Headscratchers / Futurama

Futurama

Robots

Bender's mortality

• The episode "Lethal Inspection" establishes that if Bender died (or his body destroyed), then his software wouldn't be able to enter any other Bending Unit bodies (or any other bodies period). Then comes the episode "Ghost in the Machines," in which Bender's software becomes a "robot ghost" and is able to take control of any mechanical device, from an electric toothbrush to the Robot Devil, and even Robot God. So, uh... wha?
  • Maybe the ability for robots to upload themselves to the cloud and become robot ghosts was developed after "Lethal Inspection". Or Farnsworth (the one who told Bender that if he died, he stayed dead) simply wasn't aware of it - it won't be his area of expertise, after all.

Actually, Farnsworth created the template for all Robots. He probably upgraded Bender offscreen.

• Bender has proven to perform impossible feats through sheer willpower like bending an unbendable girder. Perhaps being a poltergeist is simply testament to his sheer stubborness?

Bender's mortality, part II

• "Lethal Inspection" is also confusing as Bender has to make a deal with the Robot Devil in order to get his life back, but is then shown being able to inhabit various electronic tools ... why couldn't he just possess his own body again?
  • Bender's hardware was damaged to the point of being non-functional or "dead." Until Robot God intervened, there was presumably nothing there to work with, leaving him only able to manipulate operational, "living" machines.

Pain

• Why program a robot to feel pain?
  • Robots needs to be able to sense when it's taking damage, but for this to be any use it also needs to be programmed so as to want to avoid that sensation where possible. That's basically pain.

Bender "intertwining" with Amy

• How did Bender and Amy do it in Proposition Infinity? Bender doesn't have the right plugged wire for the act, given how he's made for bending.
  • USB peripherals.
  • Remember the scene from "The Series Has Landed" (the second ever episode) when Amy's trying to fish the ship's keys from a claw machine? Bender tells her working the device is "just like making love. Y'know: Left, down, rotate 62 degrees, engage rotor", to which Amy angrily retorts: "I know how to make love!". Maybe that's how they do it?

Power

• How has Bender not run out of power in "Roswell That Ends Well"? He was awake during the 1000+ years("I was enjoying it until you guys showed up"), so even as a head he should be sober-drunk by now.
  • Maybe he went into some sort of "sleep mode" and/or maybe he can harness enough power from the heat of the desert.

Sweating

• How can Bender sweat?
  • Possibly it's actually liquid cooling and the "sweat" is warm water.

Calculations

• In 'The Lesser of Two Evils', Bender was able to instantly figure out that his and Flexo's serial numbers were both the sum of two cubed numbers, but in 'The Prisoner of Benda', when Bender was in Amy's body, he wasn't able to solve a simple square root math question.
  • Because he's in Amy's body, which doesn't have a computer for a brain. Besides, Bender's known for being lazy. He had some motivation to solve the cubed numbers problem to clear his name, but probably didn't put in much effort solving the square root.
  • Bender's either lazy or his software sucks. Check out this interchange from season 3's "The Cyber House Rules", where he's trying to determine his profit margin from adopting a shitload of kids:
  Bender: Now to figure out how much money I'm raking in off those twerps! Oh! I need a calculator.
  Fry: You are a calculator.
  Bender: I mean a good calculator.

Global warming

• In "Crimes of the Hot", we learn that the robots running on alchohol emit a lot of pollution and that has been the cause of the severe global warming, so President Nixon, with the assistance of Wernstrom, send all the robots to an island where a giant solar panel would magnify the light of the sun to kill them like ants. Why not just have Mom, who makes all the robots, shut them down? We see in "Mother's Day" that she can override and control all robots.
  • Do you really think Mom would shut down all the robots and destroy her own monopoly to save the environment?

All My Circuits

• If seeing a robot's circuits is equivalent to seeing a human nude, why is the in-universe soap opera called All My Circuits? Is AMC more sexual than we're shown, or what?
  • It's the XXXI century. Our primitive notions of modesty have been extinct for 800 years.
  • It's also possible that "circuits" is kind of a slang term for robots. So it might literally be referring to circuitry but when used as slang it could be multi-function, like the word "dick" is to us.
  • It could be an in-universe Parental Bonus.

Bender's cigars

• How does Bender hold the cigar between his teeth, when his teeth are an image on a screen in the front of his mouth?
  • We've seen Bender open his mouth on several occasions. He just opens it a little bit to stick the cigar in.
    • Sometimes it's just on the front of his mouth, sometimes he opens his mouth (both in the middle, same problem as the one tooth issue, and from the bottom), and sometimes he opens one tooth. Despite his teeth being lines drawn on a screen, and presumably not separate based on their movement.
    • So maybe when his mouth is closed there's an image projected over his teeth to make it look like the lines between them are moving?
  • Floating cigar technology.

Bender's family

• Bender's mom is a robotic arm. The robotic arm's mom is a bulldozer. His aunt is a screw and his uncle is a robot much like himself. How does that work?
  • Bender's grandmother was the bulldozer that cleared the land for the factory the robotic arm was installed in?
  • Recycling! The bulldozer was catastrophically damaged in a building collapse and the parts were salvaged into a robotic arm. When the arm wore out, it was melted down into scrap and formed into Bender's exoskeleton. Bender has never mentioned his father, but he may have multiple "parents" who all contributed material to his construction.

His mother is alive on the podcast play. Robots probably call the Machines that make made them their parents. as for the rest, they probably form family like bonds with close friends.

Blood

• In Bird-Bot of Ice-catraz, Morbo says Bender had a blood-alcohol level of.08 percent. Blood?
  • Not that weird. We reuse old terms all the time. Oil-alcohol level just sounded awkward, presumably.

Composition

• What is Bender actually made of? One episode it's said he's made of iron-nickel alloy, another one says he's forty percent dolomite, and yet another one mentions he contains titanium.
  • In total, we learn that he is 40% titanium, 30% iron, 40% zinc, 40% dolomite, 40% lead, 40% chromium, 40% scrap metal, and 60% storage space with a 0.04% nickel impurity. That adds up to 330.04%, but it could easily be chalked up to a combination of repairs over time and the fact that Bender's a liar (maybe some of them are "Metaphor" Is My Middle Name like a robot equivalent to or "I eat X for breakfast").

Ignore the scrap metal, as that could he referring to the other metals. Ignore chromium, as the alien probably lied. Ignore storage space, as that isn't metal. And ignore the impurity for simplicity's sake. You're left with titanium, iron, dolomite, zinc and lead. 5 materials at 20% each = 100%. Bender lies and can't do maths. He probably also doesn't care what he's made of so just spouts out random numbers and materials. It's not like anyone can check...

Names

• So you've Bender - a bending robot, and Flexo, a bending robot. So each bending robot has a different bending-related name. But presumably Mom's Friendly Robot Company has produced thousands or millions of bending robots, how did they come up with a bending-related name for every one of them?
  • Well, bear in mind that Bender's full name is Bender Bending Rodriquez. We don't know Flexo's full name, but it wouldn't be a huge stretch to assume that he had a (possibly bending related) middle name and a (non-bending related) surname as well. With various combinations of these, the same among of bending-related names can stretch further without duplication. That, or multiple bending units DO have the same name. If nothing else, they each have a unique serial number.

They don't all have bending names. The one on the moon is named Billy West.

Everyone is cool with Bender and Amy

• In Proposition Infinity why was the entire crew so instantly supportive of the Bender-Amy relationship, when we already saw that they openly opposed robosexual relationships in I Dated A Robot?
  • To be fair, even in Real Life people have been known to flip-flop on this sort of matter, or draw arbitrary lines (lesbian relations were OK, for instance, but not gay ones).
  • The crew was never absolutely opposed to robosexuality, just to prolonged relationships with robots built for the single purpose of sex, especially if it's a robot that's been implanted with the personality of a celebrity. Even in that case, they were perfectly okay with the disposable sexbots, for as long as it didn't turned into a long term thing. Since Bender is not a sexbot, but an individual with a complete personality (and them some) they probably saw it as a completely different thing.

Farnsworth dating a robot

• The Professor was with a robot way-back-when. But we also know he was the father of all modern day (future day) robots. So... does that count as Parental Incest?
  • Since robots and the Professor don't share DNA, no.

How did the Robot Devil marry Leela, legally?

• If robosexual marriage is illegal in New New York before "Proposition Infinity," how could the Robot Devil marry Leela in "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings?" Preacherbot specifically says "By the power vested in me/By the State of New New York," so one can't argue that it was just a religious ceremony.
  • Maybe he thought it was part of the play and was just playing along, no pun intended. Plus, since it involved the Robot Devil, one gets the idea he DGAF about law (or possibly, used the law against itself and said that since he had Fry's hands at the time it meant he was a cyborg and thus it's OK).

Bender's gadgets

• What is with all of Bender's gadgets? In addition to the super strength required for a bending unit, for some reason he also has arms that stretch 50 feet, a pencil sharpener in his ass, a water heater, a container in his chest, etc. Do all bending units need all that? Or did Bender get extra modifications from the professor?
  • The extending arms could be useful for bending large objects and the chest cavity is just generally useful for storing stuff. The other things could just be extras that Momcorp adds on so that they can advertise their robots with a huge list of features (and jack up the price), or Bender could be buying upgrades for himself. Or a little bit of both - Momcorp sells additional stuff for extra. Either Bender's employer(s) was/were suckered into buying it, or he bought it for himself.

Reading a Robot's Mind

• In Into the Wild Green Yonder, Fry can read minds. Now, Bender is a Robot. But Fry can read Bender's mind. So... how does that work?
  • In Futurama, every sentient being (except Fry) produces the Delta Brain Wave. Everything. Including some trees. He probably read minds via that principle. His lacking it is why his mind can't be read.
  • It's all electrical impulses one way or another—a brain is nothing if not a very complex computer.

Obedient Robots

The real question now is why they obeyed him, when most of them were programmed to obey the scammers (Damn you Nudar!).

• That's simple, though: the Bender who wasn't infected with the obedience virus deleted the virus from the others. He did have a thousand years to do it, after all.

Why Not Change?

• In Rebirth, why did Frybot and the Leelaborg ditch the human skins as soon as they found out that they were both robots? They had all the memories and emotions of Fry and Leela, respectively, so shouldn't they have kept the Fry&Leela look since that was part of what each other was attracted to?
  • And I quote: "I love Fry. Robot Fry." "And I love Leela. Any Leela." She wanted him as a robot, and he didn't care. Fry may not be the smartest guy, but he's got a good heart.

Robot Santa Lives?

• In "Lethal Inspection", Mom says that all defective robots are immediately destroyed. How is Santa still around then?
  • Who said he was defective? He works perfectly well, its just that his programmer had unreasonable standards.
  • Wait, was Robot Santa built by Momcorp? And anyway, I'd like to see her try... hell, Robot Santa would probably love to see her try.
  • Yes, he was indeed built by Mom and his standards are high because of a programming error so he would certainly be considered defective. With all her vast amounts of money and resources, there is no reason for him to still be around.
  • Santa was built by The Friendly Robot Company in 2801, while it's possible that this is a precursor to Mom's Friendly Robot Company it was still well before her time.
  • Santa's a tough SOB. He probably killed the machines that came after him until it got expensive to keep making them, so Mom decided to cut her losses and let him live. He's also wanted by the law. Lots of people want him destroyed, but nobody has enough firepower to counter him.
  • The military lets him roam free for the purpose of instilling fear in the people of Earth, allowing them to keep their bloated out-of-control budget. I bet Zapp Brannigan's grampa or something came up with the idea. Also see Headscrather above on Santa.
  • Robot Santa amuses Mom.
    • Also, who do you think is selling the robots that clean up the messes Santa's rampages leave behind, every Xmas? Or do the work previously done by the various robots and people he slaughters?
  • Interestingly, Santa and Mom are among the few characters that treat Zoidberg with any respect.

For Want of a Joke

• In the first Xmas episode, the writers wasted a perfectly good opportunity to make a programming joke. Bender is established as being incredibly naughty, and then Santa adds another count to Bender's record; I was waiting to discover that Naughtiness was stored in an unsigned int, and that adding one more to the Naughtiness count reset the whole thing to 0. And then the joke never came. Rule of Funny, maybe - except that the joke they actually used ("Santa takes a long time to write, allowing them to get away") wasn't funny.
  • Maybe you didn't think it was funny, but answer this: How many people are going to get the "unsigned int" joke? Compare that to how many people are going to get the "Santa takes a long time to write" joke. You're gonna find one number is really small, while the other isn't.
  • Also, it could be awkward to get all the necessary facts into the dialogue without seeming extremely forced. The robots don't generally explain how they store data in conversation, but if they didn't mention that it's an unsigned int nearing its maximum then Santa would just seem to change his opinion of Bender for no reason.
  • They made pretty much the same joke in "Love's Labors Lost In Space" when Zapp Branigan explains how he defeated the killbots by sending waves of men for them to kill until they reached their limit and reset. There's also a deleted scene that makes it a little more like your programming joke.
    • Just to nitpick, the killbots didn't reset upon reaching their limit, they shut down permanently.
  • I don't think using one joke instead of another counts as Rule of Funny.

Boozy Boy

• If robots can also run on mineral oil seen in Hell is Other Robots, why does Tiny Tim ask for some booze? He's essentially a kid, why don't he ask for mineral oil?
  • He's not a kid. He's a robot. The robots run on alcohol by default. The mineral oil is a substitute for really devout robots of that particular robotic religion.
    • For a human comparison, we normally run on food that is nutritious, tasty, and easy to digest (in no particular order), but there have been sects in the past that had their followers subsist on water and unflavored grain mash. You wouldn't make a kid eat only unflavored grain mash because normal food doesn't cause drunkenness, so why would you expect a kid-robot (who may be Really 700 Years Old) to only eat mineral oil?

Corrupted or Not?

• The ending of Bender's Big Score: Those hordes of Benders should still be under the scammers' control, but they don't have red eyes and were able to disobey the scammers' command to get back to them. How?
  • Main character Bender, not being infected, probably debugged them wirelessly or something. They could have done it on their own if the virus didn't make them not want to.
  • The Bender who wasn't infected with the obedience virus had a thousand years to debug the others. In that time, he did. Simple.

What About the Others?

• In Benderama they treat it is though Bender is the only one affected by the alcohol shortage, and the only one not affected by the water turning into alcohol. What about all the other robots? Running out of fuel for all the robots on Earth should be a major problem.
  • The Benders than began turning all the water on Earth into alcohol, so the problem was quickly solved.

Hardly Any Alien Robots?

• Why do we hardly ever see any robots made by aliens? The only autonomous robots in the show that I remember to have been built by an alien were the ones that Leonardo da Vinci made. I know that the episode with the Amazonian women had a fembot who came from a planet that was ruled by a masculine computer, but who's to say that they weren't of Earthican origin like the human-hating robots from that robot planet? Does Mom hold a universal monopoly on robot production or something?
  • Considering Mom, it's a high likelihood she does. She had a monopoly on dark matter, it's not a stretch to assume she has one on robot production. However, we did see a robot expo where Wernstrom and others sold robots, though we don't know if they were all working for Mom or not. And in season one, there was an episode with a planet populated by human-hating robots.
    • I had wondered about that robot planet from "Fear of a Bot Planet," but they are indeed specified as having originated on Earth. The same can be said of the robot planet from "The Clockwork Origin."

Robot Meat?

• Regarding the episode "31st Century Fox"... how exactly can "robot meat" exist? Robots don't have meat on them. I know, I know, Rule of Funny and all, but still...
  • Maybe some robots can "eat" robot animal metal, like a smelting machine.

Aging

Everyone's eternally youthful

• How come everyone looks the same age? Fry still looks and acts 25 when he's supposed to be 38/39 by the series finale "Meanwhile". Same goes with Amy and Leela. What's really weird is that both of them are shown looking their age in a flash-forward sequence to 3030.
  • A combination of plastic surgery, being rebuilt, the fountain of aging, being reborn, etc. A lot has happened throughout the years the show's aired.
    • What about Dwight and Cubert? They haven't been on those adventures.
    • Who's to say they didn't do things off screen that kept them the same age as well?
    • This actually makes sense if you've studied evolutionary biology. Humans as a species are very into something called neoteny; basically, extending the development stage of life (i.e., childhood and adolescence) so that our brains can develop more. Then, consider that all humans get Put on a Bus at age 160, and you have plenty incentive to stay "the same age" as long as possible.

This is actually a staple of many animated shows. It's known as a "floating timeline". Although time passes normally, most, if not all, characters never age beyond a year or two. Ash Kethum is an often brought up example. He's been 10 years old for 26 years, and was still 10 when he was removed as the main character.

Amy is an old cyborg

• Continuing on the above, 3030 Amy had become a cyborg. So why then, if the tech is available, does she still look older?

Fry deaging the same as everyone

• In "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles" if Fry is over 1,000 years old why did he de-age the same as the others, since they go back by years not by age?
  • There's a difference between biological age and chronological age. His biological age stopped progressing during the freeze. Regardless, the others didn't de-age at the same rate. Professor Farnsworth de-ages from 160 to his 30s in the same time Amy de-ages from her 20s to age 8.

Mom's timeline

• How old is Mom, and how old are her sons? She had an affair with the Professor when they were apparently at least middle-aged, possibly older. (Her hair was already white and he was balding.) So they must be of roughly comparable age. She recounts the story of the affair to her sons as if they don't know it, so they must not have been born yet or were at least too young to be aware of it. Yet they don't seem that old - maybe in their thirties.
  • The Professor is over a century old. Artificial wombs exist, as does anti-aging.
  • There's a planet with tar that can make you younger, though you have to be drenched in it like the Planet Express crew for a major age drop. She could have made use of it to be young and fertile again.

Lars old, Fry not

• Fry's time travel duplicate in Bender's Big Score aka Lars was shown to be noticeably aged by 2012. In the new episodes, it's 3011 and Fry still looks 25.
  • Said time travel duplicate had also spent a good chunk of those 12 years on a Narwhaling boat in the arctic, and then was nearly blown up, while Fry Prime has had full access to the kind of future medicine that can keep heads alive in jars for thousands of years. It's not the years, it's the mileage.

