Universe Squick from the main cast.
    • Zoidberg (or at least Fry in his body) has also had sex with Leela in Professor Farnsworth's body in The Prisoner of Benda, so it seems Decapodians can have sex with humans without dying.
    • Could be the species only dies when mating, to prevent overpopulation issues, but just sex is possible without dying - additionally, Zoidberg can't seem to comprehend love because it's unnecessary to the mating concept, perhaps so is sex (in a sense outside of mating). Living outside of his species's norms might open his vistas to concepts related to sex outside of their end of life cycle style mating.
  • In "The Deep South," Fry attempts to have sex with a mermaid, but is immediately shown that sex between humans and mermaids is completely incompatible. I think we can just assume that Decapodians and Humans are sexually incompatible.
• In Bender's Big Score after Bender believes that he has murdered Fry in the year 2012, the next scene shows him coming out from under the Planet Express building still crying. Think about it, Bender spent almost a thousand years in a state of depression because he thought he killed his best friend.
  • Think about the other Benders in that cave. What's more likely- not a single one asks what upset Bender, or they know and still come out acting chipper? As soon as Bender comes back from the past the first time, he should know he's going to eventually kill Fry.
• The (fourth) series finale, Meanwhile. At the end of the episode, the Professor fixes the time button in order to bring himself, Fry, and Leela back to the instant second before he had the general idea for it. Surely a happy ending, right? Fry and Leela still get to live their lives together, but this time with their friends and family. Except Professor Farnsworth says that none of them will remember the previous episode's events. Including him, since he clearly and specifically says "we." Which means that when he gets back to the past, he'll still think the time button is a great idea, so he'll still build it all over again with the same result. From Fry and Leela's perspective, this just means getting to live the same full life together. But for everyone else, the universe suddenly ends one day FOREVER.
  • A previous episode saves it. "The Late Philip J. Fry" establishes that when the universe ends, a completely identical one comes into being. Since Farnsworth, Fry and Bender overshot the second universe by 6990 years, their counterparts in that universe will do just the same with the current one and due to the time button will have an incredibly high chance of ending up in one of the many repeats, and finding a solution that doesn't repeat history again and again. Plus there's going to be a Simpsons crossover in the future, so it's going to be resolved anyways.
  • Also from "Meanwhile", if Leela wasn't in Fry's time bubble when time froze, she would have been frozen alongside everyone else except Fry; and Fry would have spent the rest of his life lonely. (Or at least until the Professor showed up again.)
  • The Time Shelter is unaffected by the Time Button and was moved to a different location during the events of the episode, where it will remain after the reset. Assuming Farnsworth built it first (very likely, since it's needed to work with chronotrons safely), he'll notice that it's in the wrong place and realize something went wrong, causing events to occur differently and probably breaking the cycle.
• The ending of "The Problem With Popplers" shows that it's possible to lose the status of "intelligent life form" in the Futurama-verse by acting in a particularly stupid way. Considering what humans in the show can act like...
  • That might explain why consuming human meat is legal.
• This is a good one: how come New New York is still at sea level, but Old New York is hundreds of meters below New New York, when it was at sea level in the 20th Century? The answer: the global warming melted the poles, and then they started to mine the Halley Comet for ice to drop in the ocean, which would eventually raise the sea level even more!
• During one episode, time skips ahead at random intervals. It eventually gets so bad that isolated areas leap ahead by decades at a time. Illustrating this, we cut to a gag involving two kids complaining about having to pay for senior citizens' social benefits, only to suddenly skip ahead to old age and yell "I deserve free money!". While it is just a quick gag, consider: only that one spot moved forward. Their families are (more than likely) still their normal ages. The kids' parents will now have to deal with the horror of their sons suddenly being far older than they are.
• After Bender's Big Score, Yancy's son Philip will have to live with the guilt of sending a killer robot to kill his uncle Philip J. Fry.
• They never destroyed V-GINY.
• In Lethal Inspection, it's revealed that Bender, if he were to be destroyed, would die permanently thanks to him lacking a back-up unit. Now, just think of all the times in the series that Bender was buried underground in the past, and left there to wait until the future because he's a robot so he'll survive, good examples being Roswell That Ends Well and Bender's Big Score, with all the Benders in the lime cavern. Considering the fact that the professor gave him anywhere "between a minute and a billion years", there's every chance that something could have happened and his friends would've just dug up a deactivated Bender.
