Recap / Futurama M 1 Benders Big Score

It Just Won't Stay Dead!

The first of a stream of Direct to Video films that would hopefully revive Futurama. Alien nudists take control of Planet Express through a series of Internet scams, and discover a paradox-free method of time travel tattooed to Fry's rear. They use Bender, who has unintentionally downloaded an obedience virus, to go back in time and steal history's most valuable objects, as there's no time traveling method of him getting back to the present, and he can just wait it out for a few hundreds of years. Fry eventually uses the time code to get back to the 21st century after Leela begins dating an older and more mature man by the name of Lars Fillmore.

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Tropes:

• 419 Scam: Zoidberg gets a message claiming that he could inherit a dead prince's fortune if he pays a fee.
• Actor Allusion: The Chanukah Zombie's vehicle is a Jewish-themed TIE Fighter, a nod to his voice actor, Mark Hamill.
• Advertised Extra: Parodied. The theme song introduces all the main characters plus a new character, an alien named Zylex, who only appears briefly in a background scene.
• Aliens Are Bastards: The scammer aliens are greedy, petty, sleazy dicks with zero redeeming qualities.
• Alternate Self: Fry, now back to the 20th century, uses the code to go back in time an hour prior to eat the pizza he was supposed to deliver. This minor event results in a time duplicate of Fry who eventually became Lars.
• Animal Gender-Bender: With very rare exceptions, female narwhals like Leelu don't have tusks. She's described as "a rare toothed female" in the news report that introduces her.
• Arc Words: Farnsworth's warning that "the copy is always doomed" regarding copies of people or objects due to usage of time-travel. Every single copy through this dies or gets destroyed one way or another at a random point in the near future, and Lars becomes extremely unnerved when hearing about this for the first time, since he's an alternate Fry and now knows he's going to die very soon.
• Asshole Victim: The Box Network executives who cancelled Planet Express's license got fired, but then killed and turned into a fine pink powder to be used in "Torgo's Executive Powder". The Professor takes glee in this development happening, using the powder to soothe his crotch.
• Attending Your Own Funeral:
  • Fry does this twice, first when he crashes his own memorial service and later when he attends the funeral of his alternate self, who was Killed Off for Real.
  • As does Lars Fillmore, in the sense that the memorial service the Planet Express crew holds in Fry's honor was actually for him, the Fry that went back in time.
• Autobots, Rock Out!: The Futurama theme kicks in when Hermes takes control of the battle grid and the space fleet turns the tide against the scammers.
• Back to the Early Installment: Thanks to the paradox-free time code, leading Fry and Bender go back to the same room he was frozen under an hour after he fell in the cryotube. The duplicate Fry is apparently killed by Bender right after Seymour lays down after 12 years, which is what flash-fossilizes him in the first place. Regular Fry ends up falling into the pilot Fry's tube and re-freezes himself for 7 more years after the original Fry is defrosted. Earlier, we see Bender be the one behind the first alien destruction of New York in the pilot. Lars eventually makes it back to the future by hiding in Michelle's cryotube, thus thawing out during the events of "The Cryonic Woman".
• Badass Bureaucrat: Hermes can organize Earth's ragtag fleet into a force capable of taking out an armada of Death Stars.
• Bald of Evil: The nudist alien scammers are completely hairless and equally immoral and cruel.
• Battle Tops: Chanukkah Zombie's space fighter shoots dreidels. Of course it helps that he made them out of blasting clay.
• Beard of Sorrow: Time duplicate Fry, who is later revealed to be Lars Fillmore, grows one during his hunt for Leelu the Narwhal. It later helps hide his true identity when it's partially burned.
• Beat Them at Their Own Game: In the climax, Bender scams the scammers.
• Been There, Shaped History: In-universe example; Bender's time-travelling escapades are responsible for the destruction of Old New York. He's also responsible for Al Gore losing the 2000 election in Florida (while trying to shoot an election official named Philip Joshua Fry, Bender misses and destroys a box containing several of Al Gore's ballots.)
• Big Damn Movie: Without a question.
