Recap / Futurama S 4 E 12 The Sting

A By-Product of the TV Industry

A mission to collect honey from deadly space bees apparently leads to Fry's sting-induced death. Leela is wracked with remorse, until Fry visits her in her dreams, and Leela's sense of reality becomes warped.

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Tropes present:

• All Just a Dream: Most of the episode, including Fry's death, is a dream Leela has while in a bee venom-induced coma.
• Arc Words: Fry's "Just wake up, Leela" turns out to be him consoling Leela in the hospital while she's in a coma.
• Asleep for Days: Leela's coma lasted for two weeks.
• Bait-and-Switch: At first, it seems intuitive that Fry, who was impaled through the stomach, would die and Leela, who only got scratched, would survive. After The Reveal, we find out that Fry was actually easily patched up by the 31st century's advanced medical technology, whereas Leela got a huge dose of poison from the tip of the stinger that sent her into a coma.
• Bee Afraid: The bees are nightmarish creatures. The poison in their stingers kills people by digesting them alive from the inside.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Invoked deliberately twice to foreshadow the episode is all happening in a dream. One scene opens with Bender inexplicably on fire which never gets explained, and then there's the Disney Acid Sequence Leela witnesses.
• Blatant Lies: After listening to the black box recording of the old crew's horrible, horrible deaths, Leela turns it off and claims she couldn't make out the recording because there was too much static.
• Break the Haughty: Leela's pride results in Fry apparently getting killed by a Space Bee, and her having to deal with the grief.
• Bullet Proof Human Shield: Averted as a plot point. The fact the stinger was long and fast enough to stab Fry through, leaving him simply stabbed while Leela got all the deadly venom and spent two weeks comatose.
• Call-Back: Terry the cryogenist, the first character to greet Fry when he arrived in the future in "Space Pilot 3000", is also the last character to talk to Fry at this funeral.
  Terry: ("Space Pilot 3000") Welcome! To the world of tomorrow!
  Terry: ("The Sting") Farewell from the world of tomorrow!
• Catapult Nightmare: Leela wakes up from her dreams by shooting up suddenly, which sends a sleeping Nibbler flying.
• Comfort Food: When Leela feels sad about Fry's death, she ends up taking spoonfuls of the honey.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The plot of the Professor's previous crew bring killed by space bees references a gag from the first episode "Space Pilot 3000", where he gave Fry, Leela and Bender their career chips from his old crew from a folder marked "Contents of space wasp's stomach".
  • Fry falls in the jelly, and panics because he can't swim in jelly. "Fry and the Slurm Factory" had already shown Fry can't swim.
  • Several of Fry's past girlfriends show up at his funeral, including Kug from "Amazon Women in the Mood", Michelle from "The Cryonic Woman", Morgan Proctor from "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back", the 21st century girl from "Love's Labour's Lost in Space", Petunia from "Put Your Head on My Shoulders", and even the radiator he said he made out with (which he mistook for "the Radiator Woman from the Radiator Planet") in "The Lesser of Two Evils". Gunther from "Mars University", the Neptunian elves from "A Tale of Two Santas", Chester A. Arthur's head from "The Day The Earth Stood Stupid", and Seymour's fossilized body from "Jurassic Bark" also appear.
  • At Fry's funeral, the aforementioned Kug remarks that Fry "did good snu-snu", to which every other ex just goes "eh". Fry's implied lacklustre performance in bed was a blink-and-you'll-miss-it remark from Amy back in "Time Keeps On Slippin'".
  • Some of the objects in Leela's memory box of Fry include a fridge magnet from "The Series Has Landed", Fry's first mustache from "The Cryonic Woman", the flower Fry gave her in "The Why of Fry", and a spoon from when Fry was emperor of Trisol in "My Three Suns".
• Cuteness Proximity: Leela takes the baby queen bee partly because of how cute it is, which is how the team's problems start, as she doesn't even consider how dangerous it is.
• Digging Yourself Deeper: When Bender insults the space bees by calling them fat, he attempts to save face by saying he was only talking about "Fatso there". Unfortunately, it ended up being the queen.
• Disney Acid Sequence: The "Bee Happy" number is a trippy musical number Leela dreams up, where a bee stings her friends and causes them to inflate and explode. There's also random dance and rollerskating scenes. Even for an already trippy episode, it's very random.
  Leela: Were you singing just now?
  Bender: No, I was just telling you not to worry. I'm not allowed to sing. Court order.