Nibbler's Age

• How old is Nibbler? In the episode where his tooth chips, the doctor says that he's five from counting the rings. But apparently he was also the one who sent Fry to the future 1000 years ago?
  • Nibbler is thousands and thousands of years old. The doctor's counting the rings was based on "if he's anything like a tree," which is a blatantly ridiculous assumption to make on every conceivable level, which was probably the point.
    • Compounding the ridiculousness is the fact that they decide to celebrate his birthday immediately, based on even flimsier evidence.
  • The doctor didn't know what Nibbler was, so he was guessing.

Hermes and Bender Age Plot Hole

• In "Lethal Inspection", Hermes looks like a teenager at the time of Bender's construction. Wasn't Bender stated somewhere to be created in the late 2990s, i.e. a couple of years before Hermes' first appearance in "The Series Has Landed"?
  • Just because he wasn't shown, doesn't mean he wasn't alive.
    • I think what the OP means is that Hermes wouldn't have been that young when Bender was made.
    • I don't understand the first reply's wording at all. Both characters WERE shown. Hermes was the one who allowed Bender to live a mortal non-brain-uploady life. Look at Hermes here, and look at him in episode 2 of the show. That was my question.
  • Hermes implanted false memories so that nobody would learn the truth

Why Has No One Aged?

• The series pays some lip service to taking place in real time relative to production time (unlike The Simpsons, say)... at what point do you think they will have the characters visibly age?
  • People live to be 150+, I would assume the aging process is slooow.
  • In "Overclockwise" (set in 3011), Cubert is identified as being 12. In "The Route of All Evil" (3002), he was identified as being... 12. Harder to explain that.
    • This is Professor Farnsworth we're talking about. He probably just used some of that de-aging tar to keep his son young. Given Cubert's kind of lazy, he's fine with being a kid for a while.

Heads in jars

Neil Armstrong

• If Neil Armstrong's head is in the museum, why doesn't anyone - except Fry, know who was the first man on the moon in "The Series has Landed"?
  • No reason why everyone would believe a head in a museum.
    • Why not Nixon, then? He was the American president during the moon landings, and he's respected enough to be president of Earth in the 31st century.

Missing person at the Head Museum

• In "Luck of the Fryrish" why isn't Fry's nephew Phillip J. Fry's head in a jar at the museum if he's a celebrity?
  • We do not know his head was NOT in the head museum. We only saw a portion of it. Or perhaps he did not want his head in a jar. Also, maybe he couldn't stand listening to Neil Armstrong going on and on about the first the moon landing, so he ''opted out''.
  • Could be that he's a bigger celebrity on Mars than on Earth, so his head-in-a-jar is in a museum on that planet instead of in New New York.

A very non fatal decapitation

• How did Hermes manage to survive having his head separated from his body for dozens of minutes before having it placed in a jar?
  • Humanity has dabbled in genetic engineering, so it stands to reason they made "losing your head" less fatal. Currently it's only because without the rest of the body the head suffers irreversible damage that losing your head kills you, but there's nothing saying in the future we manage to say, decipher how the brain works well enough that we can repair it as easily as we can recover data off a hard disk.

Speech

• How do the heads talk without lungs?
  • Electronic voice-boxes?
  • It is implied that the heads are artificially made, rather than being from actual people. There are heads of people who should have been rotted by the time the technology came out, and Grover Cleveland has two heads.

Heads out of jars

• How long can the heads survive outside their jars, anyway? Does it do much to directly keep them alive? Is it ever explained or addressed?

Criteria for being in a jar

• What are the rules regarding who dose or doesn't get to be a Head Jar?
  • Whether you're famous, whether you have money, whether your health insurance covers it.

Robot bodies

• Why don't more heads utilise robotic bodies the way Nixon did in "A Head in the Polls"? Apparently there are no restrictions and all he had to do was purchase it, which shouldn't be a hurdle considering most heads are rich celebrities.

Yivo vs. Heads

• How did Yivo genticle the heads in jars? They have no necks, or metal covering their necks. Also, it might not be everyone, but the tentacles went most of the way down the spine for at least Fry.
  • They have some neck.

Constants

The millenium old clover

• In "The Luck of the Fryrish," how did the seven leaf clover last for 1000 years without disintegrating?
  • Well, it is a lucky clover... Lamination must be more effective than one would have you think.

Make more anchovies

• Why didn't Fry use the canned anchovies to clone some more? For that matter, why didn't somebody else do it long ago?
  • Zoidberg ate the leftover pizza before they had a chance to, and there were only two verified cans of anchovies in existence. They're the only people who like anchovies, anyway. Fry and the Professor might have been the first combination of people to know about the anchovies, want them, and care about cloning.

Old cloning

• Can you even clone something that's been killed, frozen, and sealed in a can for at least 700 years?
  • Don't see why not, as long as the item in question isn't too degraded. Since the world of the 31st century can rescue decapitated heads and place them in jars, they evidently have the tech.

Where was Nibbler's race during Bender's Big Score?

• About Applied Cryogenics: thanks to "Bender's Big Score" Fry was both frozen and unfrozen for twelve years and there's a frozen Bender in the cryo-tube. Wouldn't the cryogenics in charge/the Nibbler of that era wonder what was going on?
  • We learn in a later episode after a job well done Nibbler got drunk and lost the keys to the ship so he might've lost track (it's never stated how close an eye he kept on Fry while he was frozen). And the cryogenicist was portrayed as rather apathetic to the point he froze his wife to not be nagged so maybe he just doesn't care that there's a double of Fry in the lab.

Omicron Persei and the speed of light increase

• Why did it take a thousand years for the radio waves to get to Omicron Persei if the speed of light has been increased in 2208?
  • Because the radio waves were going at the old speed, of course.

Is a light year still the same?

• If the speed of light has been increased, does the definition of a "light year" change? Do all distance calculations suddenly get thrown out, or does everyone just switch to astronomical units?
  • "Light year" gets used within the series and appears to have the same definition as in the present (most noticeably, Omicron Persei is said to be 1,000 light years from Earth, which is valid now as it is in the future). Makes sense; the Real Life International Bureau of Weights and Measures emphasises keeping the measurements equal.

Unchanging Cryogenics Lab

• If new New York is built above the ruins of Old New York, why is the cryogenics lab still in a tower, and the building around it hadn't been rebuilt despite going from a seemingly low-rent office building to a futuristic future tower?
  • That always bugged me, too. Also the cryogenics lab was not destroyed when the rest of New York was and Fry's cryo-capsule lasted 1000 years without being replaced.
  • A deleted scene shows that the Cryonics lab building is much shorter in the future, suggesting that only the top levels are above ground (in the underground scenes you can see a few buildings that reach the ceiling). As for how the building survived, maybe the Nibblonians protected it.
    • As seen in "Bender's Big Score", Old New York was destroyed by Bender. Of course he would spare the building his best friend was frozen in.
    • No, he didn't destroy the building because the Paradox-Correcting Time Code wouldn't let him.

Economy

Tumbling stock

• In "Future Stock", exactly how does Fry's speech at the end devalue Planet Express' stock?
  • Because everything he says points to utterly horrible business. That's how stock works. Its price goes up when it's in demand (read:people think the company's going to do well), and goes down when it's not (read:people think it's going to tank).
  • Also, everyone watching the speech could see the publicly-displayed price starting to fall as he spoke, and sold their shares as fast as they could to avoid losing all their shares' value. So the effect snowballed.

Fry and Bender are billionaires

• Why is it that no one seems to remember (or care) that Fry and Bender are both bazillionaires from their deal with Fishy Joe?
  • It's likely they lost all the money either because they blew it buying weird crap, got sued to oblivion, or Fishy Joe managed to cut them out of the deal.
  • Status Quo Is God. Bender in particular has made or stolen plenty of money/treasure in other episodes but he's broke by the next.

Aquariums in the future

• Regarding the Thief of Baghead episode: What was wrong with glass structures in aquariums? Technology advancement only occurs when there is a problem or a more efficient way to do something. Force fields have to be more expensive than glass.

Bender's ill gotten gains

• Where is all of Bender's money? He has made millions through his stealing, racketeering and arson-burglary.
  • He probably hoards the money itself. That, or he blows it all on random crap.
  • This is a far reaching WMG, but Bender is a broken robot. He was originally programmed to bend and then Frye changed his personality to a looter in the pilot episode. As a result, Bender loots because that's his programming. It's not a sensical thing that he optimizes.

Cryogenics funding

• Who was funding the Cryogenic Freezing Facility in the 20th/21st Century? Considering scientists have only just begun using cryogenic freezing for medical purposes, the facility's existence in 1999 is very perplexing...
  • Sure, the scientists *you* know about.
  • The Nibblonians? Since they needed it to exist and could provide the advanced technology needed for it.

Alien races and planets

Zoidberg's race is named weird

• Why is Zoidberg's race called Decapodians, if most of them only have four limbs? Lobsters and other crustaceans are only called decapods because they have 10 limbs.
  • It's probably an exonym.
  • Maybe at one point they do have ten limbs, either from an old stage of evolution or in one of their weird, complicated life cycles.
  • The planet they are from is Decapod 10. It's possible the system was named after a 10-limbed people.
  • It's not named weird at all, it's a nerd reference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decapoda

Edna the alien

• How come most members of Zoidberg's species have alien-y names, but one's called Edna and that's a human name?
  • The desire to give your kid a "unique" name is a universal constant.
  • Also, it should be noted that Zoidberg's first name is John, and he has an uncle named Harold. Both of which are pretty common names in the 21st Century Anglosphere.

No one found the da Vinci planet

• How was planet Vinci not discovered by anyone until the events of "The Duh-Vinci Code"?
  • They might have deliberately hidden themselves.

Amazon reproduction

• If all of Planet Amazon's inhabitants are women, how do they reproduce? How are baby alien amazons created?
  • Parthenogenesis.
  • Maybe they're long-lived and the males of the species only died out recently.
  • Maybe they're the only ones left, the descendants of the Amazonians who snoo-snooed outworlders besides Fry and Brannigan to death.
  • Maybe it's like the real Amazons in Ancient Greece. When they needed to reproduce, they'd go to neighboring tribes with men and have sex with them. If they had boys, they'd just give them to their fathers... or possibly worse. Only with Futurama, substitute that with neighboring planet.
  • Snu snu of course. As long as they get pregnant, they don't care what happens to the men that get their pelvises crushed.

Recognising Alienese

• If (supposedly) nobody on earth could read Alienese, and even Farnsworth couldn't recognize the language to feed it through the appropriate translator, or at least call an off-planet translator, how did the Director even know it was Alienese, and Leela's mother's PhD in exolinguistics cover writing it? Was it supposed to be an icebox moment? Or was it supposed to be funny right then? Is this the same Alienese that many street signs, clocks, and fliers use?
  • I figured he was using Alienese to mean, "some language that I don't recognize", rather than an actual language called Alienese.
    • You know, you don't have to know a language to recognize it.
    • Exactly. I don't speak German or Spanish, but I can recognize if something is written in it (well, I can make a pretty good guess)
    • I took this as an example of sheer Fridge Brilliance; 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 attempt to translate the faux-Alienese because an abandoned child is pretty self-explanatory (given the Rule of Funny circumstances). This is also why Professor Farnsworth is unable to translate the note: it doesn't actually mean anything in a real language.
    • It actually does mean something, though. 'Your parents love you very much.' They say so on the DVD commentary, and any viewer with an Alienese letter translator can decipher it from the note.
    • That... Is actually incredibly reasonable. This is now part of my Fanon.
  • Additionally, if not even some of the smartest people on Earth can understand it, why is it that there is so much vandalism on Earth of it? And why is there a state whose name is written in Alienese?
    • They're all by visiting aliens.

Dog Logic

• The dog with two heads, one at each end: Rex gets the pills, and Rover gets the suppository. Would that mean Rex swallows all of them, or Rover swallows the suppositories?
  • No, Pepper eats the pills and Rover eats the suppositories. Simple.
  • It actually says that Rover gets the pill and Pepper gets the suppository. This probably means that Rover swallows both medicines.

Does Yivo Have a Delta Brain Wave?

• Does Yivo produce the Delta Brain Wave? Shkle's sentient (or so we are led to believe), but shkle's also from an electro-matter universe, and does not appear to have any problem interfacing with Fry.
  • Shkle probably does, but has no problem broadcasting the love telepathy stuff to Fry, as Fry has no problems receiving telepathy. In Into The Wild Green Yonder, Fry was perfectly capable of hearing thoughts, just nobody could hear his. The brains can't attack him, because they only target the Delta Brain Wave, but Fry doesn't have that. Yivo sends love (or something like that) through the tentacles, and apparently doesn't rely on the Delta Brain Wave.
  • It's possible Yivo got Fry to embrace shkler willingly.

Time travel

Senator Travers

• In the episode "Decision 3012", Senator Travers is erased when he wins the election due to a paradox caused by time travel. This would be fine, but he specifically used the paradox-correcting time code from Bender's Big Score, so no paradox should have taken place. The baby Travers is doomed, but otherwise he should be completely fine, right?

Da Vinci

• In the episode "The Duh-Vinci Code," the characters meet Da Vinci himself, and more importantly, recover the "Last Supper" painting and look at it. But in Bender's Big Score, Bender steals the "Mona Lisa" painting and is asked "Did Da Vinci give you any trouble?" to which he replies, "Let's just say he won't make it to The Last Supper." So, what's up...?
  • It's just a pun. Leo painted The Last Supper before the Mona Lisa.

Just go back in time another way

• In "The Late Philip J. Fry", the trio get stuck in the future and have to keep traveling forwards in time until a time machine that can bring them back to the 31st century is invented...but they already know of several ways to go back in time. For instance, all they would have to do would be to fly a spaceship to a supernova, then put metal in a microwave and turn it on, as they did in "Roswell That Ends Well". So why didn't they try that?
  • That would require access to a working spaceship, with enough fuel, and knowledge of a star which is going to blow up. Metal and a microwave (or at least an object that can create microwaves) are probably easy enough to come by, but throughout half the episode we find that the world has gone to the crapper.
    • Then why not use the time code to get back to their present?
    • Bender removed it from Fry to form the bootstrap time loop. And since he almost destroyed the universe after, Farnsworth probably told him to delete it from his memory.

Meanwhile

• At the end of "Meanwhile", are the characters doomed to repeat the same cycle of events the creation of the time button causes in an infinite number of negated timelines - so the button always breaks, time always freezes, and it stays that way until the Professor finds his way to Fry and Leela, restarting the cycle again?
  • Yup. That was actually one of the jokes/wishes Matt Groening expressed: to make the entire series a time loop.

Doesn't the Brainspawn's plan involve a time paradox?

• In the "Why of Fry", in order to escape their entrapment, the Brainspawn decide to send Fry back in time and stop himself from being frozen. Yet, Fry only became his grandfather because he was frozen long enough to be sent back with Planet Express. Fry might not know this, but the Brainspawn just obtained all information in the universe. They should know their actions will cause a Reality-Breaking Paradox that will kill them all, and likely in the year 2000 thus making their Infosphere moot.
  • They were not in the universe anymore, they were completely incapable to do anything worth doing anymore. Yes, sending Fry back in time they may create a reality breaking paradox, but in hindsight that may be the goal. They're in another universe, so that might protect them from the ripple effect. Thus they get the universe to blow up while safe in the pocket reality.

Benders just standing there

• How come nobody noticed the thousands of bending robots with the same serial number under what would eventually be the site of the Planet Express?
  • Maybe it was a really deep cave and the Bender duplicates became really good at hiding over time. He's been known to steal; Bender's got to know how to hide from police. Their presence may have also led to stories about dangerous metal men causing people to avoid that place.
    • Also, why wasn't there a problem when all the Benders met each other in the cave? Why did the rift only appear after they all came out of the hole, or was the rift nothing to do with the multiple benders?
    • The clones weren't supposed to stay in the cave at all. They were supposed to have all come out and become the final Bender, who convinced all his clones to stay in the cave so they wouldn't become the final Bender. As a result logic collapsed and thus, paradox.

Just do everything in one go

• In Bender's Big Score, why didn't Bender just time travel once to the Stone Age and then collect all of history's treasures in one going instead of having to go back so many times?
  • Because Nudar didn't tell him to.
  • Bender is lazy and narcissistic. Why go out every few years or even months for something valuable when you can go back and relax for centuries with the other Benders before being sent on another mission?

Lars realizing his mistake

• Wouldn't Lars already be aware of the consequences of being a time travel duplicate? He already saw Nudar's duplicate get killed off and the determination of the paradox-correcting nature of the time code was already firmly established by the time the Fry that went back to the year 2000 initially. It takes him all the way to his wedding day and seeing Hermes' body get destroyed for a second time that he knows he's in danger.
  • Lars is still Fry, even if he is still a bit older and more mature, and Fry was never the best at making connections like that.

Stuck in a Family Tree

• Okay, so Fry is his own grandfather. That means he's also Yancy's grandfather, since, being full brothers, they have the same grandfather. So that means Professor Farnsworth is not merely Fry's X-greats-grandnephew, but his X+ 2-greats-grandson. So that means...wait, does that even mean anything?
  • Actually, if you consider his nephew (Philip J. Fry who was the first to land on Mars), it may make a case for Fry's descendants, sharing his odd DNA quirk, are genetically programmed for greatness. This may very well stem from the fact that Fry is destined to save the universe, so yeah, his descendants are gonna be awesome as well. (This explains how Prof. Farnsworth is a genius, despite being slightly psychotic, and umpteen years old (160, I believe). Since we never see any more of his descendant, it may very well be that having Fry for a great, great, great, etc something gives you a chance at some form of awesomeness. Furthermore, it might very well be that Fry's lucky clover, in fact, enhances this effect, perhaps emitting some form of radiation which interacts with his unique brain-waves to produce an effect not unlike the worms and oh no I've gone cross-eyed.

You Keep Using That Word...