  • The time travel plot alone is very complex and hard to follow along with. It's made apparent that Fry created several alternate timelines as well, considering the flashbacks from the original series that depict his family acknowledging him going missing while in the movie, time-duplicate Fry, aka Lars, lives his life right where the original Fry left off.
• Big "NEVER!":
  Nudar: So what'll it be? Unconditional surrender?
  Leela: Never!
  Nudar: Or total destruction?
  Leela: Also never!
  Nudar: You have thirty seconds. Make up your minds.
  Leela: NEVER!
• Biting-the-Hand Humor: The beginning of the movie takes a not-so-sutble jab at Fox for cancelling the show. It has The Professor telling the Planet Express crew that they were fired two years ago by the "Box Network" (if it wasn't obvious enough, the B on their logo flickers to an F and back again) due to them cancelling their license. However, they ended up getting their jobs back due to the executives who cancelled them getting fired for incompetence, beaten up badly, dying from their injuries, then being ground up into a fine pink powder called "Torgo's Executive Powder", which is then used in several humiliating ways throughout the film.
• Bizarre Alien Senses: The scammers can sense information with organs called sprunjers.
• Bling-Bling-BANG!: Taken to its extremely ridiculous conclusion with the scammers' fleet of solid gold Death Stars.
  Bender: Ooh! I'd take one of those with a side of chili fries!
• Book Ends: "You've been scammed, sweetheart!"
• Brainwashed and Crazy: The scammers infect Bender with an "obedience virus" and use him to help them take over the company, steal priceless objects from history, and eventually go back in time and kill Fry. An unusual Played for Laughs variant in that Bender is fully aware of what's been done to him but maintains his normal personality the entire time and therefore doesn't have to be told twice to do any of the evil actions he's ordered to do (in the case of stealing from the timeline, he doesn't have to be told at all, as it's his idea in the first place).
• Bratty Half-Pint: Philip J. Fry II, in his first appearance as a child (as opposed to an infant or adult), snarks at Bender when he arrives at his doorstep and taunts him in response to his death threat.
• Call-Back: When Bender destroys Pannucci's Pizza, he also kills Seymour in a way that fast-fossilizes him, just as the Professor explained Seymour had died in "Jurassic Bark".
• Cerebus Retcon: Inverted in regards to everyone's reaction to Fry's disappearance. "Luck of the Fryrish" has Yancy name his son after him, and "Jurassic Bark" has Seymour loyally wait the rest of his life for Fry to return. Here, it is revealed that Fry's time duplicate took over Fry's life from where he left off, altering the significance behind these scenes. It probably also retcons some of them from having happened.
• Chekhov's Gun: The doomsday device, stolen from the Professor by the scammers, is restolen by Bender offscreen and used to blow them up near the end.
  You’ve been scammed, sweetheart!
• Chekhov's Gunman: Exploding time-duplicate Bender, kicked into a cryo-tube by Fry and forgotten, is used by Lars to blow Nudar up.
• *Click* Hello: Played for Laughs when Bender interrupts the election runoff in Florida:
  Al Gore: Here's to four years of clean air, clean government, and amazing new technologies such as...
  [Bender bursts through the door, gun in hand]
  Al Gore: ...ROBOT!
• Concealing Canvas: The Professor's safe is hidden behind a painting of the Professor opening that safe. Unfortunately for the scammers, there's a layer of drywall between the painting and the safe, so they use Bender to punch through the wall to reach the safe.
• Continuity Porn:
  • When the Professor says that time travel is impossible, Fry reminds him that he himself traveled through time, when they went back to Roswell in 1947.
    Farnsworth: That proves nothing! And furthermore, you'd think I would remember such a thing. Plus, who are you anyway?!
  • One of the "alien invasions" seen during Fry's cryogenic freezing was actually caused by Bender stealing a Nobel Prize Award in 2308.
  • Bender uses his quarter-on-a-string trick to scam (what he believes to be) a suicide booth, just as he did in the pilot.
  • In another example, Fry quotes Slurms MacKenzie's "Whimmy-wham-wham-wazzle!" while trying to cheer up Leela at a party.