• Doomed Predecessor: The Planet Express crew is sent to retrieve honey from an extremely dangerous space bee hive, a mission that claimed the lives of the Professor's previous crew. The crew goes on Leela's insistence, as she wants to prove them to be a better crew than the previous ones. While in the hive, they find the wreck of the previous Planet Express ship, and within it a recording of its captains' last words... which consists of a nearly verbatim repeat of Leela's previous claim before being cut off by loud buzzing and terrified screaming. The recording also implies that previous crew's predecessors met a similar fate.
• Dream Tells You to Wake Up: Fry died to save Leela from a giant-killing bee from space. Leela constantly blames herself, and keeps dreaming with Fry, who always ends the dream suddenly telling her to wake up. In the end, she does wake up... from a coma, and the nested Dream Within a Dream. Fry was fine, next to her bed, and repeating all the time "you have to wake up".
• Dream Within a Dream: Leela imagines to have dreams within her fever dream.
• Driven to Suicide: Of sorts. Leela downs two spoonfuls of space honey, knowing the next will make her never wake up. Subverted when we learn she was in a coma, leaving the true effects of the honey ambiguous.
• Epic Fail: The team did plan ahead by bringing jetpacks to escape with, but Fry put his on upside-down.
• Fantasy Keepsake: Subverted with Fry's jacket. When Leela sees it in daylight, it's her own jacket.
• Fever Dream Episode: Leela is stung by deadly space bees, putting her in a venom-induced coma where she has trippy nightmares about Fry's death.
• Foreshadowing: When the stinger goes through Fry, it can briefly be seen piercing Leela's stomach. In the next scene, her shirt is torn but her skin unbroken, and she remarks that it barely touched her. This is an early hint that it did pierce her, but she was probably already knocked out from the poison.
• Good News, Bad News: Averted: because of how dangerous the space honey mission is, the Professor doesn't even use his "Good news, everyone!" Character Catchphrase.
• Heroic BSoD: Leela goes into a deep one when her efforts to appear brave and her ignorance of the dangers of the hive ended with Fry's death, especially since he died protecting her, which eventually leads her to insanity.
• Hope Spot: At one point, Fry is resurrected with an It Runs on Nonsensoleum explanation typical of the show at its goofiest, and everyone prepares to resume normalcy. Then Leela wakes up again.
• Hug and Comment: The ending, where Leela discovers she was in a coma for two weeks and Fry sat by her bed the whole time.
  Leela: [hugs Fry] You could really use a shower.
  Fry: You, too.
• I Resemble That Remark!: When Bender insults the bees (in their own language!), he tries to backpedal by saying they're not all fat, "just Fatso there." One bee then seeths that he insulted their fat Queen.
• Idiot Ball: Bender declares he's sick of shaking his booty at the bees, calling them fat jerks. This'd be dumb enough, but for whatever reason he also decides to shake his booty while doing so, meaning the bees catch his insult.
• Immediate Self-Contradiction:
  Leela: What's the mission?
  Farnsworth: Collecting honey. Ordinary honey.
  Leela: That doesn't sound so dangerous.
  Farnsworth: This is no ordinary honey!
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Fry gets hit with the brunt end of this trope thanks to a space bee but manages to survive. It's even stated that 31st century medicine has an easier time fixing raw physical trauma like this than the massive dose of poison Leela got from the tip.
• Inflating Body Gag: In the "Bee Happy" number, the bee stings various members of Planet Express and causes their bodies to briefly inflate before exploding.
• Instantly Proven Wrong: Leela gets attacked by the baby bee from behind after proclaiming "I can smell danger a mile away."
• Insult Backfire: The Professor tells Fry and Bender they're not good enough to go to the Space Bee hive. While this does provoke Leela, Fry and Bender are totally okay with it.
  Fry: Yaaay!
  Bender: Not good enough!
• Ironic Echo: Leela is encouraged to finish the mission, telling the professor "it'll take more than a few deadly deadly bees to stop us from doing our job". Later on in the hive, they find the remains of the previous Planet Express Ship, and they listen to the black box:
  Crew member: Captain! The bees have us surrounded! Oh the professor was right, we're not as good as his old crew.
  Captain: Well I aim to prove him wrong. It'll take more than a few deadly deadly bees to—OH LORD!
  (screams can be heard on the black box as Fry, Leela, and Bender wince in horror. Leela stops the tape.)
  Leela: Uhh...I couldn't make that out. Too much static.
• It's All My Fault: Leela has a huge amount of guilt that Fry died blocking a sting meant for her.
  Leela: He died because of me!
  Farnsworth: No, no, no, no, no... (Loudly, to Bender) I'm lying to make her feel better!
  • Then the irony is that Fry was feeling the same way in the real world, trying to get Leela to wake up because he accidentally landed her in a coma.
• Laughing Mad: Leela starts laughing in an intoxicated manner when she tastes the space honey for the first time, then falls asleep.
