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Leela meets Alcazar, who claims to be another cyclops from their home planet of Cyclopia. Alcazar convinces Leela to sleep with him, as they are the only hopes of restoring their race. The next morning, Alcazar turns out to be a huge jerk, and the story shifts from a romantic space opera to a lowbrow dysfunctional family sitcom very reminiscent of Married... with Children. Can Leela overlook that for the sake of the species?
Tropes
- Achievements in Ignorance: Fry tries to batter down the prison door with a bottle of champagne. He winds up popping the cork out and hitting the door release with it. Being Fry, he spends so much time celebrating that he nearly forgets to actually, y’know, leave before it closes again.
- Actor Allusion: The entire scene in which Leela and Alcazar devolve into Al and Peg Bundy, complete with Leela dressing in Peg's tacky clothes and her hair done up in the cartoonishly large bouffant, the ugly yellow couch, Leela's whiny "Al!", the Double Entendre-laden volleys of insults, and Alcazar's scummy friends acting as the obnoxious studio audience.
- Adam and Eve Plot: Leela stays with Al after she should have left because she feels it's necessary to the survival of her species.
- Advert-Overloaded Future: When entering the Internet, the gang have to fight dozens of flying pop-up ads.
- Ambiguously Human: Given that the season 4 episode "Leela's Homeworld" revealed Leela to be a Mutant rather than a Rubber-Forehead Alien, it's possible that at least some of Alcazar's other brides were Mutants as well.
- Bed Trick: Essentially what Alcazar did; he didn't pretend to be a specific other person, but pretended to belong to the womens' various species in order to have sex with them.
- Big Creepy-Crawlies: Alcazar's true form is a dog-sized cricket.
- Bigger Is Better in Bed: Leela asks Al, if he could change form, why didn't he change it in the one place that counts?
- Biting-the-Hand Humor: Al's gross hooting friends represent the studio audience.
- Brick Joke: Before heading off to Alcazar's planet, Leela dumps the popcorn shipment Planet Express was delivering, which is destroyed in a nebula. At the end of the episode, the Professor comments that she'd be working for the rest of her life to pay him back for the shipment.
- The Burlesque of Venus: One of the works of art Alcazar shows Leela is a mosaic depicting their Goddess of Beauty, depicted exactly like Venus in the famous Sandro Botticelli painting (except that she has purple hair and is a cyclops). It later revealed that there are five other identical cities on Cyclopia, each with minor differences that helps Alcazar sell the illusion to the women he seduces, one of which having a depiction of Venus with five-eyes and brown hair like hers.
- Captain Obvious:Leela: Alcazar, I used to be a baby!
- Decoy Backstory: When Leela first meets Alcazar, he tells her that they're part of an alien race called the Cyclopians, but unfortunately, their homeplanet of Cyclopia was bombed by eyeless mole people, killing everybody except Alcazar, who was working in a pool, and Leela, who was shipped off the planet as an infant before the planet was destroyed. At the end of the episode, Alcazar reveals he's a shapeshifter, not a cyclops, who made the entire story up to marry Leela (and it's implied he did the same to several other girlfriends of other species).
- Early-Bird Cameo: The gag about the Space Pope being reptilian is confirmed in later episodes and movies.
- Emoticon: One of the chat room patrons winks at Amy using the actual ";)" emote; she isn't impressed.
- Fictional Video Game: Death Factory III: The Legend of Death Factory II.
- Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: Fry slaps Bender when Bender believes he's stolen enough, snapping him out of it.
- G.I.R.L.: Bender changes his internet avatar into a female nurse via a simple drop-down menu.
- Glamour Failure: Al turns into each bride's race, before getting flustered and turning into Mix And Match Creature versions of them.
- Hospital Hottie: While partaking of a "filthy, filthy chat room", Bender disguises himself as a sexy nurse in order to scam one of the other patrons out of some money.Bender: Hi. I'm a naughty nurse, and I really need someone to talk to. $9.95 a minute!
Chatter: Oh! Uh, you're a dollar naughtier than most!
Beat
Bender: So how about them Knicks? - Hurricane of Euphemisms: The second half of the episode is full of them, with Alcazar's friends going 'Whoo!' each time.
- The Internet Is for Porn: The first three minutes of the episode are devoted to the subject, with porn sites and dirty chat rooms galore. Zoidberg is unimpressed... until he sees "Hot Sardine on Mackerel Action".Fry: Well, thanks to the internet, I'm now bored with sex.
- Is the Answer to This Question "Yes"?:Fry: Is there a place on the Internet that satisfies my lust for violence?