  • Fry's time duplicate is shown to be responsible for Michelle's appearance in "The Cryonic Woman" — she was actually supposed to wake up in the 24th century rather than the 31st, but Lars altered the settings on her cryo-tube in order to get back to Leela.
• Cool Shades: Bender dons a pair to fulfill the Terminator homage of the third act. It gets a lampshade.
  Scammer 2: What's with the doofy sunglasses?
  Bender: It's really bright in the past.
• Cosmic Flaw: Over-use of the Time Code to get away with temporal paradoxes eventually creates the Anomaly, a tear in the fabric of reality. The sequel movie reveals that it's a gateway to another universe where Yivo lives, inaccessible by robots or electrical devices, and what shklee uses to invade the regular universe with via tentacles.
• Curbstomp Battle: Once properly coordinated, the ragtag Earth fleet makes absurdly quick work of the scammer aliens' fleet of Death Stars.
• Darker and Edgier: Free of network television handicaps, the writers were basically relying on self-censoring.
• Deadpan Snarker: Lars.
  Lars: Admiral, will we stop attacking at any point, or is this one of those phony-baloney feel-good wars like the war on drugs?
• Death of the Hypotenuse: After spending the whole movie winning Leela over, Lars learns he is doomed and breaks things off with her. He dies right when Fry tries to make them patch things up. This is an interesting case of this trope because the hypotenuse, Lars, was really a time-clone of Fry. As such, it's easy for Leela to reconcile her feelings for the two of them - because they were feelings for the same person.
  Fry: He was a good man.
  Leela: ...Yeah. You were.
• Decoy Backstory: Inverted. After a trip to the time he got frozen, Fry ends up creating a time duplicate of himself that lived for 12 years in the 21st century until Bender killed him. We're led to believe that he was simply a duplicate who died, only for it to eventually be revealed Bender only thought he killed him, and that he's the backstory to an already-seen character Leela's new boyfriend Lars Fillmore. Lars didn't even know it for himself until his hair burned off and his voice changed.
• Disproportionate Retribution: After its show gets interrupted by a presidential address from Nixon, the Hypnotoad forces the announcer to kill themselves.
  TV Announcer: We interrupt "Everybody Loves Hypnotoad" to bring you a special announcement. (The Hypnotoad glares at him offscreen) Please, Hypnotoad! It's beyond my control! No, don't make me kill myself!
• Dumb Blonde: Totally Zig-Zagged for laughs. There's a sexy blonde female doctor (called Dr. Cahill) whose entire joke is alternating between being a competent doctor offended by dumb blonde stereotypes to... well... being a dumb blonde.
• Enemy Mine: Everyone is forced to evacuate Earth to other planets by the scammer aliens, with the main characters taking up residence on Neptune. Unfortunately, they forget that Robot Santa is based there. It turns out that he's also been scammed, and Leela "convinces" him and his fellow holiday mascots to join forces and take out the scammers.
• Evil Gloating: The scammers singing "Na Na Hey Hey Kiss Him Goodbye" (with "goodbye" replaced with "We took your stuff") as they evict the entire population of Earth definitely counts.
• Extradimensional Emergency Exit: Ends on a cliffhanger where all the time duplicates of Bender emerge from the caverns under the Planet Express building, causing a paradox pileup that tears open the sky. Nibbler's response is to yell, "Everyone out of the universe!" and disappear by eating himself somehow, the implication being that he's escaped to another dimension. He turns up in later episodes without explanation.
• Eyepatch After Time Skip: Two years into Fry's journey to find Leelu, Leroy is shown with an eyepatch and a hook hand that he didn't have before.
• Fake-Out Opening: The film introduces the characters twice.
• Falling-in-Love Montage: Their "dating" montage shows Lars and Leela falling more and more in love. Admittedly as it is Futurama, they play space golf and go floating in real giant bubbles.
• Fan Disservice: The Nudist Scammer Aliens aren't pleasant to look at due to being shriveled, ugly bastards. Things especially get disgusting when they exercise the Power Perversion Potential of time travel. And especially when their sprungers are out.
• Fanservice: The first delivery that Planet Express must make once they're back on the air^note Yes, flying through the air in their mighty spaceship is to the Nude Beach Planet.