• Lousy Lovers Are Losers: At Fry's funeral with all of his ex-girlfriends, only Dumb Muscle Kug seems to think positively of his sexual prowess when she remarks that Fry "did good snu-snu", as every other exes respond by just going "eh".
• Made Myself Sad: Trope Namer. When Leela proclaims Fry still exists, Farnsworth taunts back that Fry still exists — as a frozen corpse floating in space. He laughs, then remarks that he made himself sad.
• Made of Explodium: One of the bees crashes into the side of the hive and explodes.
• The Mad Hatter: Leela, by the end of her apparent descent into madness.
  Leela: Okay, I'm insane! But I'm still sane enough to know it.
• Major Injury Underreaction: Played with. When Fry and Leela get stung, Leela's injury seems to be superficial: in her words, "a boo-boo, tops". As such, nobody in the room acts like it's a big deal, including her. Then it turns out that sting injected her with enough venom to put her in a coma for two weeks, nearly killing her outright. Fry's reaction to his own injury is played straight, since it amounts to a large gaping hole in his stomach that even though 31st-century technology can very easily treat such a thing, he still needed a spleen transplant and bandages.
• Milking the Giant Cow: Terry does this gesture when Fry's coffin is sent into space.
• Mind Screw: The second and third acts of the episode have a lot more weird visuals than previous episodes due to being a Fever Dream Episode. This includes randomly changing settings, characters' voices switching around, strange musical numbers, bees showing up out of nowhere, and a random Shout-Out to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
• The Monolith: Fry's coffin is framed like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Leela experiences the "stargate" effect when she opens it.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Leela triggers the whole mission despite the warnings not to when neither Fry or Bender want to go. Leela later takes the baby queen bee with them. In short, the entire conflict of the episode can be blamed on her, and she's very much aware of it.
  • Fry's Heroic Sacrifice itself. After getting between Leela and the bee, he appears to have taken the brunt of the sting intended for her, being fully skewered by the stinger so that Leela, standing behind him, only gets pricked by the tip...which turns out to be the worse injury by far, since the tip contained all of the stinger's venom. Had Fry not intervened, she would likely have taken the same damage he did and made a quick recovery; as it is, the venom puts her in a coma from which it's predicted that she will never wake up.
• No Dead Body Poops: The aversion is discussed at the most inopportune time, Fry's eulogy.
  Preacher: Fry's death took only fifteen seconds, but the pain was so intense it felt like fifteen years! And, it goes without saying, caused him to empty his bowels.
• Noodle Incident: Bender says he isn't allowed to sing because of a court order. How this came about is not explained (but since this is a dream, it might not count).
• Off with His Head!: Leela almost gets decapitated by the Professor's guillotine.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: The professor knows just how dangerous the mission to collect space honey is, and even says "Bad news, everyone!", a spin on his Character Catchphrase, which puts into perspective just how dangerous it really is.
• Quip to Black: After Leela comes out of her coma and finds Fry stayed by her side the whole time, they hug, and as the credits start to roll, they both comment on each other's need of a shower.
• Out of the Frying Pan: After Bender inadvertently says "I'm sick of shaking my booty for these fat jerks" in bee language and enrages the space bees, he tries to calm them down by saying they weren't all fat, "just 'Fatso' there". 'Fatso' happens to be the queen bee.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Kug of Amazonia tearfully exclaiming Fry "Do good Snu-Snu" while every other woman Fry slept with (including the radiator) go "Ehhh." Considering it's Leela's dream, their low opinion of Fry's sexual stamina is most likely an indicator of Leela's dislike of them.
  • While pawning all of the Dream!Fry's possessions, Dream!Bender kept the present addressed to Leela.
• Please Wake Up: A variant; the reason why Fry was telling Leela to wake up was that she was in a coma due to the venom. He even starts sobbing towards the end of her dream. Fortunately, she does wake up in the hospital, and they hug each other in relief.
• Reverse Psychology: The Professor has an M.O. of goading his crews into going to the Space Bees hive by stating they're not as good as his old crew.
• Rewatch Bonus: Some of Dream!Fry's lines only make sense when you realize that Leela's in a coma. For example:
  Fry: [as nothing but a floating mouth] I don't know if you can hear me, Leela, so I'm just going to keep making noises to make sure you know I'm here! [proceeds to make a LOT of loud, unintelligible gibberish]