• Does anyone on the Futurama staff actually know what a paradox is? The one Leela tries to use on Santa is more of an unpleasant statement that might create a pair of separate orders contradicting each other, which is a paradox in the way saying, "Eat that fish. No! Wait! Don't eat that fish!" is a paradox. And in Bender's Big Score . . . well, let's not even get into that.
  • paradox-correcting time code, bitch.
  • The writers being self-admitted "nerdlingers", almost certainly. In fact virtually every question on this page could be answered with "Rule of Funny".
  • I agree everything her is either "Rule of Funny" or paradox correcting time code
  • That still doesn't explain Leela's paradox utterly failing to actually be a paradox.
    • To be fair, she still has a point. Since Robot Santa is naughty, and he's designed to destroy the naughty, he should logically destroy himself. It failed because Santa regards himself as nice. The real Fridge Logic is that it isn't a paradox, yet Leela says it is.
    • He was programmed to judge naughty vs. nice. He was given a set of parameters to judge by; it's not his fault they were set incorrectly. When someone is judged naughty, he was given a set of actions to perform. (Note the spikes that emerge from the puff on his hat when he switches from nice to mean mode). He is not naughty; he is performing within parameters.
    • He judged the Robot Mafia to be naughty. Being programmed or not is not relevant to him.
  • The Other Wiki defines a paradox as, quote, "a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition." (all emphasis original) I think that's what Leela's statement is. Something that seems true and seems to defy logic or intuition. Santa's mission is to destroy the naughty. But he himself is naughty, so he must destroy himself. But if he destroys himself his mission to destroy the naughty will go unfulfilled. And so on. It's a pretty loose paradox, but it is technically a paradox. Besides, it didn't work on Santa anyway. So whether it really counts as a paradox is kind of a moot point.
    • Alternatively, consider that putting a stop to a destructive robot would be a nice thing to do. Therefore he would be nice for trying to destroy himself as a result of being naughty.
  • In most robot fiction, the most effective paradox is specifically one in the robot's own programming. For example, HAL had to report all scientific data and keep secret all the, obviously scientifically important, information on the monolith. She's attempting to point out that his programming is self-contradictory, probably that since he is naughty, his directive to punish the naughty contradicts his self-preservation directive.

Ignoring the Professor's Mortality

• Also in "Roswell that Ends Well", why does no one point out that the Professor too would die if Fry's grandfather were killed. Especially the professor himself, who points out the rest? At least I'm assuming Farnsworth is descended from Fry's grandfather, since he's supposed to be a "great etc. grand nephew" and to be a blood relative. Otherwise at best he's a 2nd cousin nth times removed.

Teleporting Time Machine

• Again, in the Late Phillip J. Fry, how did the time machine end up in Germany to assassinate Hitler? Every time the time machine arrives at a destination, it's in New York City.
  • Either Rule of Funny or Farnsworth eyeballed it from across the Atlantic.
  • Hitler was visiting New York.
  • He did step out to get Hitler. He might have taken a teleporter or hovercraft to Germany offscreen or something.
  • A more pressing question is why did he do it? The whole purpose of the forwards time machine was to not alter history, yet killing Hitler would do a lot of altering.
    • The universe ended twice. Farnsworth tends to go 'screw history' when stuff like that happens.
    "Choke on that, causality!"
    • It's Hitler. Who wouldn't want to shoot him, especially if you tend to go "screw history."
  • The time machine can travel through space as well as time, which accounts for how they ended up in NNY every time despite the fact that the Earth rotates and moves around the sun, and the sun itself is probably moving. And if you don't subscribe to the theory of fixed places in space, then it really doesn't matter anyway.
    • Well that explains my question about how it ended up exactly where it started, despite floating around in the ocean in "some year that ends in a 20."
    • Speaking of the 3512th century, the sea covering Many News York seems a lot deeper than a mere 10 feet. If it doesn't change its location, the forwards time machine should've crashed into the ground like a crater when it reached the Age of Giraffes.
    • Location is relative. From the perspective of the day to day world we experience, they only moved in time.

Inconsistent Time Rules

• In the episode Cryonic Woman, Fry responds to, "I just figured time was cyclic," with, "Nope, straight line...", which as we know by now, has been disproven by the new season's time travel episode...
  • Fry didn't know time was cyclical at the time. Also, it technically isn't; each new universe is distinct in some way. The one the crew end up in is ten feet above and to the side of their old one.
    • Actually, it wasn't: the time machine floated to the surface and was paddled a few feet over when they stopped in the flooded era, and that was the only time it ever moved. The Professor must have forgotten to take that into account when he said the new universe was lower.
    • Plus, the guy only froze himself for 1000 years. It takes more than 1000 years for time to repeat itself. Plus I thought it was a Brick Joke.
    • Not to mention that being in a freezer tube wouldn't exactly help you out there considering, you know, the universe has to be destroyed first. Plus, from what's seen in the episode, the cryogenics lab didn't even look like it survived to the year 10000; it sure as hell ain't making it to the end of all things.
  • It's a subtle distinction, but time isn't actually cyclic, just repetitive. At the end of "The Late Phillip J. Fry," they're still in the far-off future, just a future that's nearly identical to the time they came from. If it was cyclical they would have reached the end of the universe and wound up in the actual past.

Why Not Mention He Could Die?

• At the risk of creating yet another Roswell That Ends Well discussion, there's one thing about it that always irked me. Before that whole Grandfather Paradox thing came to light, Farnsworth is adamant about Fry avoiding Enos. Okay, that's fine. He's a scientist, he fully understands the ramifications of a paradox like that. Is there any reason why he never mentioned, "By the way, your brother and by extension Enos are also my direct ancestors so for my sake as well as yours, stay the hell away from Enos so we both don't vanish"? Or did he mention it and I just missed it?
  • I suppose he assumed that appealing to Fry's sense of self-preservation would be sufficient. Why bring up the indirect threat to your employer/umpty-great nephew when you can say "you do this, you die".

Why Did That Fry Not Die?

• Okay, s in Bender's Big Score, all time duplicates are doomed to die. Now, how come the Fry that went back in time and then froze himself was not similarly doomed?
  • That Fry wasn't a duplicate; he was the original. It's confusing, but the original is always the one who goes back in time to meet the past self; the duplicate is the past self that is met. The only true goof with this formula seems to be Hermes's duplicate body, as mentioned above, since Hermes himself never went back in time.
  • OP here; that clarifies things, but it raises another question. If the duplicates were the Fry that would become Lars and the Fry who was originally frozen, then shouldn't the Fry who was originally have frozen been doomed to die, at one point or another, before he went on to go back in time?
    • That's true; he did go back in time twice, so he might have been duplicated twice. But remember, the code is paradox-correcting, and for everything to make sense, one Fry still had to do the first time travel. Since main-plot-Fry was frozen at the time and Lars-Fry was busy being Lars, there needed to still be a Fry to go back in time for the first place, namely the "orignal" in that sense, and he seems to then have merged with the other two. Maybe.
    • You only become a paradox duplicate when it's logically impossible for you to become your future self, such as meeting yourself when you didn't remember meeting yourself, or preventing that self from growing up to be you. Pilot Fry didn't immediately defrost in the brief seconds Fry slipped into the same tube and was completely unaware of his future self staying in the tube-thus there's no paradox. Lars Fry, however, did meet Fry and was rendered unable to become him.

Why Didn't Hank Time Travel?

• In "A Leela Of Her Own", why doesn't Hank Arron the 24th travel back in time when he drinks from Wade Boggs head jar?
  • Is it because he goes down smooth?

Still Being Destroyed in the Past?

• OK, so I get that Fry not going to the future in "Anthology of Interest" gives the Brainspawn free reign to destroy the universe. But that happens in the year 3000, so why is is the universe being destroyed in the year 2000? Are the Brainspawn Ret-Gone-ing the universe?
  • It seems so. Two guesses why. First, time travel exists, so perhaps their reasoning is that if the past is allowed to exist, new knowledge could be created there, and they can't have that. (Not sure where such *new* time travel could come from though if they've destroyed the present/future.) Second, perhaps destroying past, present, and future together, i.e. the whole history of the universe, is just a byproduct of the method they used to destroy the universe to begin with.
  • Not being frozen destroys the universe in 2000 because of a paradox, not the Brainspawn. Though the universe would still be screwed if Fry died anytime between "Roswell that Ends Well" and "The Why of Fry."

Fry using the freezer a second time

• In Bender's Big Score, Fry travels back to 2000, but ends up falling back into the same cryofreezer with his past self. When they unthaw in the year 3000, the current Fry closes the freezer door for another 7 or so years to catch up to when he left the future. Problem is, in Space Pilot 3000, Fry escaped Leela by having her fall into that very same freezer for a few minutes. With the door now closed, how did the past Fry manage to escape Leela?
  • It is paradox-free time travel after all. The time code let the scammers steal historical artifacts without changing history, after all. Duplicates are only made when the user directly interacts and messes up with their own timeline ie Bender telling himself to wait for Fry while he goes to the bathroom.

Simpsorama Canon

• Is Simpsorama canon. Meanwhile just ends with Farnsworth encountering an old Fry and Leela and then in The Impossible Stream, resumes the time.

Earth's military

The mutants are war criming

• In "The Mutants Are Revolting", the mutants' acts of protest could easily be declared as war crimes. Yet, they get their freedom with a "Sure, why not."? Eh?
  • That's a bit of an exaggeration. They switched a fire hydrant with a fuel pump and brought the sewage to the surface. Since keeping bad stuff like that from happening is the mutants' unpaid jobs, it'd make as much sense as firemen going on strike counting as arson. Plus, we don't really know how civil uprisings work in the 31st Century, and the general public is pretty easily swayed by equality causes in the Futurama verse according to "Proposition Infinity."

Zapp

• In "Rebirth" how did Zapp Brannigan become a head on skeleton guy like the rest of the characters? Everyone else had protective bubbles around their heads, but he probably didn't. Also, how would the Professor get Zapp's body? Also, why did Kif go back to working for Zapp afterwards?
  • How do we know he didn't? I don't remember seeing the inside of Zapp's ship in the moments before the crash. They probably installed defences in order to deal with Zapp's recklessness.

Just blow up Santa!

• Why doesn't the Earth's military just destroy Santa once and for all? He's just one robot.
  • In the comic, Santa agrees to let the Earth military appear to defeat him every Christmas in exchange for a kickback. This allows Nixon to put on an annual show of keeping Earth safe. The Robot Mafia was also involved somehow.
  • Santa also isn't an ordinary robot. Not only is he paradox-proof, but he has access to more artillery than most of the army does, and he has many of the yuletide powers of Santa Claus (such as worldwide surveillance).

Space travel

Who's driving?

• Who was flying the ship at the end of "Time Keeps on Slippin"?
  • The ship has been shown to have AI. If robots like Bender can exist, surely it would know how to get back to Earth. Also, the risk of hitting something in space is greatly exaggerated in media.

Noah's ark - oh wait, there's more boats

• In "A Farewell to Arms"; the crew thinks a large solar flare is going to strike the planet, but realize the temple they found is actually a space ship from Mars. They then make a choice of who goes on the ship and who stays on Earth. Why, though, is this necessary when any citizen can just hop in their hover car and follow?
  • The episode established an EMP knocked everything out, including spaceships. The temple-ship is the only one unaffected.

Recycled IN SPACE!

• What's up with all the references to "space" like it's a specific place? We've heard of the Space Pope, the King of Space, Space Earth, Space Massachusetts, etc.
  • For the Space Pope and King of Space, this is probably a substitute for "The Known Universe/Existence". They may also designate individual offices from others with identical names: King of Space is a higher authority than King of England.
  • Space Massachusetts may be named just like York and New York, or London and Greater London, ie named after the former but designated "Space" to differentiate between the two.

Math issues

Fitting the Furniture

• How did Fry move his furniture into his "closet" through the 3-feet-by-3-feet space?
  • Through the window?
    • There is a door that leads directly to the "closet" (shown several times). Actually, it's Bender's "apartment" that is not shown anymore. But who cares?
  • The window is shown to fully open when Bender is dating the Planet Express spaceship and she calls at the apartment to find Bender. If a spaceship can converse with Fry through the opening, furniture should be no trouble!
  • Maybe there's furniture that is doll-sized that can be turned into human-sized via a button. It is the future, after all.
    • Or come in pill form and turn to full size with water, like the tents on the Nimbus,

Room for the Machines

• If the cryogenics lab so frequently has people thawed out from hundreds of years ago (and thus would take up a machine for that whole time), how do all the machines fit in one building, much less that one room we always see them using?
  • This is likely because, assuming that the cost of cryogenics remains as expensive as it is in the present day, there won't be a demand greater than the few machines shown. This raises further questions though: Fry was obviously not paying to be deep-frozen, and given the exorbitant cost of doing so, why did no one notice this, unfreeze him much sooner, and free up a machine that could generate a lot of income from a paying customer?
  • You're asking why someone whose motto is "You can solve all your problems by freezing them" looked at something he had no idea what to do with and left it frozen?
    • Alternatively, the Nibblonians took care of it.
  • Funny answer: as protectors of the space-time continuum, Al Gore and co used their flaming dump trunks of grant money to fund Applied Cryonics. After all, not doing so would destroy the universe and as an environmentalist he's against it.

Inconsistent Weight of Dark Matter

• Bender's Game: So, they run out of dark matter fuel... and Leela tells Fry to check Nibbler's litter pan for fuel. So, let's see... Dark Matter weighs the same as 5,000 suns... Bender grunted when he first had to load the Planet Express ship? But Fry can lift the ball? Hell, Farnsworth, during his explanation of the dark matter 'creation', he loads a few balls into a machine, and he's already middle age during the flash back...
  • Ah, but one pound of the stuff weighs as much as a thousand pounds as regular matter, which implies mass-changing properties, most likely following similar laws to narrativium.
  • Fry could have turned down the gravity for that part of the ship so he could load it with less trouble. Farnsworth was working in a futuristic science lab. Perhaps they have an anti gravity field to help with it.
  • We have seen localized gravity-changing devices in Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?

A Mighty Big Boat

• How in the hell did the entire population of the universe manage to fit on Bender's boat?
  • Somehow in his travels, Bender managed to steal a TARDIS... and that was it. (Hey, someone had to say it.)
    • No, Bender IS a TARDIS, that's how he can store all that stuff inside himself, and that means Fry isn't a Time TRAVELER, he's a Time LORD, and . . . *opens WMG page*

Closet Logistics

• Bender's apartment/Fry's closet: Is Bender the only robot on the floor with a closet? From an architectural perspective, given the size of and how close together the "apartments" are, there's no way each one can have its own closet that size. There just isn't enough room.
  • Dimensionaly transcendental apartments.
  • Maybe only a few rooms have the huge closets. Bender rented out one of these to store all the stuff he steals.

Why Aren't Nibblonians Heavy?

• Wouldn't all the dark matter Nibbler and other Nibblonians produces make them too heavy to be lifted (as we've seen Leela do with Nibbler) or walk around without damaging footpaths or the building they're in? Even if they've just recently, uh, cleared their inventories, all that dark matter would slowly add up, making them heavier and heavier.
  • Nibblonians can eat themselves to escape the universe, come from the literal centre of the universe and predate the Big Bang by 17 years. Physics probably don't apply to them the same way it should, and dark matter only becomes heavy excreted because its existing in normal reality and not the weird state that is the Nibblonian colon.

Not Enough Planets

• Yivo stuck a genticle in every sentient being in the cosmos(except for robots). According to shkler, there are 20 quadrillion and one organic sentients in the whole universe circa the 31st century. There are over a billion trillion star systems-the number Yivo gives is absolutely tiny for even the near-lifeless void that is the universe
  • Since we (currently, in Real Life) can only estimate what percentage of those star systems have habitable planets, the plausible number is a very wide range, though 20 quadrillion does seem quite low.

Why Not New Year?

• Fry's tub was set for 1000 years, so surely it should have unfrozen him on 1st January 3000 instead of December 31st 2999?
  • Nope. Check it out
  • Fry wasn't frozen on 31st December, he was frozen in the first few seconds of 1st January 2000. So the OP was right if it's exactly 1000 years he should have woken up just past midnight on 1st January 3000. Whatever timekeeping method the freezer used must be imperfect and have lost a few hours over 1000 years, which is still pretty damn amazingly reliable for a clock.

Characters not using solutions

Divorce the Devil

• In the episode "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings", why didn't Leela just marry the Robot Devil and then divorce him? That way Fry could have kept the hands and he and Leela could have still been together.
  • She would have got a lousy divorce settlement. Hell has all the lawyers.
  • In the words of Anna Russell: "You can do anything in an opera as long as you sing it!" Leela couldn't improvise a verse describing her divorce.
    • Furthermore, wasn't Robosexual Marriage still illegal when that episode happened?
    • Why should the Devil care if something's illegal? Also, there might have been a fine-print clause that forbade her from divorcing him or something (Hell does have all the lawyers, after all).
  • On another topic: how could Leela understand the Devil's deal after she went deaf?
    • If you watch the scene carefully, the Robot Devil uses hand gestures to get his point across, and Leela says a few things that only make sense if she's following these rather than the actual words (paraphrased from memory - Devil: "OK, just the one hand." *Points to Leela's right hand* Leela: "You want my right hand?"). The DVD includes the first draft of the animation for that episode and the scene in question is a bit longer here making the joke more obvious, for example when the Devil points to his ears Leela misinterprets this as asking her to sit on his head.
  • On yet another topic: Fry got replacement hands in a matter of minutes on one occasion. Why couldn't Leela do the same thing for her hearing? And as another thing, she wouldn't immediately know she was deaf either after Bender's blast, or simply deafened briefly.
  • And on ANOTHER (similar) topic, what was the deal with the Robot Devil needing his hands back while Fry was playing at the opera? I know he wanted his hands back and that Fry needed them to play his opera, but why didn't they just make a deal that R.D. gets his hands back AFTER Fry's big performance to win Leela's heart, because wasn't that the entire reason he wanted robot hands in the first place? Plus, he'd already made numerous holophoner albums and performed publicly several times, so it's not like he hadn't accomplished anything else besides the opera. It's a fairly simple deal that neither Fry nor Robot Devil acted on.
    • Honestly that would have been more hilarious.
  Devil: I WANT MY HANDS BACK!
  Fry: Okay, but after the show. It's being recorded anyway so I only need to play it the once.
  Devil: Oh. Alright. But I still disagree with my portrayal in the opera!
  Fry: Pfftt, everyone is a critic.....
  • Maybe he just wanted to ruin the opera out of spite regarding how he was portrayed?

Just Shoot 'Em!