• Fat Bastard: All of the nudist alien scammers have a paunch, but Schlump is noticeably the fattest of the three.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: Nudar ambushes Lars during the denouement and claims he has the time code, setting up the reveal shortly afterwards that he was Fry's time duplicate all along.
• Foreshadowing: Several regarding Lars' true identity.
  • The first time Leela meets Lars, she asks if they've met. He responds, "Apparently not."
  • Every date in the montage with Leela has them faced with a near-death situation or otherwise separated, hinting at Lars' status as a doomed time copy.
  • Lars immediately leaves the funeral after Fry comes back from the past — likely because, while he expected Fry to go back to the past (and thus become Lars himself), he didn't expect his return.
  • After the main Fry travels back in time to eat his warm pizza, the other Fry — who would become Lars — calls him out for irresponsibly using the time code and being a "pig," showing he's already more mature than the main Fry.
  • Lars refers to Leela as "the woman [he's] been waiting for [his] whole life." He's not just being romantic; the entire time he's known he's Lars, he's been waiting for the day he could meet Leela.
  • During the song, Fry laments that Leela would like him "if he was a bald-headed kook."
  • During the wedding, the pen Fry takes out of his pocket that is out of ink has the exact same emblem on top as Lars's own pen.
  • Nudar and the scammers' sprunjers were still able to detect the time code even when it was supposed to have been erased. In addition, "Bender from way at the end" had to get a copy of the time code to put on Fry's ass somehow...
• From Nobody to Nightmare: The scammers go from anonymous con artists to the rulers of Earth.
• Future Badass: Lars Fillmore. Not actually a badass, nor technically from the future, but he is a look at a much, much smarter and more mature version of Fry.
• Future Self Reveal: In this film, we meet Lars Fillmore, an older man who starts dating Leela. The main plot involves Fry accidentally going back in time and creating a duplicate of himself. One Fry remains in the past and lives out the rest of his life as he would have if he was never frozen for a thousand years in the pilot, while the other goes back to the future without knowledge of this. After living several years in the past, Fry's house is burnt down and his hair is singed off, giving him the appearance of Lars. He then realizes that he was Lars and he goes to freeze himself so he can be with Leela in the future.
• Got Volunteered: As Robot Santa said in his song "You signed away your rights when you were hired".
• Handwave: The physical differences between Fry and Lars are quickly explained away in four words, when Bender nearly kills Time Duplicate Fry.
  Time-paradox duplicate Fry: My hair! (coughs, and starts speaking with a lower voice) My larynx!
• Happy Ending Override: The previous Series Fauxnale ended with the implication (though not the confirmation) that Leela had finally fallen for Fry and that they would get together. This movie opens with Fry still unsuccessful after several years have passed and Leela embracing a new relationship (albeit it turns out to be with an alternate version of Fry) without a moment's hesitation.
• Head Turned Backwards: Hermes, thanks to Zoidberg.
  Zoidberg: I thought you were happy. Your tail is wagging.
  Hermes: Kiss my front-butt!
• Heroic Sacrifice: Lars kills Nudar by using one of Bender's time duplicates as a makeshift murder-suicide bomb.
• Historical In-Joke: George W. Bush "winning" the 2000 election because Bender blew up all the votes for Gore.
• Hospital Hottie: Dr. Cahill is a sexy young doctor. Fry calls her "Dr. Good and Sexy".
• Hypocritical Humor: Professor Farnsworth tells the others off for giving out personal information over the Internet and calls a meeting when he shows them how to avoid phony emails. After deleting some, he falls for a fake email claiming he's won the Spanish National Lottery, even though he says he didn't even know he had a ticket and gives out personal information himself, even while the others are yelling at him not to.
• Idiot Ball: No characters are safe from the nudist scammers. None. Especially egregious in the case of the Professor, who falls for an obvious scam right after telling the others off for falling for obvious scams. This leads to him signing his company over to the scammers after thinking he's won the Spanish National Lottery, even though he claims he didn't even know he had a ticket.
• Ignored Expert: Nibbler keeps trying to warn everyone about the danger of time-travel, and keeps getting ignored.