• In "Love's Labours Lost in Space", Zapp Brannigan recounts his confrontation with Killbots. He claims the Killbots have a limit for how many people they will kill; so he sent wave after wave of his men until the Killbots reached their limits. A deleted scene shows that the kill limit on a single Killbot is 999,999. Just how many men did Brannigan send to their deaths?
• When I first watched "Game of Tones" I was confused why Fry's mom still missed him when he came back in "Benders Big Score" but then I remembered it was a "paradox correcting timecode" and if Bender can cut Hermes head off in the past and him be perfectly fine in the present then presumably once he returned to the present then Lars Fillmore's entire history would have been erased. The reason I put this in fridge Horror and not fridge Brilliance is in this case what would of happened to Leelu.
  • Or she's referring to when he disappeared again, twelve years later.
• The Licensed Game was canon until season 5. The fridge horror in that game is that the result of the Stable Time Loop is that Fry, Bender and Leela are Killed Off for Real after being crushed to death.
• More disheartening than horror, but "The Late Philip J Fry" seems to show that the 31st century is about as good as it gets, then the world turns to shit. In all the future times we visited either the world is buried in snow or flooded, and technologically we don't see much that comes close to what there was in New New York. There was that one era that was a spoof of The Time Machine, but then 5 years later that society got destroyed, then Earth becomes a desert and destroyed by the expanding sun. That's grim, man.
  • Lessening this is the fact that we only ever see Earth. It's possible humanity left their homeworld to be an Earth That Was, and whoever stayed was just bad at restarting civilization.
• It's implied in "Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch" that Zapp has multiple illegitimate children as a result of a malfunctioning Holo-Shed. Those children's mothers may not have much ability or personality to speak of if they were originally programmed for one implied purpose, and God help them if Zapp ever had to act the role of their father.
• It seems pretty odd that Leela is the only person in the universe that has only one eye. However, it makes sense if you consider that you don't have good depth perception with only one eye, something the show has mentioned a few times: having only one eye is evolutionarily disadvantageous, so there has been no one-eyed species that managed to survive long enough to form a civilization.
  • Given this, and the Eyeless Face universe has them know what seeing is, were they always eyeless and it only applies to humans(hence they know) or did they lose their eyes?
• More like Fridge Squick, but in "The Deep South", Fry is implied to have peed in the water several times. This becomes grosser when you realise that the water-breathing creatures were breathing in his pee.
  • Pretty much Fridge Squick for real life oceans, too — every oceanic process pretty much makes up the contents of the ocean besides H₂O. All the fish pee, poop, blood, rotting flesh, etc., doesn't really go anywhere distinctly different from the same fluids they drink or breathe through... Fry's urine wouldn't be that gross to them, presumably, if they've thought about it for even a second.
• "Anthology of Interest I"
  • The third part of "Anthology of Interest I" ends with a Reality-Breaking Paradox because Fry isn't frozen and thus he can't go back to become his own grandfather...and he only went back in time because he put metal in the microwave while the crew was witnessing a supernova. The first part of the special had Impulsive Leela kill all members of Planet Express except for Fry, meaning if this scenario plays out "Roswell That Ends Well" almost certainly won't happen and the same universe-destroying paradox will happen (and if not that, her killing Nibbler might prevent Fry from stopping the Brainspawn from destroying the universe).
  • "The Why Of Fry" has the Brainspawn plan to destroy the universe after gaining all knowledge, and later try to convince Fry to prevent his freezing. Is the Reality-Breaking Paradox of the what if because Fry succeeded at stopping Nibbler?
• Despite claims that "people taste lousy", the 31st century is not above serving human meat, eg: Soylent Cola(a commercial product). Suicide Booths are 25 cents a pop and have a "quick and painless" option which we don't see what happens to the body. We don't see any People Farms or any legal harvesting of humans, so are suicide booths were most of said human meat comes from?
  • Which leads to brilliance in and of itself. Of course people taste awful... to people. It can then be inferred that human meat is then generally reserved for alien consumption (see: Glagnar's Human Rinds). Apparently, people in the 31st century don't think a suicidal person's body should go to waste.
  • We also see human poaching take place on a smaller scale. Fry got abducted and had his nose stolen, for instance. Other poachers are probably less discriminating...
• It's very possible Amy has had an eating disorder. Her father bullied her for being fat as a child, giving her body issues, and the second she swapped bodies with Leela, she went on a ridiculous binge-eating spree. Her Bender's Game counterpart also gushes about the burgers at Wipe Castle, "You can eat like eight of them without gaining any weight, 'cause of all the diarrhea," which, Take That! aside, indicates bulemic tendencies.