• When the Nudist aliens take over Earth, essentially three of them run the whole planet, and by the time the Earth ships return to take over, a number of space defenses have been set up. Fair enough, but earlier we see the aliens parting in New New York's spaceport as the citizens evacuate. Couldn't someone shot them there and then?

Why Not Close the Anomaly?

• If Yivo didn't want Shklir people contacting any other universe, why didn't Shkle just close the anomaly after the golden escalators were withdrawn?
  • Religion analogy? "Hey, enjoy Paradise... just don't eat the easily accessible apples."
  • Everyone was free to leave if they wanted to, and perhaps he couldn't open the rift again if it was closed.
    • Trust is the basis of every good relationship! If Shkle sealed the rift, it would be implying that Shkle didn't trust Shklir loved ones to be faithful.

Just Eat... Yourselves!?

• In Bender's Game, why don't the Nibblonians just eat their way out of their pens? Okay, sure, I guess if they just ate through the bars or something they'd just get recaptured - but it's not like they can't just eat themselves and escape to another universe.

Munching the Monster... or Not

• Why couldn't Nibbler just eat El Chupanibre (sp?)? We've seen him eat bigger, more ferocious monsters.
  • Heroic BSoD, of course.
  • Come to that, why didn't he simply devour the Nudist alien scammers from Bender's Big Score? He's already proven that he'll sacrifice one innocent person's life to save the universe, so why not three not-so-innocent ones?
    • Cannibalism taboo.

Why Not Quit?

• Why doesn't Kif just quit working for Zapp Brannigan? He obviously knows Amy, a rich girl, and couldn't he just ask for a job at the Planet Express?
  • Court order. DOoP reinstated him, and you don't argue with DOoP.
  • He's spineless. Literally and figuratively. We've already seen Zapp drag him back into service when they were abandoning the Planet Express ship.
  • Career ambitions? He doesn't work for Zapp, he works for DOOP. DOOP needs Kif to protect the universe from Zapp.
  • It does seem ripe for exploration, but the out-of-universe explanation is that Kif is at his funniest as an extremely tragic figure.

Building Bender Back

• Also in Rebirth, why does Bender have to be recreated using stem cells? Um isn't he a robot? Can't they just rebuild him?
  • Same reason human stem cells worked on a Decapodian. They're just that awesome.
  • I have a better question: why on earth would an explosion kill a robot who survived the vacuum of space and reentering the atmosphere? Furthermore, if this explosion can kill Bender, Fry would not have been able to protect Leela with simply his body. Both would have died, with not even a trace of their skeletons (which is another thing that bugged me).
  • Actually, that's a good point. I guess the writers wanted their first episode to be a Fry/Leela one, but having Bender survive and having the plot revolve around him would have more sense.

Eating Coworkers

• Why did Zoidberg, the arguably largest and definitely most destitute employee, not simply eat the others?
  • Perhaps they are saving that for sweeps.
  • You're from Omicron Persei 8... aren't you?
    • Of course not, we won't get Futurama for another 989 years, and my wife would kill me if she knew I was importing DVDs from The United States of Ear-... merica.
  • He considers them friends, like Nibbler does. Besides, Bender might beat him up if he ate Fry.
  • Same reason he doesn't catch and eat all those pesky owls who hang around like vermin. His crustacean instincts are those of a scavenging crab, not a predatory one. Remember how it was implied that he was eating Hermes' discarded body parts when Hermes started cybernetically upgrading himself, and how Zoidberg himself admits he'd considered doing so before he opted to re-build his friend bit by bit, instead.

Just Replace His Body

• In "Bendin' in the Wind," why couldn't they just remove Bender's hard drive like Morgan did in "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back" and put it into a new body? The latter episode shows that without a hard drive, a bending unit is basically a mindless drone, so putting Bender's hard drive into a new body, as demonstrated by the end of the episode, would solve the problem entirely. I mean, yeah, doing that would negate the entire point of the episode and we wouldn't get a funny cameo by Beck, but still.
  • They would still have to wait for a new Bending Unit to come in the mail before they could transfer Bender.
    • As "The Route of All Evil" shows, mail is very quick in the year 3000.
    • Mail, yes, but requisitioning a new Bending Unit Body for Bender, even if he still had insurance and it was valid in the event of giant can-opener accident, would take a long time and cost a lot. There'd be stacks of forms higher than a green snake could climb on a sugarcane stalk!
    • That was a terrible metaphor. However, I will accept it, being that it involved both green-snakes and sugar-cane.
    • And you're also all forgetting the crucial fact that ordering a new one would cost $30 dollars with a $10 mail-in rebate.
  • The same episode gives a reason; broken-down robots are mistreated or outright recycled, possibly because people can simply buy new ones to replace them for less money.

Just Stop at Fifty Million

• I know it's probably meant to be a Funny Moment, but in The Late Philip J Fry when the Professor had to make another "round trip", why didn't they just stop at Fifty Million? They had a backwards time machine, wouldn't it make more sense to just get it from there?
  • Because they realized by that point that they didn't need a backwards time machine. They could just stay put and use the time machine they had.
    • Not to mention they know from the limestone message they won't get back to the present.
    • But why didn't they do it for the second time around, then? Instead of restarting the universe for a second time?
    • Even if you've seen it once before, would you pass up a sight like the universe ending and being reborn?
  • Another question is why they didn't "give the time machine a chance to rest" at Fifty Million, but Bender probably wouldn't have let them anyway.

Why Not Use the Backwards Code?

• In "The Late Philip J. Fry," why didn't Bender use the backwards-only Time Code to return them to the year 3010? Though Bender's memory gets erased at one point in "Bender's Big Score," he re-learns the code when he takes the tattoo off Lars' butt and travels to put it on Fry's butt. (Granted, there's the problem of the doomed time duplicates, but the episode handily resolves that anyway.)
  • The time code may have been deleted from his memory sometime after that episode, in order to prevent him from tearing another hole in the Universe. He has never used it since then.

Alternative Solutions to Devil Hands

• Fry is described as having 'stupid fingers' in "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings" and advised to get robot hands so he could properly play the holophoner. However, in the episode "I Dated a Robot" after getting his hands eaten off by a cloned T-Rex he goes to a place called "Hands Crafters" and gets replacement hands. Why couldn't Fry go there to resolve his problem instead of traveling to Robot Hell? Or, why couldn't the Robot Devil go there instead of needlessly harassing Fry?
  • The first time the holophonor appears, Leela says something like "only 10 people in the Universe can play one of those, and they're not very good at it." Maybe he needed robot hands to be able to play it properly. Alternatively, Fry is an idiot and Bender is a sociopath, so I wouldn't have too much confidence in them finding the best solution. As for why the Robot Devil didn't just get replacements, he does say they're very good hands so maybe he just can't find any of that quality, or maybe he has some emotional attachment to them or feels resentment towards Fry for taking them. Or hell, he's the Robot Devil, needlessly harassing people is what he does.
  • It could be that Hands Crafters can only replace the hands as they were; say, cloning them from Fry's DNA; ergo, any hands Fry would've gotten from them would be the same as his old ones. Likewise, they may specialize in biological, rather than mechanical, hands, and thus couldn't have helped the Robot Devil.
    • Alternatively, the Robot Devil is so unique that none of his parts can be remade to similar quality?
    • So what about all his backup bodies? Which also bring up the question of why he didn't just download himself into one of those instead of using an elaborate scheme to get his hands back.
    • The back-ups are for when his body is destroyed. I doubt he'd commit pseudo-suicide just to get rid of the hands.
    • So why didn't he commit pseudo-self-mutilation and take the hands off one of his backup bodies, then take the handless body out of the sequence of replacements?

Why Not Leave Earth?

• Despite the Casual Interstellar Travel, each time a hazard befalls the Earth and only the Earth, (such as when cats stopped the planet from turning, or when all the water turned to alcohol), everyone sits around bemoaning it - even though they have a working spacecraft and could leave the planet to think about solutions at any time.
  • Because they're all idiots, it's funny, and in the last one they were all to plastered to figure it out.

Why Not Pretend to Be Aliens?

• Since Leela (somehow) lived in New New York under the charade that she was an alien up to the point where she discovered herself to be a mutant, then why don't other mutants pose as aliens as well? I mean it worked for Leela so it would work for them... unless they never thought of it. But it would be futile now that Mutants are now legal. Come to think of it, why would the New New Yorkians allow aliens to live among them and not mutants, some aliens are as grotesque as the mutants and yet a vicious alien like Morbo can hold a job as a anchorman.
  • They probably didn't think of it (the mutants are not presented as being particularly bright). And the reason humans might let aliens live among them and not mutants is because mutants are disenfranchised and weak, whereas horrible aliens have death fleets they can use to conquer the planet with. Remember when the Decapodeans did that because the people of Earth was going to execute Zoidberg? These are some of the nicer aliens.
  • Leela is the least-mutated mutant ever born. Even with one freakishly huge eye, she's very "human". And hot.
  • The adult sewer mutants are probably so heavily-imbued with the smell of sewage that they couldn't pull it off. Leela only managed to pass because she was taken out of the sewers as a newborn, before the stench could settle into her skin.

Just Have the Fish Cloned

• In the episode where Fry buys the last can of anchovies, why didn't he ask the Professor or someone to clone them?
  • Because Fry's an idiot.
    • Maybe Fry just didn't consider it an option. He had only recently come to the future so he might not have known it was possible.

The Garbage Ball

• In A Big Piece of Garbage, the people of New New York deal with the big ball of 20th century garbage by making another garbage ball and using it to bounce the other garbage ball into the sun. Which begs the question: why didn't the people of old New York just shoot their garbage ball directly into the sun to begin with?

Romance and sex

She Loves Him, She Loves Him Not

• Speaking of "The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings", what exactly happened between Fry and Leela between "The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings" and "Bender's Big Score"? It looked like Fry definitely won Leela's heart with that opera about her but by "Bender's Big Score" it looked like nothing happened between them and are "just friends"... EXPLAIN CONTINUITY, EXPLAIN!!!!
  • That's easy, but prepare for a VERY long explanation. I'm going to explain the whole Fry/Leela thing once and for all. Ok, "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings" was one of the four episodes meant to be the series finale before it kept getting revived over and over again. Now then, do you know why Unresolved Sexual Tension, Ship Tease, Just Friends, and the Will They or Won't They? tropes are so prevalent in long running sitcoms and cartoons? Three reasons. Number 1; the creators LIKE teasing the fans. Number 2; the creators like doing varied "romance subplot" episodes; they don't want to hook the main characters up permanently before creating a whole bunch of wacky romances for them. Number 3; they want to save the dramatic hookup of the Fan-Preferred Couple (aka Fry/Leela) for the last episode. Now, the problem with sitcoms like Futurama is that you never know when the execs might decide to cancel you. Or, they might never threaten/decide to cancel you, and you might go on forever (The Simpsons, for example). So, as a creator, you don't want to never get around to hooking Fry and Leela up and then suddenly get canceled. But, you don't want to take all the fun out of writing romance episodes (and teasing the fans) by hooking them up too early, and settling them in a boring-to-write relationship. This episode was made after they were canceled on Fox, and was supposed to be the Grand Finale in case they couldn't get picked up by another channel. So, you see the problem there? They needed to give fans the satisfaction of Fry and Leela getting together in case this was the last ever episode, but also needed to keep it vague in case the show got picked up. And it did, by Comedy Central. So, they had a new problem. At this point, it made NO sense for Leela to keep rejecting Fry, but they didn't want to settle them as an Official Couple for the rest of the show. So, that's where Lars comes in during "Bender's Big Score". He showed Leela Fry's immaturity, and gives her a reason to reject Fry... again. So now, with the series revived, they were able to keep the Ship Tease and Just Friends thing going. Annoying and it caused a big Romantic Plot Tumor until they finally started dating, as you know, but that's what they had to do. If you've read this far people, thank you. That should explain the whole argument of UST not just for Futurama, but for most sitcoms in general.

Fry and Leela Split Up?

• How come Leela and Fry were a couple in "Rebirth" and "In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela", but they go back to just being friends in "Attack of the Killer App"?
  • Fry needed his space after the events of In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela, being more than a little uncomfortable with Leela after what she was forced to do, presumably.

Fry and Leela's Status in Season 6

• In season six, are Fry and Leela together or not? It's been ambiguous, but "The Late Phillip J. Fry" seems to indicate that they are. But then in "That Darn Katz!", the very next episode, Leela laments to Nibbler about how she doesn't have a man.
  • It seems to vary depending on the episode. In context, you could construe it to mean that, at that moment, Fry was too busy having fun with Bender to pay attention to her.
  • Besides, Leela and Nibbler needed to be alone to have their heart-to-heart. They probably are together, we just aren't reminded of it every episode.
  • As of 'Ghost in the Machine', they're either not together or it's a casual/open relationship: Fry's always seen sleeping alone and Leela has no reaction to Fry saying he just had sex with Mrs Poopenmeyer.
    • The 31st century has done away with our crude sense of modesty. Maybe being rewarded with sex is considered standard protocol in New New York. That, or Fry's just making a joke.
  • They seem to be in an on-again, off-again relationship in season 6, Leela even mentions it being so in Overclockwise. They have a permanent relationship in season 7.

Human-on-Crab Action

• How did "Fryberg" and "Lellsworth"... you know...?
  • Butt stuff.
  • Zoidberg probably has a cloaca or something.
    • In Bender's Game (and another episode, I believe) Leela threatens to kick him in his cloaca so...
  • Better yet, how is Fryberg alive? Decapodians die after sex, and Fry looked very pleased with himself.
    • He said they die after passing on their genes. You can have sex without passing on your genes.
  • Perhaps they both have to be Decapodian?
    • Or maybe Leela was the "man". I kinda expect that from her.
  • Or maybe they just didn't go all the way.
  • I think we're better off not asking any questions.
  • On a somewhat-related note, I really hope Farnsworth and Zoidberg never found out that Fry and Leela... you know. I think they'd both be pretty grossed-out.

A Cyclops Scorned

• This one's been driving me crazy ever since I first saw the episode: In "Parasites Lost", why did Leela get so upset at Fry when he mentioned his previous relationship with Amy? I'm pretty sure she already knew they dated during that episode ("Put Your Head on my Shoulder"), and even if she didn't, why would she care at all who he used to date?
  • Obviously she knew they dated, and it's not the fact they dated she was mad about. It's just that a current/prospective girlfriend does not want to hear about previous girlfriends. It's an especially bad idea to talk about them when you're about to get it on with said prospective girlfriend. It probably totally killed the mood.

The Birds and the... Humans?

• Law and Oracle how can a person get married to birds?
  • Future marriage encompasses a lot of unusual combinations. Even ghost and horse!
    • But didn't the last human ghost die out centuries ago?
    • Who's to say the Encyclopod's birth didn't revive it? After all, it carried DNA from practically EVERY species, including many extinct ones. Also, nobody ever said that that ghost was a human's, did they?
    • No. That was only in Bender's uncle's castle. Human ghosts are presumably 'alive' elsewhere.

Out of character behaviour

Bender Can Cook for Once

• If Bender is such a horrendous chef, then how is it that he was able to bake a perfectly good cake for Nibbler in an earlier episode?
  • Baking a cake isn't hard. You just do what a book tells you to. Bender can't improvise and always tries to. That's why he can't cook. Alternatively, Rule of Funny
  • Plus Nibbler seems to eat almost anything.
    • Yes, and we've never seen Nibbler reject food of any kind at all. No one else, of any discerning taste, ever tries the cake. So we have no evidence that it was perfectly good at all. However, it did superficially look much better than the food he makes in "The 30% Iron Chef".
  • Alternatively, he's just gotten better with practice.
  • Baking is science, which Bender would understand, being a robot and all. Cooking is art.
  • In one of the comic book letter sections, the answer was that, like all professional chefs, Bender is awesome and terrible in turns at cooking.
  • You can be skilled at making one food and terrible at making another. Bender may just be awesome at cake-making but suck at everything else.

I Can't Sea the Reason

• In "My Three Suns", Zoidberg, a saltwater creature from a mud planet, spits out salt water along with the others. Why? Two episodes later, he even calls out Hermes for removing the salt water cooler.
  • There's more than one possibility of concentration for saltwater, you know. Maybe the water was too salty for Zoidberg, what seems very, VERY plausible, given that it is "salt with water in it", according to Bender's words. That's way more salt (per volume) than one would expect in the shore region of an ocean.
  • Everyone was doing it. He just wanted to be popular.
  • Not sure if it's mentioned or not but the salt could be iodized salt (table salt). That's completely different from the kind of salt found in ocean water. Iodized salt is bad for crustaceans and other salt water animals.

Hermes's Inconsistent Morals

• Hermes' entire willingness to almost murder everyone does not fit in with his saving of Bender as a child.
  • Hermes' willingness to kill people was a gag ... people other than Zoidberg anyway. Hermes came to the defense of the Crew - especially Bender! - when Morgan Procter put Bender's consciousness into the Master In Pile without begrudging anyone (Because when push comes to shove, you gotta do what you love - even if it's not a good idea!), not to mention his defense of the entire Earth during Bender's Big Score. Though Hermes maintains a fastidiously neutral facade, he's always had a good layer deep inside. Really deep.
    • He asks Leela to pick him up an application for a license to kill ("Weapons or bare hands?" "I don't know, what does piano wire count as?"). We've seen people born and die in the waiting line at the Central Bureaucracy. Sounds serious to me.
  • I'd go Chaotic Good, myself. Remember how long it took him to decide to not press the button in The Farnsworth Parabox?
  • no Hermes is definitely lawful(i would say lawful neutral with lawful stupid tendencies,) yes he would kill somebody but he would need a license first and would need to fill out the paperwork afterwards.
  • He'd certainly kill for a Manwich.

How is Fry Smart Enough to Be a Cop?

• In "Law and Oracle," Fry actually turns out to be a pretty good cop, despite being a complete idiot and incompetent delivery boy. Bwa? Is it that easy to be a police officer in New New York? Or is that just Rule of Funny at play?
  • You can be dumb in some aspects of life and good at others. Fry is more The Ditz than "moron", so maybe being a cop is what he's better at and he never got the chance until now.

Isn't That Incest?