• Immediate Self-Contradiction: "You haven't seen the last of Barbados Slim. Now, goodbye forever!"
• Info Dump: By Lars, posthumously.
• In Spite of a Nail: Despite Fry not being missing in the year 2000 in this timeline, his brother Yancy Fry still names his son Philip after him.
• I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Fry is at first extremely happy when he sees Lars left Leela at the altar, saying that finally there was a happy ending. He changes his mind when he sees Leela burst into tears and sees how unhappy she is without Lars and tries to mend their relationship at the expense of his own chances towards the end of the story. However what neither he nor Leela know is that Lars is also doing this himself for the sake of Leela's happiness. Marrying him would have meant that she was marrying a time travel duplicate of Fry and his days were guaranteed to be numbered as a result of time traveling using the paradox-correcting time code. Knowing that his death was inevitable and wanting to spare Leela from living in grief he calls off the marriage and ultimately manages to fulfill his destiny to die by saving Leela and the younger Fry and taking out Nudar in the process with the help of a self-destructing Bender.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: The alien scammers keep getting away with scamming everyone in their sight, including the Earthicans out of their planet. They finally get their just-deserts at the end when the Planet Express crew kills them with the bomb that Bender scammed them out of (and while Nudar survives, he subsequently dies as well when Lars thaws out a frozen Bender set to self-destruct).
• Laser-Guided Karma: The nudist alien scammers, who have been scamming everyone and everything for the entire movie, turned out to have the bomb they were going to use scammed out of them by Bender, which the Planet Express crew then uses to blow the aliens up.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: The entire opening sequence.
  Leela: (surrounded by electrical fans) So what does this mean for us and our many fans?
  Farnsworth: It means we're back on the air! Yes, flying through the air in our mighty spaceship!
• Losing Your Head: Aside from the reappearance of heads in jars, Hermes gets his head chopped off within the first five minutes of the movie and survives before eventually getting his body back.
• Mind Screw: The Time Travel is a tad confusing, and it takes many views to get any kind of idea as to what the hell is going on.
• Misfit Mobilization Moment: This happens in the climactic battle against the scammers when Hermes' head is plugged directly into the battlegrid. Cue Theme Music Power-Up and much ass-kicking.
• Mundane Made Awesome: "I can wire anything directly into anything! I'm the Professor!!" (dramatic pose).
• My God, What Have I Done?: After believing he's killed Fry in the past, Bender is utterly broken.
• Mythology Gag: The Futurama theme remix was from the Xbox/PlayStation 2 console game.
• Never My Fault: After apparently killing Fry, on return to the future Bender blames the Planet Express crew, which an indignant Amy calls him on.
  Amy: Us?! How could you possibly blame us?
  Bender: It ain't easy, it just proves how great I am.
• Not Now, We're Too Busy Crying Over You:
  Bender: (crying) Ohhh, Fry, I'd give anything to un-murder you!
  Fry: Did someone call me?
  Bender: (irritated) No! (Gasp!) Fry?!
• Not Quite Dead: Nudar survives the Professor's doomsday device at point blank range due to wearing a doom-proof suit (though he did lose his wang due to not wearing doom-proof pants). Unfortunately for him, the suit is too damaged to protect him from an exploding Bender time clone.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted, as part of a joke, and a The Terminator reference, when Bender is sent after Fry. He immediately runs into another Phillip J. Fry, a slovenly fat man, tries killing Al Gore's aid Phillip J. Fry in 2000 (only managing to destroy all of Florida's votes for Al Gore) and a few years of hunting, runs into Philip J. Fry, Fry's nephew.
• Only Sane Man: Hermes, of all people, as well as his most notable role. He is the only person to realize the crew is being scammed by Nudar. Of course, everyone ignores him.
• Ontological Inertia: A major plot element of the film is "paradox-free time travel"—that is to say, a form of time travel where no matter what you do, the universe bends events so that the present mostly turns out the same. This allows things that would normally be impossible, such as preventing yourself from going back in time or stealing a vital historical object and never returning it, without significant risk of the universe breaking down. This is mainly through causing any spare duplicates created through time travel to abruptly die. At the end of the movie, Bender manages to do something so impossible that it breaks Ontological Inertia altogether, cracking open the universe.