• "Zapp Dingbat" has a joke where Leela sees her mom kiss Zapp and immediately assumes Zapp "took advantage" of her, including showing her a doll to indicate "where [Zapp] touched [her]." Leela's always seen Zapp as pathetic and brushed him off easily, but this implies she sees him as an actual sexual predator, which isn't inconsistent with his previous behavior (especially "In-a-Gadda-de-Leela," where he nearly tricks Leela into having sex under false pretenses and the two are then forced into sex by the V-GINY). Additionally, while Leela usually just seems annoyed to interact with Zapp, she seems more uncomfortable and avoidant in this episode, even before he hooks up with her mom — something that makes more sense following the events of the aforementioned episode where Zapp shows he's capable of actual sexual manipulation and not just bad pickup lines and whining. So Leela spent most of the episode listening to her mother, one of the few people Leela really loves and trusts, defend someone Leela knows is a predator. It's all played for laughs, but this context makes her discomfort much more understandable, possibly even interpretable as sexual trauma instead of mere humiliation.
• In "The Prisoner of Benda" when Amy warns Hermes she would ruin his body, Hermes says "thirty years of the munchies beat you too it". The episode takes place 30 years after a kid died trying to mimic Hermes' limbo skills, which made him swear off limboing until "A Flight To Remember" 20 years later. Does this mean Hermes smokes weed partly to help with the guilt of the kid's death?
• "Leela's Homeworld" ends with a sweet montage of her parents protecting her throughout the years. The first thing we see is baby Leela's parents picking her up and turning her around before she crawls down the stairs. This suggests Leela was left unsupervised in the Orphanarium near unguarded stairs as an infant. The majority of the children in the Orphanarium who don't have living parents secretly watching over them could've fallen down the stairs and gotten seriously hurt or killed.
• Leela doesn't have much of an arc in "Beast With a Billion Backs," but her emotionally distant behavior holds a lot more emotional weight remembering that Bender's Big Score canonically only happened a month prior. Less than a month ago, Leela watched the love of her life first leave her at the altar without explanation, then perform a Heroic Sacrifice for her, only to learn that he's a doomed alternate version of Fry, surely affecting how she sees the latter going forward. Now not only is Fry committing to Colleen, but Amy, whose romantic success has always been a subject of envy for Leela, gets married to Kif without a hitch. Then, much like Leela in the previous movie, Amy loses the love of her life and Leela is naturally sympathetic... only for Amy to shack up with the pervert who Leela despises. It makes her reluctance to trust Yivo make so much more sense — her last attempt to commit to anybody literally blew up in her face, and everything in the world seems likely to remind her of that fact. It also makes a lot more sense why she'd call out Fry for "forgetting" her for Colleen, as who knows how much they'd addressed the whole Lars thing since the previous movie?
• Professor Farnsworth being a Mad Scientist that could possibly end the world is Played for Laughs for most of the series, until we find out that in his youth, he quite literally mentally insane, having violent night terrors, and temporarily removed from all technology in hopes of improving his condition before being thrown into a mental institution for twenty-five years of his life. His parents didn't know what to do, and effectively distanced themselves from him for the sake of his brother Floyd hopefully not turning insane too. Then we have the Professor's own child clone, Cubert — who, as early as his introductory episode, needed one good thump on the head to start having the same dreams of Beyond the Impossible science that Farnsworth started having, science that literally moves the universe itself around the Planet Express ship. Farnsworth was effectively born to be tormented by an anonymous mental condition involving impossible concepts of science any man would consider mad, rarely able to not think of random concepts that he couldn't even hope to properly create for most of his life, and it fundamentally twisted him into genuine raving insanity with no control in the matter. And then there's the likely messed-up relationship with Mom for several decades, which only further indulged a dark, pragmatic and narcissist mindset. Farnsworth seems fine in his lot now, but he was twisted by his life.
• Those Darn Katz becomes pretty dark when you realize that at the end Katz species most likely goes extinct due to their planet's turn coming to a halt and while sure they did try to whipe out everyone on earth to save their planet I don't think deserved to have their species wiped out as a result.
  • On the bright side because they've had space travel for millennia they could find a more habitable world. Though on the other hand it makes their plan of tidally locking Earth unnecessarily cruel.

Fridge Logic

• In Bendin' In The Wind, the group crash their Old-world Combi bus because they can't drive over the San Francisco Bay Bridge, it having converted into a hover bridge. Except they follow Beck's tour bus over the same bridge into SF just minutes before.