• An entire subplot in "The Prisoner Of Benda" revolves around Leela, who has been transferred into Farnsworth's body, being upset that Fry isn't attracted to her, concluding that this means he only loves her for her body. It's supposed to be kind of absurd, but even with Rule of Funny in full swing it surprised me that no one pointed out that Farnsworth is Fry's direct/indirect descendant and is treated by Fry as a close family member, meaning that she's expecting Fry to be physically attracted to his social and biological relative—even if only to shoot it down with "It wouldn't be the first time."

Frenemies

• Why is Farnsworth so cruel to Zoidberg if Zoidberg and Farnsworth are supposed to be close friends and Zoidberg is supposed to kill Farnsworth when he turns into a Yeti Monster? Is this just a case of new season differences or what?
  • Professor Farnsworth's kind of a Jerkass.
  • Fry and Bender are close friends but that doesn't stop him being a dick to Fry.

To be sorted

Body exchange

• In "The Prisoner of Benda", Amy in Hermes's body got (understandably) disgusted to the point of losing her appetite after seeing Fry and Leela making out in Zoidberg's and Professor Farnsworth's bodies respectively in Elzar's restaurant. Later on, Hermes in Leela's body was able to work off the extra weight Amy put on that body when she was in it, and Amy!Hermes was able to work off Hermes' extra weight. When the Globetrotters came in and were able to get everyone switched back to their original bodies, we see in an overhead group shot that Hermes reverted to his former fat self again. Continuity error or did Hermes gain 60 pounds in 5 seconds?
  • One word, dude: Munchies.
  • Those Jack in the Box deep fried tacos are addicting man!

How Did the Date Work?

• In 'The Beast with a Billion Backs', when the universe (which I assume means every single sentient living thing in the universe) went on a date with Yivo, how could some of them do things like go to a restaurant or the movies (where there were clearly people working; at one point someone at the restaurant gives them another lamb chop to replace one that fell on the floor)? Shouldn't all the employees at those establishments be on the date too?
  • Robot employees, spluh!
  • Time zones. While one time zone is dating Yivo for the evening, the people a couple of time zones over commute to that zone and wait on the happy couples. Then they rush back home to get ready for their date with Yivo.

Misc

• In The Movie, how did Fry get that tattoo on his butt in the first place?
  • It's tough to tell what "in the first place" even means when you're in a Stable Time Loop.
  • It is it's own causality, it exist because Bender took it off Lars, and stuck it on Fry. Fry is in a similar deal himself, being his own grandfather.
  • This is known as an ontological paradox, in which a piece of information (the time code) is used to bring about its own existence. I.E., the characters know something because it came from the future, and it came from the future because the future versions of themselves know it, and the future versions of themselves know it because they know it in the past, which they do because oh no I've gone cross-eyed.
    • It's a paradox-correcting time code.
    • Yet even the time code has limits, hence the anomaly Bender causes after taking the code tattoo back in time. Besides, it would have been a more serious Grandfather paradox if Bender hadn't closed the time loop, since if he hadn't, the events of Bender's Big Score would have been logically impossible.

• In 'The Beast with a Billion Backs' where the heck where the Nibblonians?!
  • They hopped to a safer universe at the end of Bender's Big Score.

• In 'The Beast with a Billion Backs' where are the children? I know the writers didn't want kids to be in a movie with genitalia tentacles, but can anyone guess where they went?
  • They were all in daycare until things blew over.
  • For that matter, where are the sewer mutants?
    • In the sewer, just hiding.

• Why is everyone so completely clueless about the 20th century when countless people from that time, not just Fry, are still alive (and even running the country)?
  • Several people from the 1940's are still alive. Do you know what life was like in 1940? Besides WW2? Once the records were destroyed, they were probably just taken as unreliable eyewitnesses.
    • Yes, but if someone from the 1940's tried to tell you that they hunted mammoths (dude!), wouldn't that seem slightly odd?
  • Would you believe anything that Fry told you?
  • What kind of crazy anachronisms would the average 21st century person think up if they had to describe life in the year 1000? Worse, they aren't even aware how wrong they are. The writers simply extrapolated the average person's confusion about the Middle Ages and fast forwarded 1000 years.
  • Or Nixon? Especially after he squished some people on live TV?
  • Gotta love the "primitive robots" though.
  • Also makes you wonder why people don't believe Fry and Farnsworth when they say he's his uncle especially since they're hiring people to help unfrozen people from the past find their relatives.
    • I think the only time that happened was in the episode with the Slurm, and it was only because Fry told the government Farnsworth was "making up crazy stories again".
  • The inaccurate portrayals of 21st-century life are mostly in things like amusement parks and action movies, so it's possible that 31st-century historians actually do have a fairly good idea of what the 21st century was like, but most people just don't care and/or find the anachronistic version more fun.

• So in Beast with a Billion Backs, Yivo said that Shklir was alone, so what about Shklir Angels?
  • Shklir angels weren't sentient.

• So, how was Parallel Amy parallel?
  • She wears pink nail polish and a yellow jogging suit, spluh!
  • That and she had brown hair and tan skin.
    • And she was evil. And shallow...
    • She was not evil.
    • G'uh! D'uh!
  • She came from a parallel universe.
  • Apparently, she didn't flip coins to make major life decisions as much as some of the cast did.

• After the end of Into the Wild Green Yonder who's going to take care of Dwight and Cubert?
  • Aren't they on the ship at the end?
    • I don't think so, Morbo mentions that "there are no children here!" so it would be unlikely. Then again they could've been hiding on the ship the whole time anyway.

• The ending of Time Keeps On Slippin. Fry made a message saying "I LOVE YOU LEELA" using stars, with the O in LOVE being the star cluster that they originally constructed. How did they not see the message when they went there to plant the doomsday device? They should have at least been able to see the L or V.
  • Space is 3D. Their approach vector might have been at an angle that made the resulting constellation illegible.
  • Or they arrived at faster than the speed of light...
    • That's impossible, no one can go faster than the speed of light. That's why they changed it, remember?
  • Maybe they time skipped there.

• In Crimes Of The Hot, Bender states that he can get up off his back if he's slightly on his side. If that's true, why does Bender have to roll himself onto his stomach to get off his back later in the episode, rather than just roll himself slightly onto his side?
  • Bender has a hard enough time admitting his flaws. You don't think he'd make them look less severe if he had to?
    • He can't do that either.
  • He had to roll himself onto his stomach because that's how he gets up from being slightly on his side. So long as he's at least partway rolled over, he can continue to roll until he's face-down, then lift himself with his arms.

• In Beast with a Billion Backs, how did Fry's suit get into the electro-matter universe, and how did they expect the missile to get in, if only living or organic matter (I never was too clear on that point) could get through the barrier? Fry's suit I could get being some sort of biotech, but not the missile.
  • Keep in mind that when Farnsworth and Wernstrom discovered this fact and tried to warn Nixon, the President disregarded what they had said, and went straight to the military, instead.
  • Well, it was Zapp Brannigan launching the missile...
  • And Fry's suit didn't make it through safely: that's why his oxygen tank gave out, causing Fry to start asphyxiating.
  • The Professor said robots and electrical items couldn't go through. Something totally inanimate like a missile could travel through. If not the glass window they later used would fail.

• In Beast with a Billion Backs, Bender and the Robot Army of the Damned attack Yivo using blades whose edges are backed with electro-matter torn from a letter Fry sent back to Bender. As Yivo's universe is electro-matter and our universe isn't, plus the fact that electro-matter is impenetrable by regular matter, this is the only way they could. Fair enough. But how exactly did they get so many weapons? We only saw Fry send one letter without any implication that he sent more, yet there are enough scraps of it to arm the entire army with Yivo-injuring weaponry.
  • The very fact that they had enough electro-matter to make so many weapons implies that Fry sent many, many more letters.
    • Give that they were ageless and immortal, they could have been on Yivo for a very, very long time. (Though "The Late Phillip J. Fry" would seem to contradict that.)
  • The very fact that electro-matter is impenetrable by regular matter should make it impossible to tear up those letters into weapon blades in the first place.
    • It makes it impossible to cut it. It doesn't make it impossible to tear it. Think of the difference between cutting a pile of silk fibers or titanium wires in half as opposed to pulling the pile apart, to use an exaggerated example, since they were using what appeared to be paper.
    • Also, they could have cut the letters into pieces with other letters. Or, they could have cut a letter with itself, by folding it.

• Why did nobody mention that Star Trek was banned until that one episode, when they mentioned it in practically every other episode?
  • There were actually very few direct references to Star Trek in the series (as in characters actually mentioning the show, not just homages). Fry mentions it in the first episode just after being unfrozen and then gets hit over the head by a closing door - you could interpret this as deliberately giving a mild punishment, but either way it makes sense that someone who has just woken up from a 1,000 year sleep would not be expected to know all the laws of the future and so they would be lenient - and later in that episode, Leonard Nimoy goes out of his way to avoid mentioning Star Trek by name. Most other references to the show took place amongst Planet Express employees in their own building so they would probably be safe there.
  • The one case that does seem problematic was "That's Lobstertainment" where Star Trek: The Pepsi Generation was up for an award. Maybe it was the unrelated show Start Wreck.
  • In "Brannigan, Begin Again," Hermes compare the DOOP to "the Federation, from your Star Trek program."
  • In the first episode, Fry tells Nimoy's head to do the Vulcan salute. Nimoy just replies, "I don't do that anymore".
    • He didn't say 'do the Vulcan salute', he said 'Do the thing!' and held his hand up with the four-fingered version.
  • If you take it as a given that only TOS is banned a lot of questions about this are cleared up. Because "Generations" and possibly the 2009 film are ok there could still be Kirk vs Picard debates on the internet, references that seem to reference TOS could instead reference the continuity of the new film, and Star Trek: The Pepsi Generation could just be another in a long line of Star Trek properties that are fine as long as TOS isn't aired.

• In "Where No Fan Has Gone Before", why was it just The Original Series that got banned for being too popular? Surely The Next Generation" was just as good (if not better)?
  • Slightly less frenzied fans. Slightly.
    • But aside from seeing Jonathan Frakes' head, there was no acknowledgement of it whatsoever.
    • That and the Kirk vs Picard chat room.
    • Equally, if Star Trek is punishable by death, why is there a Star Trek chat room?
    • Death Row?

• In "Bender's Big Score" why doesn't Bender go back 19 minutes for the bathroom instead of 19 seconds, creating a duplicate?

• In 'Anthology of Interest I', Leela is shown to be a part of the Planet Express crew during the 'What if Bender was really giant?' story. This seems confusing since Fry and Bender don't seem to be part of the crew, so why would Leela not still be working at Applied Cryogenics? Similarly, both she and Bender are shown with The Professor and Zoidberg in the 'What if I never fell into that freezer-doodle and came to the future-jiggy' story, which is odd since presumably if they hadn't met Fry due to his non-freezer-doodlification, she'd still be in her old job and he'd have successfully used the Suicide Booth...
  • Leela wasn't happy. She wanted to run away from her old job, all she needed was someone—or heck, something—to show her that. Also, Bender, as a robot, is inordinately difficult to kill. Or maybe Mom doesn't let her robots get destroyed. Or some other random person mad Bender angry, got him electrocuted, and bam. Fry just stopped that person from meeting Bender by taking his/her place on the tube.
  • Plus, unless I'm misremembering the episode, the stories were just that. Stories.

• In Rebirth, how was Fry resurrected, when he was dumped into the stew before the Final Ingredient (a fly) was added?
  • Likely because his remnants were still in the gene-pool after the formula was completed.

• We all know that Fry is his own grandfather because of what happened in "Roswell That Ends Well" but in the past his grandfather (at least who his grandmother told him his grandfather was) was named "Enos", this throws off the whole family tradition in the Fry family of naming your first-born-son "Yancy" which Fry's father said dates back to the American revolution "Your name is Yancy, like my name and my father's and his father's, all the way back to Minute-man Yancy Fry". One could argue that Fry conceived his mother in the past except that at one point in "Roswell That Ends Well" Fry yells something along the lines of "Everything's Gonna Be Alright Dad!" at Enos's crotch, though it might not be too far-fetched for Fry to get his Grandparents mixed-up.
  • No, because Fry's dad specifically said that he was named Yancy just like his grandfather (or his father's father, I forget), and his father, all the way back to minute-man Yancy Fry. I noticed that and thought it was weird that he skipped his own father until seeing Roswell That Ends Well.
  • It could also be reasoned that Enos had an older brother named Yancy.
  • Or Mildred simply married a man called Yancy Fry to cover up her unwed pregnancy.
  • Or maybe Enos' first name is Yancy and he just prefers to go by his middle name.
  • Actually, Enos has the same hair color as Fry's mom, which might mean that Enos is from Fry's mom's side of the family. However, he has been referred to as Enos Fry, when he should have been Enos Gleisner.
    • Enos could just be an Identical Stranger. Orange hair isn't that rare
  • Or maybe it's referring to Mildred's father, and Fry's dad is illegitimate.
    • He'd have to be a bastard since Mildred wasn't married to Fry.
  • Fry to my knowledge never said he met his father's "father." Enos was shown to be a homosexual with Mildred's leanings to him being apparently one-sided. It's easy to see that Fry's father only knew the man Mildred married (perhaps she did so her child could have two parents) as father. The above guess that Mildred married another member of the Fry clan is solid enough.

• So pigeons have been replaced by owls, but a pigeon picked up hologram Hermes in the episode on Chapek 9?
  • Rodentia have been replaced by Owls. Pigeons don't live in mouseholes.
  • Pigeons are basically flying rats. You don't see rats running about on the streets of Old New York.

• The fact that the Fry, Bender, and Professor of the third (shown) Universe are killed off like they're not even people. That, and that the Leela we've come to know since the beginning of the series grew up miserable and died. Sure, everything will seem the same, but aside from the 3 time travelers these are an entirely new Planet Express Crew.
  • By that logic, we should've felt ubersad every time a time-paradox duplicate was killed in Bender's Big Score. This might be an entirely new crew, but they're exactly like the previous ones except their universe is 10 feet lower and 5 feet to the right. Also, all of existence ended TWICE. Do they not matter just because they weren't shown suffering?
    • Bender's Big Score had the same problem. It's too bad, because the show averted What Measure Is A Me so nicely in "Rebirth".
  • Twice? For all we know, the universe died and remade itself an infinite number of times before the series. Judging by how Bender nonchalantly said they need to go around again, it will probably keep ending and remaking itself for more infinity.
  • They pretty much had to get rid of the other three, and I certainly prefer that they made a joke about it rather than just having them get into the time machine and have the other guys take their place.
  • I thought of this very same thing, but I assumed that the time machine did not anytime to move forward to so it was schunted to the beginning and it is still the same universe.
    • If that's true there would be a massive paradox seeing as how they crushed themselves.
    • The Time Code was worked into the forward-only time machine. The only difference is, Professor Farnsworth didn't have it memorized perfectly, and so changed one digit: now the forms from that world die instead of the duplicates.

• Another question about The Late Phillip J. Fry (a damn fine episode though it was): when the universe ended, what happened to God◊?
  • Either that God is mortal like the rest of the universe. Or, God is the reason why the universe remakes itself after ending (and they just didn't see God during the vast emptiness since God is so far away).
    • Or it's not God, but the remains of a computerised space probe that collided with God.
    • That seems probable.

• In The Late Phillip J. Fry, how did the time machine survive the Universe being destroyed? Wouldn't it have been destroyed with the Universe? Also, the characters were first going to stop at a second universe, but had to go to a third. If that is true, then where are the second universe's versions of themselves that are stuck in the time machine?
  • It survived because it was outside of time, Universe 2 versions probably merged with the Universe 1 people.
  • The Universe 2 characters presumably went through the same arc as the Universe 1 characters and took the place of their duplicates from Universe 4.
    • By that logic, the time machine two universes before the main one would have appeared and/or crushed the main cast.
    • Not if they were killed before they had the chance to do so. Think about it, the time machine from Universe 3 can't crush the inhabitants of Universe 5 because the Universe 1 guys killed them, similarly the Universe 4 cast die before they can reach the Universe 6 cast. But this leaves the crews from Universes 5 and 6 alive to continue the cycle. You get a pattern of (Jump 2, Jump 2, Die, Die), and if we extend this backwards then the crew from Universe -1 can't appear in Universe 1 because they were killed by their duplicates from Universe -3.
  • See below. Farnsworth killed Hitler in the reality of which you speak. Clearly this had some sort of butterfly effect, stopping the Planet Express Crew from existing. Though, yes, the skipping also works and relies a little less on Fridge Logic/Brilliance.
    • Except we saw the team in brief clips in the timeline where Farnsworth killed Hitler.

• Just one more comment about "The Late Phillip J. Fry." Am I the only who finds the ending of that episode horrifying? Keep in mind that Leela, the Leela Fry loved, the Leela that we've been watching for the last five (or six) seasons? That Leela is dead. Really, actually dead, most likely alone and having never found love again (though Nibbler probably would still have been with her). Fry hooks up with a Leela at the end, but even if they're identical, when you get down to it she's just a Doppelgänger Replacement Love Interest, and the Fry she loved is also dead. After seeing that ending, pretty much every other episode of the series becomes really creepy, since you know what has/is going to happen to these characters.
  • While I don't have anything regarding the Doppelgänger Replacement Love Interest thing save the MST3K Mantra, it's pretty obvious that the original Leela didn't turn out that badly. The only reason she was miserable during the scenes we see was because she was still angry at Fry because (in her POV) he died as a direct result of being a jerk(standing her up to go to Hedonism-bot's ill-fated bachelor party. When she realized that wasn't the case, she was able to look back and realize that the time she had with Fry was a great one overall, and she was finally able to truly move on. If I remember the years given correctly, she was only about 80 or 90 in her last scene, so she still had plenty of time to live in, she was filthy rich from owning a wildly successful Planet Express, and, believe it or not, it is possible to be happy without a significant other. So yeah, Fry or no Fry, the original Leela likely turned out fine after Writing Back To The Future.
  • That doesn't mean she still didn't miss Fry. She loved Fry. True, she could have turned out fine but that doesn't take away that pain of losing someone that she was in love with.
  • All the main characters have died, come back, and lived alternate lives so many times now that there's no point worrying who the "original" Leela and Fry are. The events of any one episode, especially a time travel/alternate universe episode, should be viewed as one of many possible ways the characters' lives could play out.
    • Actually, they all clearly lived the exact same life.
  • I like to think that when someone in the Futurama universe dies, they are reincarnated as their counterpart in the next universe, meaning that technically the characters are all the same. This doesn't entirely work out for Bender, Fry, and Farnsworth, though. But also, since they traveled outside of the universe and into the next, the universe shouldn't have had enough matter left in it to recreate Fry, Bender, and Farnsworth at all. This could be Hand Waved by saying that there's two men and a robot somewhere who are missing from the universe. That means that they could actually be reincarnated as Fry, Bender, and Farnsworth in the next universe (taking on their respective personalities as well), killed, and then become themselves again in the next one. Going by this, that means no one really died.