Bender: Is the Space Pope reptilian? - Jerkass Ball: Fry, the normally friendly if moronic guy of the group, gleefully shoots Alcazar during Leela's first meeting with another cyclops and causes him to disconnect from the game. He then feigns remorse while Leela calls him out on it, just so he can shoot her afterwards while her guard was down. Luckily for him, Alcazar was able to contact Leela again and continue with where they've left off. He quickly drops the Jerkass Ball once he sees Alcazar treating Leela terribly the morning after their stay on "Cyclopia" and tries to convince Leela to dump him.
- Last of Their Kind: Alcazar claims that he and Leela are the only two Cyclopians left. Turns out he's a shapeshifter pretending to be a cyclops just to have sex with her... and is doing the same thing to four other alien females.
- Magic Pants: Alcazar's tuxedo adjusts to whatever shape he takes. Lampshaded when he's asked why he planned five weddings on the same day: "Do you have any idea how expensive it is to rent a shapeshifting tuxedo?"
- Marry Them All: Alcazar had the same scam working on four other alien women as he had with Leela, pretending to be the last male of their kind so he could convince them to marry him.
- The Metaverse: The Planet Express team go into the internet using virtual reality goggles and mocap suits to travel inside like it was a city.
- Moment Killer: Leela first meets Alcazar while playing a video game in the internet. Before they get to know each other, Fry shoots Alcazar to win the game.
- Schmuck Bait: A "video game" you say? You fancy future people will have to explain it to me.
- Selective Obliviousness: Basically; Leela recognises that Alcazar is a jerk, but was marrying him despite that because she believed otherwise her species would die out.
- Serendipitous Survival: Exaggerated when Alcazar claims he survived the depopulation of "Cyclopia" because he was cleaning a pool at the time and the massive fireball passed over him safely.
- Sexy Discretion Shot: Happens between Leela and Alcazar after he tells her the history of their heritage.
- Sham Wedding: Alcazar has a scam working on five alien/mutant women, including Leela. He pretends to be the last male of their kind so he could convince them to marry him. All five weddings are thrown on the very same day and Fry and Bender expose him. His brides beat him up.
- Shapeshifter Swan Song: A non-lethal one, and a rare case where it appears to be done voluntarily—as all of his "brides" are beating him up, Alcazar keeps shifting into all of his other forms (sometimes mixing up traits of each) because he doesn't want them to see his real form. They do eventually beat it out of him: He's a dog-sized insect.
- Shout-Out: One of Alcazar's other wives is a Yithian.
- Space Romans: The entirety of the Cyclopian culture seems evocative of Ancient Grome, complete with their Goddess of Beauty looking like "The Birth of Venus (Botticelli)". The city of the five-eyed people (and presumably the other three cities) have a similar aesthetic, with their Goddess of Beauty having five eyes and brown hair (like Alcazar's second bride).
- Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace: Fry bursts in with Alcazar's other brides just before Leela could say the "do" of "I do".
- Stay in the Kitchen: Alcazar seems nice at first but acts increasingly sexist and controlling towards Leela. It turns out he wants women to stay at home because if they wandered too far from their mansions, they might discover the other mansions containing the other women he's seduced.
- Take That!:
- The "studio audience" for Married With Children are depicted as white trash rodents and pigs.
- The Professor mentions how it took years to get AOL connected to the internet.
- The three nerds in the chatroom are supposed to be writers Ken Keeler, Eric Kaplan, and executive producer David X. Cohen. According to Cohen on the
DVD Commentary, it was entirely Rough Draft Studio's idea.
- Teeny Weenie: Implied with Alcazar.Leela: If you can change form, why didn't you change it in the one place that counts?
[Audience hollering and cheering at her witty remark] - There Are No Girls on the Internet: Amy and Leela's chat room has some men complaining about how few women are also present. Then again, the room was clearly advertised as "filthy", and the chatters instantly clam up once Leela makes her presence known. Even in the episode proper, most of the avatars seen on the internet are male, and human for that matter (although Zoidberg was interested in a different area of the internet to the others, following a sign promoting "Sardine-on-Mackerel Action"). There does seem to be some websites based around aliens, including the aforementioned Sardine-on-Mackerel site, another advertising "Barely Legal Aliens", one about Asexual Reproduction and one called "Claw Fetish", but these might be aimed at Humans with a Race Fetish.
- Unseen Pen Pal: The Planet Express crew is on the holographic Internet when a male cyclops approaches Leela. Up till then she had never met another cyclops and knew nothing about her origins as a sewer mutant, believing herself to be an alien. Alcazar persuades her to come to their "home planet" where he tells a tale of how they're the last survivors. It all falls apart when Bender and Fry find 4 other alien women on the planet and reveal the man to be a shape-shifting cricket-man who was scamming his way into "making it with 5 weird alien babes".
- What the Hell, Hero?: Everyone participating in the video game, including Bender, glares at Fry for shooting Alcazar while Leela was in the middle of her chance meeting with another living cyclops, and then shooting Leela while she was upset and distracted, to win the game.