  • This Troper is a San Francisco native, they got into SF by crossing the (lesser known) Bay Bridge.
  • Or assuming that it was also converted to a hover bridge, they could have just looped around to the south, as SF is on a peninsula, not an island.
• Bender's body composition: In 30% Iron Chef, he claims his body is 30% Iron. In Jurassic Bark, he claims his body is 40% Dolomite. And in A Head in the Polls, his body had 40% Titanium. 40+40+30=110. With all of the research, work, and math the writers do on everything, how did they miss this?
  • He had to be repaired at least one time, it's possible that the new parts had a different composition.
    • It's a running joke. See: http://theinfosphere.org/Bender_Bending_Rodriguez#Composition
  • Not to mention, Bender is a notorious braggart for a master criminal who once pounded a guy into the ground like a stake with a shovel. Are we to treat this one differently because it has numbers in it?
  • Also Bender has been broken apart multiple times, so being rebuilt with new materials isn't out of the realm of possibility.
  • Maybe he was rounding up. 35.5% Dolomte + 35.5% Titanium + 29% Iron = 100% Bender.
  • He also seems to keep track of the sales prices of different metals - could be he trades in some of his parts if they're favorable currently, buying replacements of parts made out of some low price, but potentially higher later on. Could also be, he's not technically talking about everything he's made up with these percentages - for example, could mention 30% iron, not as a percentile of say his chest parts, but say the gears and whatnot that make up his name, while the 40% titanium could very well be metal % composition of his torso.
• The inhabitants of the faceless dimension shown in "The Farnsworth Parabox" claim they haven't seen anything ever...but they're aware of what sight is?
  • Have you ever seen oxygen? Hope? But you know what they are.
  • Just like we are aware that homing pigeons and hammerhead sharks are able to sense magnetic fields and electricity, respectively, although we can not.
    • it is possible that the facelessness only affects Earth; there could still be aliens with sight.
  • Or maybe it's just them who are faceless.
• January 1, year 2000, 00:00 and seconds, Fry falls into the cryogenic tube for 1000 years. But he wakes up on December 31, 2999, sometime in the afternoon. Then he was not frozen for 1000 years, but for 999 years, 11 months and 30 and a half days.
  • Leap years. We have leap years because the year is not 365 days long
  • A 99.99986% accuracy on that timer is pretty solid, too
  • I imagine that the people working at the lab likes to wake people up during regular business-hours. It doesn't appear that anyone is working nights, at least not New Years Eve.
  • Fun fact of the day: The Gregorian Calender actually doesn't go up to the year 3,000. The reason for this is that A year is not 365.25 days long, and we determine a year by the earth's rotation around the sun. And, astrologically speaking, we don't know whether the year 3,000 will be a leap year or not because calculations are too inexact. But the freezing pod, being a machine, probably calculates years mathematically; and mathematically, the year 3,000 is not a leap year. So if the year 3,000 IS a leap year in the Futurama universe, it would account for the extra day.

. . . the saddest part is, I probably put more thought into that than the creators did . . .

• You underestimate their geekiness.

• The mean Gregorian year is 365.2425 days. If the timer used that as the basis of a year, 1000 years would be 365,242.5 days, meaning Fry would wake up just after noon on Tuesday, 31 December, 2999. Easy. If there was no significant difference to the length of the day, he would wake up in the middle of the day.

• In "Benderama" All of the world's water turns to alcohol. Within mere days the entire world is completely drunk, apparently having been forced to drink said "water". Unless the mini-Benders converted everything within bottles and cans to alcohol as well, there should at least be bottled water, or Fry's favorite, Slurm.
  • Considering the health factors, I think other drinks were available as six days of drinking pure alcohol would be incredibly lethal. It's also possible, since Bender reached sub-atomic scale, that any canned liquids once opened would have immediately been converted.
  • About everyone being drunk, what if the Benders converted the water inside of the people into alcohol? That's a bit of a fridge horror itself.
• In "A Farewell to Arms" Fry sacrificed his ticket so Leela could be saved. However, Fry got accepted twice earlier in the choose machine. Couldn't he have kept one ticket and given Leela the other?
  • Just watched that episode yesterday, I'm 99% sure he doesn't get a ticket for the duplicate acceptances.