• A Headscratcher not based off the multiple universe thing-the forwards time-machine stops one billion years into the future, where the planet is a desert and all life is extinct. If so, how are Fry and Farnsworth not being scorched alive when they get out of the Forwards Time Machine? If all life on the planet is dead, then its definitely not okay to land there.
  • According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future at 1.1 billion years in the future (close enough to 1 billion), the average temperature of the Earth will be 47 C/116 F. Assuming that the Earth's orbit has not been additionally altered from "Crimes of the Hot", the temperature would probably be a bit below that. Not comfortable, but not immediately scorched. A bigger problem would be the lack of oxygen due to it being lost from the atmosphere. Presumably explained by one of the Professor's inventions. Such as the underwater breathing invention in "The Deep South". Additionally there would be an issue with UV rays due to the lack of an ozone layer, but I'd put that down to not immediately lethal.

• Also in the first X-mas episode they say pine trees are extinct yet pine trees have been seen throughout the episode
  • I think those were hinted to be artificial, though it doesn't explain why they couldn't get an artificial pine tree instead of a palm tree.
    • It's their tradition and culture, a palm tree is their X-mas tree just like nowadays a pine tree is ours and anyone who uses a palm tree would be crazy or possibly referencing Futurama. The reason they do change over to a pine tree for X-mas is because Fry says he wants one.
  • Pine trees are extinct. Those are spruces.

• Okay, the episode where Bender and Amy get together. Everybody except the Professor support the relationship. Did they all forget about Electro-Gonorrhea, the Noisy Killer?
  • It would have complicated things. The point of the episode was that people who oppose non-traditional relationships have silly and indefensible reasons for doing so. Introducing a valid concern like sexually transmitted disease would have made the debate too nuanced for the episode to work as written. But yeah, it would have been a great callback.
  • And remember, Farnsworth was the only one who wanted to screen "Electro-Gonorrhea, the Noisy Killer." None of the others reacted to the idea. It's possible that electro-gonorrhea is an outdated or overstated sexual risk that only a prude like Farnsworth would worry about. The film he did screen during Fry's Lucy Liu-bot phase certainly didn't seem up to date.
  • Considering the sexual history of the two characters involved, Electro-Gonorrhea might be the least of their concerns.
  • They all acknowledge that the films are propaganda pieces - why would 'electro-gonorrhea" be any different? But even if such a disease did actually exist and it was as lethal as claimed by Farnsworth, they would probably have gotten checked or otherwise used some form of protection - just like most normal sex-fiends.

• The episode where Zoidberg eats the Earth flag always bugged me. It's obviously supposed to be an allegory for flag-burning, but shouldn't Zoidberg's act be considered an act of vandalism, not treason? I mean, if I went up to a courthouse and burned its flag, I should rightly be arrested for vandalism. It wouldn't be an issue of freedom like its presented as in the show.
  • It's just because it's Freedom Day, where you're supposed to be able to get away with stuff like vandalism. On an ordinary day Zoidberg would get beaten with lightsabers for eating something he didn't own, sure. And that probably is part of an ordinary day for Zoidberg. But on Freedom Day, to punish him for it suggests that it's a special kind of evil, so the allegory holds.
    • If people are supposed to be able to do anything they want on Freedom Day, shouldn't they be able to beat Zoidberg with lightsabers for doing something they didn't like?
    • It's the principle of the thing. Freedom Day is supposed to be about doing whatever you want without any consequences whatsoever. Presumably you're not supposed to, either by custom or law, take retribution for being wronged (short of things like rape, murder, etc.). If you can beat someone for eating the flag, then hey, why not hit someone for doing any of the things Bender did? Pretty soon, you're right back to a normal day which defeats the purpose.
    • The whole point of the Freedom Day episode was to make fun of how Americans use the word "freedom" all the time without really having a stable definition of what it means. Basically, the Earthican government is saying "You're perfectly free to be beaten with lightsabers if you do anything unpatriotic."
  • It shouldn't be that hard to understand. Waving a flag is symbolic of national loyalty. Eating or otherwise desecrating the flag is a symbolic act of disloyalty, therefore (according to such a mindset) it counts as evidence of treason, aka disloyalty to one's country. The whole episode was a dig at nationalism masquerading as a respect for liberal values.

• In the episode where Nixon gets Bender's body and runs for president, Scoop Chang says he can't run for president since he already was elected twice. Um, Nixon was president of the USA, not Earth. USA ≠ Earth!
  • The Earth government seems to have evolved from the US government, note that the White House is the seat of government and they mention senators and congressmen.
  • Not to mention the word "Earthican", and also the flag (which has Earth in place of the Stars, where the Stars represented each State in the Union. Logically, this means the entire Earth was eventually conquered by, or otherwise acquired Statehood within, the United States.)
  • He was elected twice in the intervening one thousand years.
    • And I thought people in the 31st century were idiots...

• So when our universe went through the second and third Big Bang, did Yivo's too?
  • Presumably, but according to the sped-up events we see from inside the time machine, things appear to have happened as exactly in Yivo's universe as it did in "ours", so the end result would be a negligible difference (aside from Yivo's universe also possibly being 10 feet lower).
  • I guess the question I was trying to get at was "does the Big Bang cover all existence and not Futurama's main universe?" I suppose that scene answers that question, at least in Yivo's case.
  • It's been ten duodecillion years since Yivo last contacted Universe Gamma. What makes you think sklee remembers it at this point? The only proof of its existence would've had all her protons decay, after all.

• How can Zoidberg attach Fry's head to Amy's body in a way that keeps him alive? We can't even do that today, and Zoidberg is at most as competent as the Middle Ages physicians who suggest bloodletting when it comes to being a doctor.
  • Actually... it was done with dogs in the 1950s. Head Transplant. Warning; probably high Squick factor. Presumably the procedure has been simplified in the interfening thousand years to the point where even a hack-quack like Zoidberg could manage it.
  • Just because we can't do that today does not mean the far off year of 3000 has not invented such a technology. Also, Zoidberg may have next to no knowledge of human anatomy, but he is competent enough to reattach anything severed to a body, even if he doesn't do it right. The future probably has some neat tech that makes it fairly easy.
    • So what, does he have a "How to sew a head on someone" instruction sheet? If so, why don't they just give Zoidy an instruction sheet on the human body?
  • Because he'd put it upside down
  • He saw it done in a commercial.
  • As seen in "Bender's Big Score", heads are a lot more resilient in the year 3000, able to survive and remain functional without a body for long periods. We also see that Zoidberg can re-attach Hermes' head in that episode using some goop, and the head remains functional despite being put on backwards. Maybe the goop mimics the head-preserving effect of the head jar, and was also what was used to attach Fry's head?

• How do we know that Fry is his own grandpa? I doubt they ever did any sort of paternity (or grand-paternity?) test to see if it was true, since they assumed it right away. He could still be Enos's grandson for all we know. Or should we assume that being your own grandfather the only thing effed up enough to make you lack the delta brainwave?
  • Because the show tells us time and time again that Fry is his own grandfather, and evidence supports this (at present). Maybe they'll roll around with a new episode contradicting this story at some point, but it's a pretty big staple of the show's story. I wouldn't expect them to treat it lightly.
  • The Nibblonians seemed convinced that Fry was his own grandfather, and they are portrayed as nigh-omniscient. Also, Fry is apparently the only sentient being ever in the Universe to lack a delta brainwave so whatever caused it has to be insanely rare.
    • Not necessarily the only sentient being ever - remember that Fry's father is also his own grandfather.
    • The lack of a Delta brain wave is probably a genetic, instead of a direct consequence of being your own grandfather. And maybe the gene skips a generation?
  • Kindly explain how Enos impregnated Fry's grandmother after being vaporized in a nuclear explosion.
    • She could have already been pregnant without knowing it. Fry slept with her within hours of Enos' death. The absence of the delta brainwave and other evidence supports Fry's paternity, but it's still odd that the Professor jumped straight to the more bizarre conclusion with seemingly no awareness of said evidence. Well, maybe not odd for the Professor.
  • If Enos was Fry's grandfather, the What If where Fry didn't fall in the tube wouldn't end with the universe imploding.
• In the episode "Fear Of A Bot Planet", it makes sense that the Robot Elders would stir up anti-human sentiment amongst the robots of Chapek 9 in order to distract them from their real problems. What's less clear is why they feel the need to conceal their intent to kill Fry and Leela from the public (who are instead led to believe that they've been sentenced to a lifetime of robot-style labour), when the planet is filled with posters, movies and other such campaigns explicitly calling for human slaughter.
  • The elders are idiots.
    • SILENCE! You are exactly right.

• Why did the group rush to buy a Mom product knowing that she's evil?
  • Same reason people do it with morally suspect corporations in real life. Its the only, best, or cheapest product of its kind on the market.

• In "Bender's Big Score", Bender go back in time to steal Hermes' body. However, the only way to bring it back was to wait in the cave with the body. Wouldn't it have rotted?
  • I didn't get what you meant at first, but not necessarily. Maybe Bender drugged him and let him sleep down there, THEN removed his head just in time to bring it up to the building.
  • There's a larger problem: how was Hermes copied, if he didn't go along with Bender back in time? Bender's killing him should have rippled to the present.
    • Perhaps Bender went back in time, grabbed Hermes, took him back in time again, and then decapitated the copy that resulted. That way, Hermes could be killed and could survive at the same time, creating the paradox that was resolved rather messily at Lars' and Leela's wedding.
    • It's supposed to be paradox-proof; that's why stealing world artifacts hasn't caused a ripple effect either.
  • Wouldn't it just be easier for Hermes to get Bender to stop his past self having his head sliced off? All Bender has to do is go back and tell Hermes in secret not to limbo underneath a sabre, and that way he doesn't end up making a paradox duplicate with either of them.

• During the demo derby in Bender's Game, why did they make George Takei's ship look like the NX-01 Enterprise and Scott Bakula's ship look like the TOS-Era Enterprise instead of the other way around?

• So in the year 5 million humanity is split into two different species but in the year 10 million the people look like modern humans again?
  • That bothered me too. The best I can come up with is that in the intervening 5 million years, the people of the world idolized the human race before the "split" (much as Renaissance Era people idolized the Greeks and Romans, I suppose), and technologically engineered themselves to once again resemble humans from our time.
  • There's plenty of other options, such as off worlders recolonizing or the "split species" was just a regionalized thing.

• My question about "Bendin' In The Wind" is this: What was the big deal if Bender could move? I understand it would look like he was a liar, but he raised the money for OTHER broken robots, not himself, so why would they take the check back? Even if he was lying, the cause remained the same. Also, why did he apologize to Beck for lying? He didn't lie. He WAS paralyzed when they met. Even arguing that Beck couldn't verify that (though they met in the hospital where he was very obviously injured), why would Bender cop to lying? He DIDN'T, he merely didn't confess he'd gotten better the moment it happened, but that had nothing to do with his cause. He WAS a broken robot that realized broken robots could be useful.
  • He DID try to steal the check at the end...
  • I was wondering about this too. If someone is an activist for a charitable cause, being directly affected by that cause is certainly no prerequisite for getting involved. That's the whole point of charity!
  • Bender thought that people would have a problem with him being able to move. Everyone else had a problem with Bender because they thought he pretended to be disabled to gain fame. This would have been avoided if only Bender explained his situation.
  • It was because Bender's concert rested on the story of him being a successful musician despite his broken state, which sends an example to other broken robots. If he's not broken, it looks like he was lying simply to gain undeserved show attention or even to scam them, thereby undermining his own cause to empower broken robots. The problem is that Bender hurts his own case by stealing the cheque once he's found out.

• In Lrrreconcirable Ndndifferences, everybody pronounces Ndnd's name differently than it had been pronounced throughout the pre-movies series; everyone puts brief pauses between the Ns and Ds, rather than just letting the name flow. Ndnd was my favorite Futurama character name but I don't like it nearly as much when pronounced the way it is in that episode.

• In one of the early episodes ("A Fishful of Dollars"), it turns out that due to 1000 years of compound interest on the 93 cents in Fry's checking account he has amassed $4.3 billion. Other people from the past have been unfrozen from the cryogenics lab; even if they weren't frozen for so long, they'd still have the potential to increase their wealth in the meantime if their bank accounts remained. So why aren't there other people who have similarly discovered previously unanticipated fortunes in their possession? Or if there are, why hasn't the local economy adjusted in response to this, preventing Fry's brief fortune?
  • Because they all squander it nigh-instantly on insanely rare and expensive nostalgic mementos of their bygone era.
  • The economy would only adjust if a large number of people became billionaires through cryogenics. My WMG was that sometime after Fry's freezing an anti-cryogenics movement sprung up and made a lot of bad press for the cryogenics lab. Debates were deadlocked until Congress came up with the compromise that they would outlaw any future freezings but allow the few people already frozen to run out their timers as planned. The only purpose of the cryogenics lab is to help people who unfreeze in the Future acclimatize to the 31st century, and once they all unfreeze the lab will be mothballed.
  • One word: inflation. Yes, 93 cents at 2.25 percent interest for 1000 years is $4.3 billion... in year 2000 dollars. But after a thousand years of the dollar being devalued due to inflation, Fry's $4.3 billion would probably be worth about 40 cents in "today's" money. You can't just invest money for a long time and watch the interest pile up; your return rate has to beat the inflation rate. It could be done, but not with a simple interest-paying savings account like Fry would have.
    • Actually, it would be about 67 billion dollars subjected to inflation if you use the "pert" formula. Fry having 4.3 billion dollars is a sign of inflation, though as you mentioned not as much inflation that should have happened.
  • Also, Fry was a bit of a special case. Anybody who would be frozen long enough for a significant amount of interest to pile up would have been rich enough already to afford to be frozen that long.
  • Not to mention that the economy could manage so long as it was a sufficiently rare event. Perhaps most of those who were frozen before 3000 and after setting an account awoke to find that their banks had collapsed in the meantime.
  • Fry was frozen accidentally, and thus his assets ($.93) remained in his name. For most of those frozen at Applied Cryogenics, part of the terms of being frozen is turning over all assets to A.C. to cover the energy, upkeep and personnel for the next few centuries. Thus, most folks don't have bank accounts to wake up to.
  • I've always assumed that should cryogenics become common-place, at some point one of the heirs to those frozen would go to court to have the frozen declared legally dead, and all of their assets transferred to their heirs. And the assets of those without heirs going to the state. (With the frozen being allowed, at best, a trust to pay for the cost of their care.) Fry presumably escaped that fate because a) he was never legally declared frozen/dead on account of the irregularities of his freezing and his assets weren't seized or b) the initial 93 cents was considered so tiny that it escaped being seized or frozen due to account inactivity, and subsequently ended up being forgotten about until he awoke and checked his account.

• The Eyeless Universe in the Farnsworth Parabox should by all accounts have no concept of sight.
  • Maybe they evolved to use sonar like the bats, and call this sense "sight".
  • Or that it's a universe where a recent disaster made everyone eyeless, so they are familiar with the concept, because they had it once.
    • The problem with that one is that they say "ever".
    • If the event that removed everyone's eyes happened before they were born (and was somehow genetically inheritable) then it would still be true that they never saw anything ever, yet they would still know of the concept from history.
  • Isn't that exactly the entire joke? It's a "that doesn't make any sense" joke (whatever we call those around here). Heck, why would there even be a Planet Express crew?
  • The first response to this mentions bats using sonar. As humans we understand senses like that even if we don't biologically have them. In the eyeless universe maybe cats and dogs have eyes so the human crew are familiar with the concept of seeing, even though they can't?
  • Maybe it isn't an Eyeless Universe, but simply one where the Planet Express crew was born without eyes. When they said "we don't see EVER", this could just be referring to them instead of all humanity. We don't see anyone else to prove this.
  • Possibly whichever alien species don't have eyes in Universes A & 1 do have them in the "we don't see EVER" one, and vice versa. So they'd have heard such aliens' stories about a strange sense called "seeing", they just can't do it themselves.

• Okay, so in "The Series Has Landed", Amy is introduced for the first time as Planet Express's intern and one of Professor Farnsworth's engineering students. But in "Mars University", Farnsworth teaches only one class, "The Mathematics of Quantum Neutrino Fields" — and he made up the name "so that no student would dare take it." Continuity Snarl?
  • The class he taught was apparently a first-year undergraduate module since Fry was able to take it, Amy is (or was until she graduated recently) a Ph.D. student. Amy would have been performing research under the Professor's supervision rather than attending this sort of class.

• In the episode with Bender and Amy getting 'married', the episode starts out with Bender 'graffiti-tiling' everything, and then, after the one time Bender tiles the Proposition Infinity onto the cop bot, the whole side plot gets dropped... WHAT the HELL?
  • It was never a sideplot. More of a Red Herring Twist. Matt Groening does this a lot, where an episode will start out with a certain plot device, then suddenly pull a massive left turn into something completely different. I can't think of a single episode of The Simpsons that didn't follow this formula.
    • It was more of a Lead In.