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Fry is still alive, and he really is communicating with Leela. That's because Leela has been dreaming ever since she got stung, and Fry, who has been talking to her the entire time, easily survived the sting while Leela went into a coma.
• Sanity Slippage: Seems as if Leela is going through one.
  Leela: I'll find Fry's coffin, get his corpse and keep it under my mattress to remind me that he's really dead. That'll prove I'm not insane!
• Series Continuity Error: Way back in the pilot, the Professor had removed his old crew's career chips from a folder labelled Space Wasps stomach contents. Handwaved on the commentary, where they claim the Space Bees did kill the old crew, and were then killed by Space Wasps. Then again, the Professor is senile, so he probably mistook Space Bees for Space Wasps.
• Ship Tease: Fry already made his feelings for Leela known. Leela has constantly rejected Fry's feelings, but this episode hints that she is starting to reciprocate those feelings.
• Shout-Out:
  • Scruffy playing "I'm Walking on Sunshine" on the bagpipes while Fry's coffin is shot into space parodies Spock's funeral from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
  • At the beginning of Leela's second dream, Fry initially appears with just his mouth and hair visible, similar to the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland.
  • Zoidberg's portion of the musical number parodies the 1968 Elvis Presley comeback special.
  • Leela's experience opening Fry's coffin parodies the stargate scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
  • "Sweet three-toed sloth of the ice planet Hoth!"
  • The entire plot of invading a dangerous alien hive to take space honey/royal jelly and take a Queen home brings to mind the various Aliens novels where Weyland-Yutani or a competitor tries the same thing with the Xenomorphs. It doesn't end well there either.
• Speak Ill of the Dead: After (barely) escaping the hive of angry bees with their lives, Leela badmouths the old crew who perished on the same mission by stating that "the only things they did better than [them] were suck and die!"
• Starfish Language: The bees communicate by dancing, though in practice it looks more like they just communicate by buzzing.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Fry has had an Unbroken Vigil for weeks watching Leela, who was in a coma. When she wakes up, they hug each other in relief that the other is alive. It turns out neither of them has bathed, for obvious reasons, and smells bad.
• Taking the Bullet: Fry jumps in front of the space bee before it stings Leela. The stinger barely scrapes Leela, while it completely pierces through Fry's body, killing him. In actuality though, the stinger didn't kill Fry, but completely went through him, causing all the poison to end up in Leela and put her in a coma directly afterwards.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: The second and third acts of the episode take place inside Leela's brain while she's comatose and hallucinating from space bee venom. Even though we don't know this until the end of the episode, there are still several scenes beforehand where she appears to be hallucinating (mixing up people's voices, imagining a musical number, etc.) due to the effects of eating space honey.
• Thrown Out the Airlock: Bender throws the baby queen out of the ship's airlock after it stings Fry and Leela (where it gets splattered by a space truck), even though without its sting it was rendered harmless.
• Unbroken Vigil: Fry sits by Leela's bedside for her entire two-week coma.
• Venus Is Wet: Venus is depicted as a lush, tropical swamp with red water and purple and blue plants during Leela's dream.
• Waxing Lyrical: Part of the dialogue in the conversation with Hermes about the honeycombs are the lyrics to the 1980s jingle for Honeycomb cereal.
• Will They or Won't They?: This is part of the last FOX season building up to the whole Fry/Leela thing.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: Just when Leela was about to eat the third spoon of space honey which would make her sleep forever to be with Fry in her dreams, she's stopped by a photo of Fry who encouraged her to not doing this.

  Leela: [crying] Then what am I supposed to do?

  Fry's Photo: Fight it!

  Leela: [crying] I can't!

  Fry's Photo: You can! The Leela I know doesn't give up this easily.

• You Are Fat: One of the funniest dialogues in the episode would be Bender saying this about the bees.
  Bender: I'm sick of shaking my booty for these fat jerks!
  [bees advance on Bender while giving him a Death Glare]
  Bender: [understandably panicked] I didn't mean you're all fat, just Fatso there! [points to the Queen]
  Bee: [Buzzing with subtitles] He insulted our fat queen!
  Queen Bee: [Buzzing with subtitles] You try keeping your figure after 10,000 kids!
• You Must Be Cold: Fry covers Leela with his jacket in her dream when they ride across the snowy landscape. The jacket then becomes a Fantasy Keepsake after Leela wakes up.

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