• Alright, so in Bender's Big Score, when Bender is searching for Fry, he goes to Yancy's house. After claiming he's searching for Philip J. Fry. Yancy calls Philip, however it is revealed that it's just a little kid. Anybody who's seen Luck of The Fryrish will know Yancy named his son Fry in memory of his brother. Think about it for a little, and you can pretty much conclude this as Fridge Brilliance, as it's pretty obvious it was intentional - But wait, if Fry actually traveled back to the year 2000, then why is Yancy's son still named Fry?
  • They were already that close, they just had a normal sibling rivalry as kids.
  • Also, let's take into account that Fry went on an overseas mission that probably took years. Therefore, whether it's "Bender's Big Score" or "Luck of the Fryish" the scene where Yancy names his son after Fry and claims he misses him everyday could tie into either canon. He could be missing him because he got frozen or because he's on an overseas trip and might not come back. They never explicitly say whether they believe Fry to be dead or simply gone at the time.
  • Also, the very first thing Yancy said after Fry was born was that he wanted to be named Philip. So even if his brother never went missing, he probably just liked the name enough to pass it to his son.
• "Bender's Big Score" is centered around a time code on Fry's ass that allows people to travel backwards in time. The inciting incident for this time code arriving on Fry is when Bender goes back in time to put in on there... and he got it from future Fry. The time code is a bootstrap paradox in that it doesn't make sense how it was initially created.
• In the series, it is often stated that New New York was built on top of all the old buildings of Old New York. In fact, on more than one occasion, we see the gang descend into Old New York, often to find something nostalgic for Fry. Fry himself was frozen in a building which existed in 2000, therefore, Old New York. Yet somehow, when he wakes up in the year 3000, he is not underground, but above ground and yet somehow in the same tube in the same room in the same building. How did the whole facility get there?
  • If you check the backgrounds of the scenes in questions, you'll notice that the room in question is on the 64th floor (the number is on the wall when Fry exits the elevator), and the building has clearly been refurbished and redecorated/rebuilt, as it doesn't look quite the same — and when Fry first exits the building to step out onto the streets of New New York, he very clearly does not exit through the same door he entered the building through. The building miraculously survived the destruction of Old New York, and was tall enough that most of it remained above-ground when New New York was built — but now it's not as impressively tall and has a lot more basement levels.
• Fry's brain is 'special' because he is his own grandfather—that is to say, he fathered his own father. Yancy is descended from that same father as Fry, so Fry is also Yancy's grandfather. Professor Farnsworth is descended from Yancy. So why is Farnsworth not also immune to the brains and receiving other such bonuses from the paradox of his ancestry? Fry is both his distant uncle and distant grandfather across generations.
  • Key word: Distant. After 1000 years, whatever genetic advantage Fry had would have been considerably diluted.
  • Maybe Fry's father, and Yancy, and even Philip J. Fry the Second did have that special brain... but none of them was around for the Brainspawn, or indeed any of the dangers that Fry's 'special' mind could stop.
  • This descends into WMG, but Fry (and probably his dad) have the special brain because Fry and his dad form an infinite loop of being each other's father. Yancy isn't a part of the loop, so it makes sense why Farnsworth wouldn't have it.
    • In fact, this is exactly the case. Fry lacks the Delta Brainwave specifically because he's his own grandfather and thus indefinitely inbred. Anyone else genetically related to Fry such as Yancy, Fry's dad, and eventually Farnsworth still have the Delta Brainwave because they aren't inbred with themselves. It's also why anybody else in Fry's line are normal. The lack of a Delta Brainwave isn't a trait to be passed down. In other words, the lack of a Delta Brainwave is a result of Fry's existence being a paradox.
  • The defective gene that creates a lack of a Delta Brainwave could be recessive-it would have to be, to keep the Stable Time Loop of Fry having a smart dad (if his dad was stupid like him, he may not meet his mother and everything would fall apart.)
• Fry being his own grandfather... That means that Fry's bloodline is self-contained. He has no ancestors; he's come from nowhere and his existence is practically an afterthought of the universe thanks to a microwave accident, like the universe was made and he was added later. He's kinda like Jesus, in fact.
  • He still has ancestors—he's only his own grandfather on his father's side.
    • Nothing in show confirms that he's his Father's father. In fact, Yancy makes reference that his dad was also called Yancy (hard to explain away even if Enos was thought to be his dad). Everything fits better if Fry is his mother's father. Especially as you can trace 1 X chromosome originating with Mildred, passed to Mom, who passes it to Fry, who then takes it back and passes it Mom again meaning that mama Fry had the same X gene twice. Plus her brain seems to demonstrate more of the strange delta wave stupidity than Yancy.