• In the worms episode where the holophoner first shows up, Leela says "Only a few people in the universe can play one of those! And they're not very good at it!", indicating that it's a very rare instrument that's incredibly hard to play, which is why it's so amazing that Fry can play it so well, which is all well and good. But then the next time it shows up, there's a class teaching children how to play it in New New York, and it's apparently cheap enough (and has a low enough entry requirement) that Fry can get in, which implies (at least to me) that this is now a relatively widespread instrument like the guitar or saxophone or something. So what's the deal with that? Is this the only class in the universe that teaches it, or has it suddenly taken off in popularity since Fry had worms?
  • ...Yes?
  • There wasn't any change in the instrument's popularity or quantity. It's simply a situation whereby numerous people (incorrectly) consider themselves as having a decent chance of becoming a master player. This isn't terribly uncommon; it's related to the Dunning-Kruger effect, and also to the popularity of lotteries, which only have a few winners and (given how often the winnings are squandered), "even they're not very good at it". Also, so long as folks are willing to shell out money for holophoner lessons, at least one teacher or two isn't going to care much about entry requirements. Finally, of course, it's possible that Leela was exaggerating (or repeating an exaggeration she heard and believed).
  • Most of the people who learn it probably aim for a baseline level of competence/mediocrity where they can play some simple tunes on it but not much more than that (like the crude cartoons that Fry produces at the end of "The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings" when he's lost his amazing abilities with it). People who learn the holophoner probably aren't aiming to or expecting to become genius-level wunderkinds with it, they're just looking for some basic ability with it. As for the rareness of the instrument itself, similarly there are presumably some incredibly rare high-end instruments out there, but the vast majority are just cheap basic models that get the job done but aren't exactly the greatest out there. Like the difference between a Fazioli F308 Grand Piano and a cheap Casio electronic keyboard.

• At the end of "The Farnsworth Parabox", they've somehow gotten each universe inside itself rather than the other one. Putting aside the total Mind Screw of trying to figure out the topology of that switcheroo, what I'm wondering is: What would happen if you opened the box and stepped inside? (Prior to this switch, you fell out of and "up from" the box in the parallel universe, making them work as "doors", but this time it should somehow be a portal to… itself? Aggh…)
  • Theoretically, the portals should have folded so that the "open" sides faced each other, instead of out into their universes (assuming the tension snapped the portals in place instead of requiring enough space that the Farnsworths could remove their fingers from the edges). Topographically and in practice, the result was virtually (and probably completely) impossible. It's remotely plausible that the universe was inside-out in the box, and that the z-axis was aligned with the external z-axis (which makes sense), but the team obviously fudged the reality around the boxes. If you watch closely, there's an animation blip around the boxes while they are pulled through each other, which means that even the writing and animation team (including David X. Cohen, who wrote and proved a new mathematical theorem just for an episode that didn't actually need the answer shown on-screen) wasn't able to figure out how to get it to work.
  • Basically, if you jump in, after a pause you jump out again.
  • What if you shoved a really long log in almost as thick as the box itself.

• Is anyone else bothered by that fact Leela didn't seem to give a crap about how her parents and the other mutants were forced live until the episode, "The Mutants Are Revolting." AKA, the episode where it became her problem. IMHO, it makes her motivation seem less like, "I'm freeing these oppressed people and fighting for them because it's the right thing to do." and more like, "I'm freeing these oppressed people and fighting for them because there's no way I'm living in a shithole like them."
  • Her parents, and the other mutants, seemed pretty okay with it, possibly because they hadn't known any other life and were more or less used to it. Sure, they know on some level that they're getting the raw deal, but they've learned to live with it. Leela, who's seen and experienced the good life on the surface, is the only one among them that really understands just how bad it is by comparison. Plus, up until then, she hadn't been directly exposed to how aristocrats like Mrs. Astor viewed mutants, so the freedom thing was as much about that as it was about their general oppression.
    • No, her parents knew what it was like to be non-mutants. Her mother had a degree in xenolinguistics, remember?
    • We don't know how she got it; could've been a correspondence course she took from home, or at that university in the sewers that's brought up in this episode.
    • Also, Leela lived down in the sewers before, in "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles". That episode implied she was living there for days without complaining once about the living conditions. (Except maybe that she couldn't have any beer until she finished her tequila.)
    • And that whole time she was indulging in the normal(ish) childhood that she didn't have when she was a kid. She didn't have to go down to the sewers, that was her choice, while in the latter case she was forced down there. Plus, in that episode, she knew, if only in the back of her mind, that it was a temporary thing, while in the more recent episode it was supposed to be permanent.
    • Original poster: One of the things that bugs me about Leela never once complained about the suffering of once before this episode, not even trying to find an online protest group or something, but once she has to suffer through this, she resorts to what could easily be classified as terrorism.
    • Leela's always been at least a bit selfish. It's not really out of character for her to care more about something when it directly affects her as opposed to when it's someone else's problem.
    • Do you protest every injustice in the world? Or just the ones that seem relevant or make sense to you?

• Why would Mom need to make a bunch of living zombies to buy the eyePhone 2, when hordes of people did it willingly for the first version? It's not like the populus of New New York is exactly intelligent enough to refuse a novelty.
  • I thought it was just a forced viral ad that she sent out on the hijacked feeds, not an actual mind-control virus. If I'm wrong, that just makes it More than Mind Control. Anyway, a lot of people actually don't go out and buy every upgrade, but only buy upgrades that make significant jumps or wait a couple of levels until their current thing is (in their opinion) truly obsolete.

• In The Late Philip J. Fry, how come 5 million years down the line, humanity evolved into two divergent strains, but in the next time-jump forward conventional humans somehow reasserted themselves?
  • Because the song told them to.
  • Earth might have been repopulated by humans from another part of the universe, or the Dumblocks evolved back into something resembling humans.
    • Adding to this, the Dumblocks were inspired by the "wise time-travellers", and decided to remodel their genome after them.

• In "A Fishful of Dollars", would $4.3 billion really be worth that much after a thousand years of inflation?
  • Prices in most episodes seem to suggest a lot of deflation, so that wouldn't be an issue.
    • More likely, the dollar has been redenominated several times over the intervening millennium. A thousand years of inflation, even at a reasonable 3 percent, would turn $1 into $7,000,000,000,000. Rather than make people use trillion dollar banknotes to buy a Slurm, the Central Bank of Earth would say "a thousand old dollars is now one new dollar" every 300 years or so. So a dollar in the Futurama universe can have about the same purchasing power as a dollar now, but its value still reflects a thousand years of inflation. They just trimmed some zeroes off the end.

• In the Christmas episode they mention that pine trees have gone extinct. Except, there have been pine trees everywhere throughout the entire episode. There are even pine trees in the background while saying pine trees have gone extinct. There is no way something as simple as Rule of Funny or MST3K Mantra could cover up such a huge plot hole.
  • Since these trees fold into the ground when one says, "Trees down." It's wholey possible that those pine trees are artificial.
  • It should be noted that the entire Christmas episode was just for fun, and not canon. So it's possible that the contradiction was done on purpose and Played for Laughs.
    • We're not talking about the 2010 holiday special, we're talking about "Xmas Story", which is definitely canon, or at least isn't subject to Negative Continuity like The Simpsons is.
    • Oh, my bad. Thought you were talking about the more recent one where everybody dies over and over.
  • Presumably they're either Fir or Spruce.

• How does Fry know about the Kardashians?
  • Because their heads are probably still alive.

• Why is nothing ever made out of the fact that Fry's father Yancy is also his own grandfather? Is he missing the delta brainwave as well? Could the Nibblonians have plans for him that Fry can't take part in?
  • Wouldn't Yancy be his own great grandfather? In any case, Yancy didn't get frozen, and is long dead, so he doesn't really matter.
    • On the first, no. Fry and Mildred conceive Yancy in 1947, Yancy and Fry's mom conceive him in 1974. On the second, chronologically, the last we saw of Fry's immediate family was a few glimpses in 2012, in Bender's Big Score. I think there is a potential story here - not necessarily a time travel one, maybe something involving Nibbler set after Panucci's was blown up in 2012.
    • Here's how it goes; Yancy begets Fry who goes back in time to beget Yancy who then begets Fry. Both Fry and Yancy are their own grandfathers.
  • The lack of a Delta Brainwave could be recessive. It might have to, in order to not change Fry's history and risk a Reality-Breaking Paradox.

• So what made all the Earth's water supply go back to being water instead of alcohol? Obviously the little Benders wouldn't be bothered with such a task.
  • I assumed that was the joke when the Professor started talking about his sweaters—you expected an explanation about the water but they consciously avoided the Plot Hole. A bit annoying, I'll admit.
    • I just assumed that the water righted itself in the end or they just drank all the booze so all was left was water. It's not like it's hard to make, just get some Hydrogen and Oxygen, not hard to find and BAM! You have water.
  • Considering how much of the planet the benders were seen to have eaten, I think there's a lot bigger issues here than just alcoholic water. Maybe they got a replacement planet?
    • You saw the swarm that came out-it wasn't big enough to fill those holes.
  • They could just used the nanotechnology that made the mini-Benders in order to replace the water.

• Was anyone else bothered by the Designated Hero thing the Ecofeminists had in Wild Green Yonder? Sure, Leo Wong was a Jerkass, but that doesn't absolve the Ecofeminists of their own acts. They killed the Headless Body of Agnew, vandalised Wong's golf course (probably killing a few construction workers as a result), imprisoned the Planet Express crew in a cage because they were trying to do their jobs almost all of the Nimbus crew were killed chasing after them (Though Zap is probably more to blame on that one), and we're supposed to side with them all because of some stupid Anvilicious Aesops?
  • We were?
  • The point could be made that the audience isn't supposed to be on their side due to many illogical and idiotic actions (the above mentioned cages) but also nobody really wants Leo to win. Maybe there just isn't a black and white hero/villian of the story.

• In Silence of the Clamps how come nobody realized that Francis was Clamps?
  • They probably thought he was a different robot of the same model; there's multiple bending units they've run into that all sound the same but act differently—including one in that very episode. It's not hard to believe there'd be other clamping units too that look like and have the same voice box as Clamps.
• In Silence of the Clamps, Billy West wasn't Bender...But he still looked shocked and ran away when he saw the Planet Express crew?
  • He's hardly ever met anyone from outside of Aldrin's Gulch, and given his father-in-law's opinion of city folks, he was probably startled and frightened to see a group of out-of-towners. By the time they visited him at home, he's calmed down and his inherent friendliness asserts itself.

• I'm a bit fuzzy on earlier episodes, but isn't the wheel extinct? If so, why did Farnsworth have that "chair with wheels on it"?
  • Fry re-invented them, and they became used again.

• "Ghost in the Machine" - Why doesn't Fry know about Parade Day? He's lived in New New York for eleven years at this point, he's no longer a complete fish-out-of-water.
  • Maybe they were in space for every Parade Day?
  • He's Fry.
  • Maybe Parade Day is celebrated once every 12 years

• What does M.O.M. stand for or is Mom her real name?
  • Her given name is Carol. Mom is her professional name.
    • She is the creator of all robots aka their "mom".

• If Career Chips were created for the purpose of everyone being employed in the 31st century, why do we still see homeless and jobless people? If Leela was correct then they should've been "fired"... out of a cannon and into the sun. Come to think of it if Sal keeps changing jobs then his hand would be extremely sore by now.
  • Maybe some career chips are less specific than others. Sal's career may be "Everyman". There could also be career chips for begging- beggars with prime positions in generous cities (often outside Wal-Marts) can make plenty of money annually.
  • There's also plenty of ways to lose your job without refusing to perform the function at all, and it was the refusal part that got your fired into the sun. You could be fired (Normally fired, as in dismissed for doing poor work), your business might shut down, your job might be outsourced, or you might quit that specific job but still accept that you need to work within that field. Career chips don't give you a job, they just say what job you're good at and are allowed to do.
  • Their career chips are defective.

• Why did Fry think he wasn't going to use two of the dimensions in the Escher apartment? He clearly saw from Bender falling down and up and along the stairs that it would be easiest to just live in all three perspectives (certainly than to keep himself in only one). There are plausible reasons to not live in that apartment without testing the effects of walking from one perspective to the next (mostly disorientation and possible nausea), but while Fry is an idiot and a Cloud Cuckoo Lander, that didn't seem to be a riff on his cloudcuckoolander status, and he clearly showed that he wasn't enough of an idiot in that instance to make that mistake from idiocy (unless he was being a Know-Nothing Know-It-All, which seems to ring hollow but I can't figure out why it seems to do so). Most importantly, it didn't seem like the Rule of Funny was aimed at his comment, just at the apartment. Was that just one of those things where the writers say, "Move along, we're done with this scene", or am I missing something?
  • Sometimes people go househunting and don't want a house that's too big because they're paying more for space they won't use. Fry and Bender would've said the same thing about an apartment with four bedrooms but it's funny because it's an Escher reference.

• The whole Earth-is-the-same-thing-as-america thing makes me scratch my head to a ridiculous degree. It wouldn't be so bad if it was ever used for jokes, but it never really is. And why are the former presidents of the USA considered former presidents of earth?
  • Presumably, America took over, or united with everyone and managed to keep American culture dominant. And so the American history of rulers was what continued.
  • It *is* a joke. It's Lampshade Hanging on the fact that a lot of sci-fi series can't be bothered (or don't have the time, or don't have the budget) to come up with a complex realistic response to futuristic ideas of nationality. Futurama gets a lot of mileage out of the "what's the deal with X?" "it's a sci-fi show, it's that way because that's what happens in sci-fi".
    • To continue the above point, there's a reason that we have the tropes for things like Planetof Hats. Its also why you get futuristic Americans, brits, aussies and so on when, in the future, you'd expect all new accents and possibly even languages to pop up. Even when we create parallel human civilizations, like in the Gears of War books, we still have a southern military leader and, in the books, British, Irish and Maori parallels. It's a joke on this cop out.

• What will Nixon do once eight years have passed and his term limits are over?
  • He was able to run in his election because he had a new body. Maybe he got a second new one?
  • Or maybe the law that one can only serve two terms as president was repealed.

• If Bender thought he was immortal until the episode Lethal Inspection, why would he want to kill himself in the first episode? If he thought he was immortal, why do this? It's not like it would do him any good. Also, why would he want to kill himself when he could just as easily "Turn his On-Off switch to off," ?
  • As said in Lethal Inspection, he's a friggin' drama queen.
  • A plea for attention from Bender. I AM COMMITTING SUICIDE AND THIS TIME I MEAN IT◊

• Don't go all Rule of Funny on me. I know it's probably the exact reason earth is taken over by scammers, but where the hell are the scambaiters? Surely someone who are used to dealing with scams and scammers wouldn't fall for their Nigerian prince/Spanish lottery/get rich watching porn crap.
  • There probably were a few people who didn't fall for it, but when they were surrounded by idiots who did, including the President of Earth, I don't think there was really a lot they could do about it.
  • It's shown in the first episode that most of the crew wised up after a scam or two, but once the scammers nailed someone in charge (like Farnsworth and Nixon), they had everyone by the vulnerables. They may also have abused the treasures Bender stole from history, giving them enough financial clout to undermine rivals. Lastly, scams rely on people being greedy, and the people from the year 3000 or thereabouts are probably greedier than their 21st century equivalents (such as in the episode in which the military loot an entire spider alien species for its treasure).

• I was wondering about this for years but in the episode "Fear of a Bot Planet", Leela objects to being sentenced as a human by the human-hating robots because (at the time she believed) she is a one-eyed alien and eventually it turned out much later that she actually is mutant. Does this mean the robots know she's a human the whole time or what? This could've been a big clue for Leela's past.
  • The robots just didn't care: She looked human enough, ergo they considered her human.
  • It's possible that they did know. The writers claim that Leela being a mutant was planned from the start and a few clues were shown before the reveal, for example her parents are visible in a series 2 episode when the mutants first appeared. More relevantly Bender's HUD picks her up as human in 'The Bird-Bot of Ice-Catraz', so apparently some robots do have this ability.

• Why is it that nobody has noticed the time-duplicate Bender in the cryogenic tube. It's not even the timeline trying to prevent a paradox, since that Bender was doomed anyway. And for that matter, wouldn't someone get suspicious that two of the same people are present(the duplicate Fry living his own life, and the original Fry being frozen)?
  • This is the same cryogenics firm that left their office unlocked and unoccupied with an open cryo tube that apparently defaults to 1,000 years as soon as you close the door, and then failed to notice that Fry had been accidentally frozen in the first place. Apparently once you're in there they don't care until it's time to thaw you out.
  • They don't care. In one flashback, the manager was shown to be extremely uninterested, hence the slogan "You can solve all your problems by freezing them."
  • I'd think that the Nibblonians would be concerned, assuming they visited the cryo lab again. And given how utterly essential it is for the existence of the universe, they would've.
  • Fry and Bender worked there for at least a few weeks and also somehow never noticed their own frozen duplicates. It can be excused that Fry was hidden off to the side in his pod, which is a barely plausible explanation for why he wasn't seen (though an apparently empty pod with close to six years left at the time would be another matter entirely), but Bender was very clearly visible.
    • Applies Cryogenics doesn't care who goes in and why(hence why nobody kicked out original Fry for getting frozen without an apponitment or permission), so they probably assumed the apparently empty tube was just someone hiding for privacy's sake. As for the time duplicate Bender, there are other Bending units who look just like Bender so the yet-to-time travel Bender could just assume it was a lookalike.

• Is Mars under the jurisdiction of the Earthican government or not? Also, what is the Earthican state called? Just "Earth"? "The United Continents of Earth"? "The Republic of Earth"?
  • As Amy's parents own the entire western hemisphere, I think we can assume Mars is privately owned and governed by the mega wealthy who own most of it.
    • Then why did Nixon have jurisdiction to oversee the building of the casino in "Into the Wild Green Yonder"? Granted, he let Wong do everything he wanted and ordered sham environmental inspections, but still, it seems Wong had to go through Nixon. Also, what about Mars University? Is that private too?
    • Could be. Private universities aren't exactly uncommon. It would also explain how Amy got in despite being, y'know, a slacker and an idiot.

• The "Lost City of Atlanta"; its existence is shrouded in legend, yet its main industry is tourism. What?
  • Congratulations. You've discovered the joke.

• When did Amy's parents first meet Kif again?
  • On the Titanic. They actually were the ones who hooked the two up.
    • Right. But then in "Where the Buggalo Roam" they act surprised at his appearance, and "have instant dislike" of him.
    • This Trouper always wondered why did they hate Kif when they introduced Kif to Amy in the first place, either it's because they eventually found out Kif wasn't the Captain of the Titanic or as Amy once actually said "My parents may be evil but they are stupid". Could their stupidity explain how they forgot Kif?
  • Amy clearly says "You remember Kif" when she (re-) introduces him to their parents; if they had forgotten their first meeting, the show clearly hadn't. And this is probably part of the joke — they are interfering in her life no matter what, trying to arbitrarily push him on her in the first place and disapproving of him later.