• Other Me Annoys Me: The time-duplicate Frys and Benders don't get along, with Bender-2 planning to kill his future self at the drop of a hat. Disturbingly averted by Nudar.
• Parent-Preferred Suitor: Played for Laughs during Leela's wedding to Lars. While Leela's mother is happy that she's marrying a two-eyed human, her father gripes that Leela deserves a husband with a dozen eyes - specifically, the compound-eyed Fly Mutant.
• Plot Parallel: After Fry returns to the future after escaping the Nudists and we witness Bender killing the time travel duplicate Fry in the past, the movie flashes back to the 12 years of that Fry's life before he was killed. However, the main cast don't witness these flashbacks and its purpose isn't immediately apparent until the end of the movie, where it's revealed that the duplicate Fry survived Bender's assassination and became Lars.
• Post-Climax Confrontation: After the climactic space battle against the scammer aliens (which ended with their ship being destroyed by a doomsday device), their leader Nudar comes back, having survived thanks to a doom-proof platinum vest in one last attempt at gaining the time code, but Lars sacrifices himself to kill Nudar before that can happen.
• Potty Dance: Strangely enough, this happens to Bender for the first time ever. He even hangs a lampshade over the lunacy of the situation. Then the Bender time clone does this in front of Fry, which activates his self-destruct sequence.
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner/Ironic Echo: "You've been scammed, sweetheart!"
• Recycled Soundtrack: The same opening cue from the video game was reused during the first exterior shot of the Head Museum.
• Rewatch Bonus: Lars' chemistry and behavior with Leela makes a lot more sense after The Reveal that he's an older version of Fry, hence why he's so at ease around her.
• Ridiculous Future Inflation: In a scene set in 2012, five years after the movie's release, Al Gore notes that $100 could buy one gallon of gas.
• Running Gag: Torgo's Executive Powder makes several appearances throughout the movie.
• Screw Yourself: Nudar the scammer alien falls in love with his time duplicate.
• Seen It All: Farnsworth dismisses Fry's Bender tattoo, "So he's got a little ink. Big whoop." (He turns around and walks away, showing a huge "THUG LIFE" tat on his back.)
• Sequel Hook: The movie ends at sort of a cliffhanger, and though Beast With a Billion Backs supposedly picks up where it left off, it doesn't really get a lot of its material from this movie, and hardly acknowledges its events.
  Bender: Well, we're boned.
• Shout-Out:
  • Mr. Panucci's cousin resembles Quint from Jaws.
  • The scammers send Bender back in time to steal a host of famous pieces of art, including an unfinished copy of Leonardo da Vinci's The Mona Lisa and Michelangelo's David. Bender also somehow manages to steal the Ten Commandments and Eddie Van Halen's guitar.
  • The one-eared rabbits on the elves' assembly line resemble Bongo from Life in Hell.
• Shown Their Work: Female narwhals do develop tusks on rare occasions. Leelu is introduced as a "rare toothed female" to reflect on this fact.
• Sickeningly Sweethearts: Leela and Lars, at least to Leela's coworkers (but especially to Fry), who are dealing with too many problems themselves to be in the mood to hear it.
• Skewed Priorities: Bender thinks he's killed Fry per his orders while Brainwashed and Crazy and tearfully declares that he'd "give anything to un-murder" him. Fry shows up alive on cue, and Bender, on top of his delight over this twist, immediately decides that he'll have to kill him "again" so that no one will think he's incompetent and whips out a mallet.
  Farnsworth: Bender! Stop killing for a minute!
• The Slow Path: The Time Sphere only goes back in time, not forwards, forcing the Scammers to use Bender to steal historical values. Fry only gets back to the present by re-freezing himself.
• Spotlight-Stealing Title: The plot is in fact largely centered on Fry, but you wouldn't guess it from the title or the DVD cover. ^note The title itself is a reference to the 1972 blaxploitation film Shaft's Big Score and the fact that Bender is the one stealing all of Earth's treasures for the scammer aliens.
• Stable Time Loop:
  • The origin of the time code and the name "Lars Fillmore".