    • Yancy doesn't claim his dad was called Yancy. The quote is 'Your name is Yancy, just like me, AND MY GRANDFATHER, all the way back to minuteman Yancy'. Thus, Luck of the Fryrish can be theorised to have deliberately foreshadowed The Why of Fry.
    • This Troper rewatched the episode just to be sure and it's true that they never call him Enos Fry. However, Our Fry does lean in and directly address his father supposedly in Enos' balls, and acknowledges Grandma Mildred, implying heavily that he's perfectly aware of the fact that they are his Father's parents and not his Mother's. Given that it's Fry, that's not 100% conclusive but he's not always that inept.
• In When Aliens Attack it takes 1000 years for earth television shows to reach Omicron Persei 8. What did they do for entertainment in the early 30th century before TV?
  • Conquer planets and wear the faces of those conquered. Looking at it that way, it's entirely possible that TV is what brought Lrr, Ruler of the Planet Omicron Percei 8, into the lazy state of being his wife complains about today.
  • The same thing humans did before we got TV.
• Okay (deep breath)... In the episode "Decision 3012", President Nixon's opponent, Chris Travers came from the future (that is to say, their future) where Nixon's plan to barricade out all illegal extraterrestrials led to robots being given all the menial labor jobs which led to the robots rising up against humanity. Travers won, which led to the negation of that future and Travers not getting sent back to prevent it, which resulted in Nixon's victory. Shouldn't that have led to the original future going back to happening and Travers getting sent back in time so he could re-negate the bad future, get re-erased, re-restore the timeline, re-un-negate the bad future, and so on and so forth until the two alternate timelines were constantly shifting back and forth like some kind of Schrodinger's universe? (BTW, 5,000 geek points and a hundred internets if you kept up with that).
  • -5000 points for missing the Call-Back — Travers' time travel was the same one Bender used in Bender's Big Score, which was paradox-free.
  • Perhaps Travers disappearing was itself a part of the timeline that led to the robots taking over in the first place.
• In Law and Oracle, Schrödinger was going 35 mph over the speed of light. In Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles, it is said that the ship goes 99% light speed. Why is it that simple vehicles on the road are faster than ships made for space travel?
  • This is a stretch, but Schrödinger may have been going 35 mph over the *old* speed of light, whereas the ship might have been at 99% of the vastly increased new light speed. That would be a strange way of talking though.
  • Also possible: it's Schrodinger. They altered his speed by measuring it and the computer made an error; he is travelling c+/-15mph and by measuring the computer concluded +15 despite that being impossible (we can get computed values higher than the speed of light even now)
• If MOM is Apple, does this make The Professor Microsoft?
  • No. Mom makes robots. The Professor runs a delivery service. They're not business competitors.
  • "Future Stock" makes it clear that they are business competitors, and that package delivery is one of Mom's many enterprises.
    • They could compete. Mom makes robots. The Professor makes all kinds of stuff, seems to be in it mostly just for the sake of the science, and, despite the numerous doomsday devices, is usually the not-evil one. Sounds exactly like Google to me. There's probably a What If machine in Mountain View.
    • Yeah, but they've never been shown as business competitors, they seem to more just really hate each other.
• In "Luck of the Fryrish" why isn't Fry's nephew Philip J. Fry's head in a jar at the museum if he's a celebrity?
  • Perhaps there's an opt-in?
• In "The Prisoner of Benda", Fry and Leela have sex while occupying Zoidberg and Farnsworth's bodies, respectively. However, it is also revealed in "Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?" that Decapodians die after mating. How, then, did Fry survive?
  • That may only apply to sex with other Decapodians. The Decapodian body may not interpret what they did as sex. After all, Zoidberg himself has never, to my knowledge, been shown to have sexual attraction to anyone of another species.
  • Well, aside from the time when Farnsworth accidentally sprayed himself with fish pheromones...
  • Or the lobster from first season, or his girlfriend in second to last episode... or basically anyone who can stand his stench.
• In "My Three Suns", Bender's lack of the sense of taste gets mentioned. In the meantime, in the episode immediately preceding it, Bender was seen eating an anchovy pizza and spitting it out along with everyone else at the Express except Fry. It could be that he spat it out for a different reason (e.g. the preservatives in the can of anchovy was sensed to be dangerous to his continued safe operation), but it's still rather weird.
  • Everybody was doing it, he just wanted to be popular.
  • Alternatively it was a programmed response by Mom to reject eating anchovy oil, ensuring she could keep her monopoly on robot oil.