• In the episode where Fry becomes a billionaire, why anchovies seems to be treated as an odd thing to put on pizza? In its homeland (Italy), anchovies are a common topping, two of the most famous pizzas (Sicilian and Genoan) use anchovies.
  • Because the show isn't made in or taking place in Italy. In the US, anchovies are stereotyped as the one topping nobody likes.
  • That was a thousand years before the year 3000. Even Italians aren't eating the same foods they were eating in 1000 A.D.
  • No, what really bugged me is the following: pizza's de-facto homeland is Italy, (more detailed information from the other Wiki can be found here), and was imported in the US by Italian immigrants in the 19th century (with one of the very first ones opened in 1905). So, I thought that they also carried on the concept of anchovies being a fair topping for pizza. Is just that I found the idea of so many people totally disgusted by it very confusing and hard to believe. Now that I think of it, maybe is because the type of anchovies involved are actually different? And to the second answer, we actually are: the first reference to pasta (Italy's staple food) date back to 1154, so, even if 1000 years haven't passed yet...
    • No, you're not. The pasta might be the same (mostly), but back then there were no tomatoes, no potatoes (for gnocchi), no chili or bell peppers, and probably various spices used now weren't available then either, being very expensive to import from the east. Not to mention the simple fact that people try different combinations of things over time.
  • Except that, the food Is pasta: all the other spices and the tomatoes used for the sauce were indeed obtained later, but they're not vital to the pasta itself. And, by the way, yes, you did weakened my position by using better research against mine research, but you still haven't answered me about the anchovies. And yes, even if people try new combination or new food, that doesn't mean that they'll change their staple food forever. I've tried many many foreign food and delicacies myself, and even found most of them delicious, but I'm still loyal to the "staple" food.
  • How would most people even be able to form an opinion on anchovies? They haven't been used as a topping for almost eight centuries.
    • In the future version of Earth that exists in Futurama most of the Earth seems to be represented by New York. As most any native New Yorker can tell you, we loved the idea of pizza and took to it whole heartedly. However very few really take to anchovies to the point that it's a topping you can't even get in many local pizza places. As such it makes sense that the entire planet would see anchovies as a disgusting thing to put on pizza.

• Why did Senator Travers disappear? Wasn't the time travel code explicitly stated to be paradox free? Worst part of this is, they could have accomplished the same thing by just having him die normally due to being a time traveling duplicate as previously established.
  • Worse still: He disappeared because he prevented the future from whence he came, meaning he was never sent back in time. But once he disappeared, wouldn't that cause his future to happen, bringing him back into existence and creating a potentially universe-destroying loop of him repeatedly fading into and out of existence over and over and over again?
  • It's paradox-correcting, not paradox-free. Presumably, in this case the code rectified the paradox by negating the time travel in the first place. Perfectly reasonable.
  • The problem is that his disappearance causes a paradox by itself. Travers goes back in time to defeat Nixon, because Nixon being reelected will cause a robot uprising. Travers defeats Nixon, leading to the robot uprising not happening, leading to Travers disappearing. Are we to assume that Nixon doesn't go through with the events that will cause the robot uprising (which would correct the paradox)? Because if the robot uprising happens, Travers would go back in time.
  • That wouldn't be a paradox, but a stable time loop. And each turn of the loop will make the ending much more correct: "NIXON ALWAYS WINS! AROOOOO!"
  • By the way, if president Travers simply had some absurd death because of being a time duplicate of his newborn self, that would not be the same. In this case, the president would be whoever was running for vicepresident with him, not the candidate that lost the election.

• A Clockwork Origin: "[bang bang] Has the jury reached a verdict?" Since The robots had all evolved into energy beings who didn't care about petty squabbles, who the hell said that? Did they evolve mid-sentence?
  • Perhaps the judge was just not privy to the jury's realization that they had transcended such petty arguments.
    • Yeah, but they were the same species. Why wouldn't they have evolved simultaneously?
    • Evolution doesn't work that way. Go back far enough and everything evolved from the same species.
    • On our planet, no. On theirs, apparently one and the same individual can evolve, since they remember being on the jury.
  • Evolving to a higher plane of existence does not mean they can't still be drama queens...

• So, in Luck of the Fryrish we learn that Yancy named his son Philip after Fry. Of course, this leads to a nice Continuity Nod in Bender's Big Score, where his son is also called Philip. Until you figure out that since Fry never disappeared in that timeline, Yancy would have no reason to call his son Philip in the first place.
  • Well, Yancy still always liked the name Philip. He wanted it for himself as a kid.
  • Naming a son after a sibling is an entirely normal thing to do whatever the circumstances. "My brother is named Philip" is all the reason that's needed.
  • Or maybe, after finding out how much his brother really cared about him, he decided to fix his strained relationship with his brother when he came back to the past and they grew much closer.
  • By the same token, how does Bender interrupt his own "I need the bathroom" monologue when he initially delivered it without interruption before time-travelling 19 seconds back? It's probably an alternate history, one with the "untampered" timeline, the other with the time-tavelling alterations, that realign once the paradoxes are corrected.
  • It's paradox correcting time travel, so of course it doesn't make sense!
  • The whole point of "Luck of the Fryrish" was that Yancy really did love Fry even if Fry didn't think so. As previously stated, "My brother is named Phillip" is all the reason he needed to name his son Phillip.

• What's become of Nibbler? We are told that he's now a member of the crew but we never actually see him functioning as one, and he's absent from Hermes's employee review at the beginning of "The Six Million Dollar Mon."
  • He wants to be treated as a member of the crew, but the guys prefer him to eat Friskies and make bo-bo in a litter box. He's cuter that way.

• In "Godfellas", the ship can't catch up to Bender because he was fired at maximum speed. However, we've seen that the ship can traverse between galaxies with ease. Wouldn't this, couple with gravitational pull, mean they simply have to calculate gravity's effects on Bender to intercept him somewhere?
  • Bender is moving in a straight line, and given that space is largely empty once he gets out of the first galaxy there will be no significant gravitational pull on him. He might deviate slightly from his original course, but it is incredibly unlikely that he would turn around fully. Also, even if he did slingshot around a black hole or something they still need to track a human-sized robot across galaxies, there's no way they would be able to narrow down the location enough.
  • It's worse than that. Ships can accelerate indefinitely in the vacuum of space, and have no "maximum speed" at all, while Bender was not under any power and therefore going at a constant speed, so they should've been able to catch up to them easily.
    • The Planet Express Ship doesn't propel itself by normal means, it stays still and moves the Universe around it. Given the total It Runs On Nonsenseoleum nature of this explanation it's easy enough to say there is a maximum speed at which it can do this.
  • A better question might be, why didn't they think of going back to Earth and grabbing another ship with a faster engine?
    • Possibly, by the time they were able to go back to Earth, get a new ship, and come back to where they were, they would have completely lost track of him. As mentioned above, tracking Bender's vector is difficult enough already without factoring in the lost time of getting a new ship.

• Viva Mars Vegas...didn't Mars get tossed into the sun a few episodes ago?
  • Actually, you can see Mars hang in the sky after Leela got saved in 07x02. Either it got stuck in earth orbit, got moved back after it passed earth or was halted by scruffy during his saving of Leela.
• It turns out Professor Farnsworth discovers he has a younger brother named "Floyd", but in "Space Pilot 3000", the probulator claims that Fry has got one living relative, his nephew, the Professor. Even more confusing is the discovery that Igner is the Professor's son; why did the Probulator claim Farnsworth is Fry's only living relative while Floyd and Igner are also related to Fry?
  • Mom never told anyone that Ignor was Farnsworth's son. As for Farnsworth's brother, there is the chance that he's dead. Alternately, Professor Farnsworth is very old and the probulator may not have been made until later, so it may not have all the information on him.
  • There was a quick joke at the end about how "some hobo who claimed to be the professor's brother" turned up and was killed, so yeah Floyd isn't living.
    • yes but it was bender who said that, and the probulator was used before he ever met the professor, meaning that if he is telling the truth Floyd must have been alive at the time of the pilot.
    • Due to the fact that Fry is also the Professor's many great grandfather, and it's unlikely Yancy's descendants only had one lineage of children in 1000 years, that the Nibblonians made sure that the Probulator only gave Fry one result for living relatives, that being Professor Farnsworth.
  • The device might not be able to get all the information off of DNA alone (at least for as distant a relative as Fry) and requires official records. Maybe the reason Floyd is a hobo is because he was incorrectly recorded as desceased.

• In the episode, "Where No Fan has Gone Before", why is it only TOS-era Star Trek was banned? Listen to what George Takei says, they banned the 79 episodes and six films, meaning the original series and the films from The Motion Picture to The Undiscovered Country. Why are TNG, DS9, VOY and ENT okay but TOS is banned?
  • The fandom for TOS had got out of hand and formed religons, while the fandoms for the other series and movies were less obsessive and insane so they were not banned.
  • I'm not sure the fandoms for the individual Trek series are that separated. And if that were the case, then it wouldn't be taboo to mention the name "Star Trek" since that can refer to multiple shows.
  • Instead of making a "DS9 religion", fans began religions of Bajoran prophers and Pah-Wraiths. The bureaucrats of the government did not realize that those where Star-Trek based.

• In a future where mutants were shunned upon until the day they became legal, did Zapp Branigan realize that Leela was a mutant this whole time and if he did then wouldn't he be terrified by the very idea that he had sex with one?
  • Three(ish?) words: I had snu-snu.
  • If Leela herself couldn't put two and two together, there's no way Zapp did.

• In "The Problem with Popplers," The Planet Express crew stumbles upon an uncharted planet, and are the only ones delivering Poppler's to Fishy Joe's. So, once the only supplier stops supplying the food (because of discovery that they're sentient), how is Fishy Joe still getting Poppler's to sell?
  • Fishy Joe's refrigerators would be stocked with at least a couple days' worth of Popplers, from previous deliveries. Not much time passes between Leela's discovery and the Omicronians' arrival, so it's reasonable that they had enough on hand to keep operating until everyone learned the truth.

• Why does Mayor Poopenmeyer ask Fry his name in Ghost in the Machines? Poopenmeyer's dealt with Fry before, a particularly memorable case being when they allied to save New New York from a giant burning ball of garbage... so wouldn't he already recognize him?
  • He's a politician. He's very important. Fry's just a single citizen, completely unimportant. Remember to vote!
  • It's part of the joke of the show that these seven random citizens direct the fate of the World several times over when convenient. There's probably a trope named after it.

• This is a bit of an awkward question, but here goes. In 2-D Blacktop the Professor makes mention of Leela "upgrading her buzooms (breasts)" and Leela doesn't correct him. Does this mean Leela's breasts are fake?
  • Yes. That's precisely what it means. Take That, Audience!.

• How can Fry be his own grandfather if Bender irradiated his sperm in the Slurm Factory episode?
  • Because the body always makes more sperm.
  • Fry got his sperm production healed in "Parasites Lost," by the superintelligent worms

• In "A Bicyclops Built For Two", Alcazar claims that a baby Leela escaped their home planet just before the missile hit. He then says he was cleaning a pool at the time of impact and emerged the only survivor. What I don't understand is, if he was old enough to have a job at the time Leela was a baby, shouldn't he look much older than her?
  • Of course he should. Remember that it was all a lie, so his story does not need to make sense.
  • Cleaning a pool is plausibly a job, or rather chore, that might be given to a small child, which could make him only a few years older than Leela as far as the adult scale goes.

• In Anthology Of Interest 2, Leela asked what would happen if she found her true home. She then got knocked out. The rest of the Planet Express crew could have watched, and probably did considering how they treated the video in The Attack Of The Killer App. Did they find out she was a mutant? Why not?
  • Perhaps when they knocked out Leela they turned the machine off and spent the entirety of Leela's flashback trying to wake her up.
  • Given that Leela's question doesn't make sense if the machine knew her actual origins (her real parents aren't her "true home" in the sense she means), it's possible that it showed nothing at all or, alternatively, that it showed the planet Express building, which would be indistinguishable from it showing nothing at all to everyone else.

• If Enos isn't Fry's grandfather (and most likely in the closet), how come he looks so much like him?
  • Fry's grandmother, Mildred, had a type, and Fry just happened to fit the mold of dumb, orange-haired guys, her type.
  • Actually, I think it's because Enos was Fry's grandfather in the original timeline before he disrupted the flow of time. As in, Enos was the original owner of Fry's genes. Of course, with Fry's interference, that was "overwritten" and never happened, therefore creating a Stable Time Loop. Don't think about it too hard though.
  • Enos could be related to Fry's mother instead, like her uncle. Cousin marriage is legal in the state of New Mexico Yancy Sr comes from.

• I never quite got why Fry was dressed as James Dean. A reference to Rebel Without a Cause seems a little out of place in a show that almost exclusively makes deliberate references to current pop culture and sci-fi. Further, Fry isn't really the "angsty rebellious teen" that you think of when you think of Rebel - he's more of a light "nerd". There aren't really any other parallels between Fry and Dean or Jim Stark. The one reason I could think of would be to highlight Fry as a "20th century man" by putting him in the outfit of another 20th century man; while his outfit is distinctive (no one else ever wears jeans), it doesn't look absurdly out of place either. Darn, I need those DVD commentaries...

• In "Space Pilot 3000", shouldn't the DNA Scanner recognize Farnsworth as Fry's great-x-grandson? Thanks to Roswell, Fry is the Professor's direct ancestor as well as a distant uncle.
  • Maybe it scans known family trees. Mildred probably still told Yancy that Enos was his father because she didn't want him to know his real father was a one night stand she had with someone she only saw once. That would look bad now but much more so back in the 50's.

• In one of the comics, the crew find the Professor's old crew, who are strangely similar to the crew we know: the captain's name is Sheila and she has an eye missing, the delivery guy is called Sly and his hairdo is similar to Fry's, and there's a robot named Mender who looks sort of like Bender. Their doctor is a literal clone of Zoidberg. Why is there nobody analogous to Amy?
  • The professor only kept Amy around because she was the same bloodtype as him, presumably he wasn't anticipating needing a replacement blood at the time.
  • Just out of curiosity, was there anybody analogous to Hermes?
    • There was no analogue for Hermes because Hermes doesn't generally go on deliveries, meaning that the accountant in that era was still 'our' Hermes. The same is probably true of Amy, who goes on deliveries more rarely than the others and whose actual role at the company is one that would make the Professor want to keep her out of trouble.

• Where was Nibbler in the "Anthology of Interest" scenario where Fry was never frozen? We do see him absent when Fry falls from his chair, but Nibbler had to have at least ordered the pizza since Fry goes to Applies Cryonics. What distracted him?
  • The scene was a simulation created by the What-If Machine; we don't know how it works, precisely, but it presumably has to gather the data used for its simulation from somewhere. It might not have been aware of Nibbler for one reason or another, which would mean its simulation wouldn't account for him.

• In "Put Your Head On My Shoulder", Amy Wong brings up that her parents promised to buy her a bar if she got all B's and decides she must go buy a car because she instead got all C's. What exactly would've been purchased if she got all A's? An "ar" wouldn't really make any sense.
  • Maybe they didn't consider that because Amy's so dumb.
  • And that is how Amy just missed getting her own aardvark.

• Rule of Funny aside, how exactly did Bender's cigar manage to burn down Zoidberg's house underwater?!

Vanishing suiciders

• In the first episode, we see a long line of people slowly file into the suicide booth. Someone steps in, the doors close, and a few moments later the door opens and there's no trace of the person. This would make sense if they were snapped out of existence or just obliterated, but when Fry and Bender use it we learn it just uses knives and razors. So where did the bodies of the other users go? Does the booth dispose of the body after it kills them? If so, why didn't it dispose of the "corpses" of Fry and Bender?
  • If I remember right, the floor of the booth opens like a trapdoor. Doesn’t explain why Fry and Bender were fine, though.

How was Fry not found?

• How did Fry's family never find him after he got frozen? They weren't at all concerned when he didn't come home from work for a few days? Seems like finding Fry would been relatively easy; they get concerned when Fry doesn't arrive home 24 hours after he usually would so they either go to his place of business or call 911 and file a missing persons report and they and/or the police would go on the following path; they go to the pizza place Fry delivers for, get the address of his last known delivery from his boss (he may not be allowed to give the family that information but he would have no choice but to hand that information over to the police), they go to the cryogenics lab who tells them which room he delivered the pizza to (if Fry was allowed to access that part of the facility as a mere pizza boy then surely family members of said pizza boy and especially the police would be allowed too), they find him frozen with 1'000 years on the timer, crank it back to five minutes, and wait. I don't quite remember the opinion Fry's parents had of him and his brother did have a rivalry and didn't much like each other, but Luck of the Fryrish shows that Yancy did come to miss his older brother. Also, Seymour was able to find him no problem so if a dog was able to find them, surely at least one to three people would have no problem tracking him down.
  • Great point! I don't have the answers, but a possible explanation is that the Niblonians engineered Fry's freezing so they might have taken active stops to help the cover-up. I'm inclined to believe that you've spotted a genuine plot hole, though.
  • It's mentioned in a later episode that Fry's family didn't want to waste tax payer money to find him. It's inconsistent with the love they show them in Game of Tones, but that's what they went with.

Is Fry the first person to not freak out about a career chip?

• Aside from the fact that the career chip premise was an aborted arc, wouldn't pretty much everyone who got unfrozen be terrified and doing everything they could to resist such a torturous device that tells them what to be for life?

Timing of Fry and Leela meeting Farnsworth

• In the pilot, Fry, Leela and Bender luck out with a job at Hubert's delivery service. What just happened to his crew?
  • Devoured by space wasp as per the episode itself, Farnsworth retrieves their career chips from an envelope labelled 'contents of space wasp's stomach'. Later retconned to be space bees in "The Sting"

Game of Tones

• It makes sense that since Fry never entered the strip club, he wouldn't know what the interior looks like. But when it comes to his family home, he knew what the interior looked like. Even if it was frozen in the state when he last saw it, it shouldn't have been a White Void Room.