  • Lampshaded by a tuxedo-clad Bender who comes during the middle of the film to put the tattoo on Fry's ass, while under orders by Nibbler in order for the timeline to make sense.
• Temporal Duplication: How the Time Code resolves paradoxes; if the past version of the user is altered, they become a time paradox duplicate separate from the original, at the cost of being doomed. Lars is much longer-lasting one to Fry. A non-paradox example occurs with Fry falling into the same cryogenic tube he originally fell in, then freezing himself for several more years to return to his present.
• Temporal Paradox: The Time Code allows one to blatantly ignore paradoxes, allowing things like stealing history's treasures and interaction with past selves. The only issue is that it'll eventually rupture the universe.
• Theme Music Power-Up: Once Hermes starts coordinating the attack fleet, they go on a curbstomp spree to the tune of the Futurama theme.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: Seymour returning almost felt like an apology to the fanbase for making them cry so much during Jurassic Bark.
• Time Abyss: Due to dozens (perhaps hundreds) of time-travel jaunts, Bender is at least hundreds of thousands of years old.
• Time-Passes Montage: There's sort of one with time-duplicate Fry living the life he left behind after getting frozen. There's also a nod to the Seymour one from "Jurassic Bark".
• Time Travel: Obviously.
• Time-Traveling Jerkass: The Nudists once they get their hands on a time sphere (formed through a code on a tattoo on Fry's butt), fully intending to use it to steal things of value from all of history. Additionally, they don't care that the time sphere could lead to the destruction of the universe until after they have obtained everything of value in history.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: Literally and figuratively. The time code tattooed to Fry's butt in the shape of Bender's head can be used to summon one. Besides, it enables one to ignore temporal paradoxes like Fry meeting himself from an hour earlier, yet the tattoo itself is in a Stable Time Loop, since it was taken from Duplicate Fry/Lars's butt and placed on the youngest Fry's butt.
• Tomato in the Mirror: Duplicate Fry discovering that his rival for Leela's affections is a time-displaced version of himself.
  Fry: I'm Lars? I'M LARS!
• Too Dumb to Live: Although the plan to retake Earth was thought up by Leela, Nixon puts Zapp Branigan in control of actually executing it, likely because Leela is a woman. Take a wild guess how it goes.
• Took a Level in Badass: Having all of Fry's experience plus another twelve years of maturity, Lars is able to handle a lot of life-threatening crap on his dates with Leela, thus surviving longer than most doomed duplicates would.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Labarbara Conrad, previously shown as a (mostly) loving wife to Hermes, is now perfectly willing to leave him and remarry Barbados Slim at the drop of a hat just because he lost his body.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: No one in the 21st century is as surprised by the presence of a gun-toting robot as they really should be.
  Yancy: (shouting into the house) Phil, some kind of trash can here to see you.
• Video Wills: Lars recorded one which is played at his funeral. The touching message is slightly undermined by the obnoxious advert for the video will recording company that plays at the end.
• Wetware CPU: At the climax, Hermes is plugged into the ship's mainframe and serves as a terrifyingly efficient tactical director.
  Hermes Conrad: Prepare to see a bureaucrat's brain in action!
• We Will Meet Again: Parodied.
  Barbados Slim: You haven’t seen the last of Barbados Slim. Now goodbye forever.
• Wham Line: "I'm Lars? I'M LARS!"
• Wham Shot: Fry's time code tattoo of Bender on Lars' ass after he sacrificed his life to save Fry and Leela.
• Woman Scorned: Leela's all for Zapp's idea on sending Lars on a suicide position since he canceled their wedding.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • Part of Zapp's plan to retake Earth is to send in a brigade of children to die first (as the battle is being fought "for our children and our children's children"), allowing everyone else to come up with a better plan.
  • In addition, the nudist aliens react gleefully to having shot the kids down.
• Zip Me Up: With Hermes and LaBarbara at Leela and Lars's wedding, as Barbados Slim can't zip up her dress, but Hermes can.
  Hermes: Consider yourself bird-dogged.
  LaBarbara: That's my man. Take a boat, Barbados.

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