• In "Bender's Game", why exactly were Amy, Hermes, and Zoidberg at the dark matter mine after the destruction of Cornwood? The only crew who were teleported there were Leela, Fry, and Farnsworth.
• In Future Stock, Planet Express's stock price collapses after That Guy dies and Fry turns the company back to The Professor. Except Planet Express shouldn't have a listed stock price because it wouldn't be publicly traded. At the shareholders' meeting, we see that the company is completely owned by the cast, plus Hattie who owns one share. Since Zoidberg started out with majority control, that accounts for every outstanding share of the company.
  • The fact that Hattie owns a share was probably a nod to the fact that Planet Express is publicly traded. It's just not a popular company to hold stock in at the beginning of the episode.
• When Bender is sent to Robot Hell, he is told it is because of the terms of his contract with the Church of Robotology: "You sin, you go to Robot Hell." So... the best way to avoid Robot Hell is to not convert to Robotology in the first place?
  • Yep. Perhaps robots join the church because they know that they can't resist the temptation to sin, so they join because they believe the threat of Robot Hell will scare them into leading better lives.
• In "The Problem with Popplers" Lrrr and Ndndnd's son Jrrr is a baby, but in T. The Terrestrial he is a teenager. How come Cubert, Herme's son Dwight, and the orphans didn't age at all in those years?
  • Because of the increased longevity/immortality of future humanity there is a maximum functional (Adult) population, with the old being sent to the near-death star, so the minors are kept as minors until a functional slot opens up, possibly using chronotons or something.
  • Alternatively, the Omicronians age faster until maturity when they take a dose of the immortality serum. mentioned in When Aliens Attack (where they come to see the final episode of Single Female Lawyer), thus retarding their aging indefinitely. Thus, Jrrr isn't necessarily a teenager in the same sense as a human teen he is an adolescent Omicronian of equivalent age to the time that has passed within the Futurama universe between his respective appearances, he's still a non-mature Omicronian and thus hasn't been given his immortality serum yet. Contrarywise, humans don't have any such thing but apparently still age at the same rate as humans now, leastwise when they are children/adolescents to young adults.
    • Seems likely, considering Jrrr was already walking and talking at just a few weeks, and a few weeks after that possessed enough intelligence to speak in complete, well thought out sentences.
• In "Crimes of the Hot" Bender was willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of the turtle because he knew that his pollution would just increase global warming. Why didn't he just move to another planet?
  • Laziness and him caring about the Earthicans just a bit.
• In "Decision 3012", Travers disappears at the end due to a paradox about him not having to travel back in time due to him succeeding at changing the past. But Fry was able to still exist and become his own grandfather after his original grandfather died as a result of him traveling to the past. So if making your own existence into a paradox doesn't make you not exist, then why would creating a paradox by succeeding at your goal while in the past affect whether or not you were in the past?
  • Stable Time Loop. Fry's changing the past, ultimately, created the present he had always existed in, meaning it was ALWAYS that way and there was no change. Travers created a different present by being elected, and therefore his WAS a change, and he had to be "edited out" to avoid destroying the universe.
    • But "The Why of Fry" proves you can also get away with the other scenario (go to the past, change it, and invalidate the reason for traveling back in time with no consequence). Timey-Wimey Ball, A Wizard Did It, MST3K Mantra engage!
    • There seems to me several different time travel methods - they could each come with different risks and mechanics, from the 'always happened, nothing actually changed' method with the roswell incident, to the 'paradox fixing' time codes, to essentially alternate, identical realities via universal time repeating. and most of them can work within one another, too - there doesn't seem to be a 'no reality' failure state of fry not going to the future, despite being needed in the future, so in every 'reset' fry has both a 'always happened' he's his own grandfather and the sort of 'had to fail with the brains, go back, negotiate with nibbler and change the crappy scooty puff jr. ride' time travel state, too.
• In "The Sting" Amy mentioned that Fry's corpse is "stuffed with wood chips and preservatives." They sending his body into space, why would they need to embalm it?
  • That turned out to be All Just a Dream so logic is irrelevant.
  • So it wouldn't stink up his coffin. There's bound to be some atmosphere in the coffin from when they put him in, and with no respiration taking place, the body will start to decompose. Makes things much more pleasant if they ever want to retrieve the coffin.
• In All The President's Heads, we learn that the founders of America were forced to sign the 'Declaration of Dependence', which resulted in America forever remaining a loyal colony of Britain (with all the stereotypes that brings). One question: how were they being forced? True, we see them being threatened at gunpoint... but death would make these founders martyrs, for some future charismatic group of men to bring the Declaration of Independence about. Did these founders not realise this? Or were they so scared of death that they sacrificed their country for their lives? If the latter is the case, how on Earth was America founded?
  • The Declaration of Dependence is useless as a document really, they didn't really give up the country by signing it. All it legally does is prevent the Colonies from peacefully seceding from Britain. If another group had come along, they could just ignore said Declaration. (Though other countries might see Americans as going against their word, but even then contracts are void internationally if you are forced to sign.)
• In Godfellas, presumably Leela knows where and what direction they were going when they shot Bender from the ship. Why not come back later with a faster ship?
• Bender frequently claims to be made out of 40% of several different metals, seemingly contradicting himself by having them add up to over 100%. However, these claims are typically spaced episodes apart, and with how often Bender gets injured, it's entirely possible that he doesn't always repair himself with the same metals.
• It's a common joke in the series that Fry is always wrong. Cut to the episode where Fry starts working at the cryogenic lab. A recently - frozen man asks Fry if time is circular. Fry corrects him that it's linear. Near the end of the series, we find out that it was circular after all (In a way).
• In "The Late Philip J. Fry, humans have evolved into two races in the year 5 million. There are Intellectually Advanced Purple Humanoids and the Dumblocks. Why do we see modern humans when they travel to Ten Million A.D. and Fifty Million A.D?
• When skhle appears in "The Beast With A Billion Backs", Yivo says shkle dwelt on shkler own. But shkle also said shkle had a job and a stamp collection. If shkle was alone, why'd schkle need a job?
• In "When Aliens Attack" it's said that all videotapes were destroyed during the second coming of Jesus (thus making it impossible to shown the alien the finale of Single Female Lawyer), yet in "A Fishful of Dollars" Fry gets an apartment complete with a 20th-century TV, VCR and videotapes, so what gives? How can there be videotapes if they were supposedly all destroyed? Were they brand new tapes? Also the notion that an old TV show wouldn't have been all over the internet in the future was a bit far-fetched, even for the time the episode originally came out, as later episodes show that older 20th century media is still available (I.E. the Star Trek films) in some form.
  • Farnsworth only says that "most" video tapes were destroyed, including probably all of Single Female Lawyer (if the series finale wasn't aired again after the initial airing was interrupted it can't have been very popular). In "A Fishful of Dollars" Fry has enough money to afford something as rare as a surviving tape.
• Who would want something like Hedonism Bot? The fun of being a hedonist is doing it yourself, isn't it?
  • it's the future, where it doesn't necessarily need to be profitable to be done, as long as it's interesting - the Professor himself makes dozens of somewhat 'useless' inventions that are essentially because he felt like it and/or thought it was a good idea. Some random individual, perhaps wanting to live vicariously through Hedonism Bot, or just wanted a robot like that. After all, Roberto was deliberately made insane, yet it's not like that was really 'practical'.
• "The Inhuman Torch" ends with Fry claiming to have accidentally started the fire at the Planet Express building while Bender was thousands of miles away, realizing that Bender will be accused of torching the building on purpose if the others find out that he was around. However, Fry was dangling one-handed from the balcony while the others, on the ground, were attempting to rescue him, and Bender saved him from inside the building by extending his arm, grabbing him by the scruff of the neck, and pulling him in. How exactly did anyone miss that?
• In "The Late Philip J. Fry" we see the future that results after Bender, Fry and Farnsworth disappear and are believed to be dead, in which Leela takes over Planet Express. Zoidberg is still hanging around pretending to work at the company twenty years after Leela laid him off. This seems about right, until you get to "The Tip of the Zoidberg" and find out that he had a standing offer to work a lucrative job at MomCorp, only remaining at Planet Express so that he could be on hand to Mercy Kill Farnsworth when the time came. Maybe Mom laid him off too?
• Why does the probulator only show Fry one living relative when it is known he has at least two more? Simple. The Nibblonians knew that for the past nastification to occur he must meet Professor Farnsworth. So they ensured that the device only told him about that relative.
• Yivo has one eye and tentacles and wants to mate with humans. If such mating has occured earlier, this might explain the origin of the genes of Leela's mother's tentacles and odd number of eyes (and of the squidification).
• Fry and Yivo hit it off because Yivo is a cyclops (with purple "hair").
• The Robot Devil more than likely included names of deceased characters just to cheat Fry, but why include his own name let alone hold up his end of the bargain?