Recap / Futurama S 4 E 3 Love And Rocket

When you see the robot, drink!

Planet Express gets a delivery contract with Romanticorp, and Fry decides to find the perfect expression of his feelings for Leela amid the thousands of tiny candy hearts they're delivering. Meanwhile, Bender starts dating the Planet Express Ship once it gets a female voice setting. When he grows bored and dumps her, the ship takes the breakup a bit too hard...

Tropes

• Baby Talk: Farnsworth briefly forces Leela into speaking cutely with his cattle prod when she expresses her disgust about Romanticorp's owners.
  Leela: You have got to be kidding. <shock> I mean, ahhh, that's so sweet! <shock> I mean, awww, dat's scho schweet!
• Bait-and-Switch Compassion: When Leela asks Bender to reconsider how he feels about taking advantage of his girlfriend's trust, he just laughs, but then realizes she's being serious, and then laughs harder.
  Leela: Doesn't it bother you even a little to be taking advantage of your girlfriend's trust?
  [Bender bursts into laughter, then stops.]
  Bender: Oh, wait, you're serious. Let me laugh even harder.
  [He laughs even harder.]
• Big "NO!": The Ship yells one of these after getting dumped by Bender.
• Blatant Lies:
  Planet Express Ship: I saw you last night with those two ladies of the evening... Explain that!
  Bender: Okay, I like a challenge. (Stops to think) Um... no... no... ah, I got it. I'm going to be completely honest with you, Planet Express Ship. Those women you saw me with were my accountants.
  Ship: Your accountants...? Oh, I would dearly love to believe that were true... so I do.
  • And the immediate follow-up earns Bender a two-fer. Lucy Liu's head is still inside Bender's chest cavity since like 10 episodes ago!
  Liu: [when Bender's chest cabinet door suddenly swings open] Who are you talking to?
  Bender: No one, baby! Lucy Liu is the only girl for Bender!
  Liu: I love you—
  [He slams the door shut]
• Brick Joke:
  • The woman testing the wire dummies. She's seen taking one out on a Valentine's Day date at the end.
  • In the zoo, the Ship talks about the baby tapirs. This comes back at the end of the episode when Bender switches into her voice to compare himself to "a cuddly baby tapir."
• The Burlesque of Venus: Bender criticizes the Ship's conservative opinions towards nudity by asking if he would censor the Venus de Venus, a painting depicting a Horrible Gelatinous Blob as Venus in a similar pose to the Florentine painting, while being named after the sculpture Venus de Milo. The ship does not care much for it.
• The Bus Came Back: Lucy Liu has apparently been in Bender's chest the whole time.^note The lines were recorded at the same time as her dialogue for "I Dated a Robot" for use in future episodes.
• Call-Back: Bender is still carrying around Lucy Liu's head, and she still thinks they're dating.
• Casting Gag: The Ship's female voice is provided by Sigourney Weaver, famous for her science fiction roles such as Ellen Ripley and Gwen DeMarco.
• Culture Clash: Lrrr and Ndnd are utterly confused by Friends, wondering why Ross, as the largest, doesn't eat the others. Ndnd suggests that they're just saving that episode for sweeps.
• Cutting the Knot: By the end of the episode, Leela opts to just dump the candy heart cargo out into space instead of cleaning it up.
• Deadly Euphemism: Teddy Bear "Hospital". Note that the quote marks are in the episode itself.
• Epic Fail: The crew deliver a billion candy hearts to the Omicronians on behalf of Earth as a sign of peace. The candy's unpleasant taste and misspelled words cause the Omicronians to attack them.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Bender and The Professor are visibly disturbed when they find out how the Lovey Bears are made, while Amy thinks it's adorable.
• Falling-in-Love Montage: Bender and the Planet Express Ship have romantic interludes set to Bender's rendition of "Daisy Bell", fitting for a Valentine's Day Episode. However, in the scene immediately following the montage, Bender announces that he's dumping the ship.
• Fanservice Car Wash: Amy washes the ship... in a bikini!
• Girl on Girl Is Hot: When Fry tries to wash the ship, Bender (who is currently in a relationship with it), shoves him away, but when Amy does it in a bikini, Fry and Bender both watch approvingly.
• Great White Hunter: One is seen chasing after a runaway Lovey Bear, complete with a native assistant wearing a basket to hold his extra firearms.
• Heartbreak and Ice Cream: After Bender breaks up with Ship, Leela eats ice cream with her.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Fry gives up his oxygen when he sees that Leela's has run out. She's able to resuscitate him afterward.
• Hypocrite: Bender grumbles about the Ship lying about her age to him. This is well after he's cheated on her and lied about it (and also cheated on Lucy Liu's head with the Ship and lied about that, too).
• Implausible Deniability: Bender is out on a date with the Planet Express Ship when he turns to look at a sexy fembot. The Ship calls him out on it and Bender immediately says he's not, while his eyes are still fully extended.
• It's All About Me: Bender refuses to risk merging programming with the Ship because it might alter his programming.
  • Also, when Leela assures the Ship that he's taking the breakup just as hard, cue a Gilligan Cut to Bender lying in his bunk, singing a song about how great he is.
• Lemony Narrator: Zoidberg at the ending, why not?
• Literally Laughable Question: Leela asks Bender: " Doesn't it bother you even a little to be taking advantage of your girlfriend's trust?" Bender laughs, then says: "Oh, wait, you're serious. Let me laugh even harder." and does so.
• Matrix Raining Code: How the Merger of Souls mentioned below is represented.
• Merger of Souls: The Ship successfully merges her programming with Bender's in the end. Bender is unaware, and Fry and Leela have no intention of telling him.
• Moment Killer: Doctor Zoidberg's gotten really good at this.
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: Invoked by the Trope Namer himself, as he narrates how numerous couples on Earth stood together in joy, "and me, Zoidberg!"
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Bender times his dumping the Ship "perfectly" (namely doing it just when the Omicronians are trying to blow them all to bits). Fry calls him out on this, but what's worse is that Bender did it on purpose (apparently, he likes dumping someone to be as memorable and devastating as possible).
  • Leela's attempts at consoling the Ship are what prompt her to fly into a quasar.
• No OSHA Compliance: Thanks to the big Romanticorp contract, the Professor is finally able to bring Planet Express Ship up to government standards, like fixing the cracks in the dark matter reactor, or caging up that lion that'd been running loose.
• Not His Sled: When the episode recreates the "HAL reading lips" scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, one key difference rears its head:
  Planet Express Ship: Oh, if only I could read lips.
• Not Now, Kiddo: Leela to Fry, as he's trying to point out she's almost out of oxygen.
• Older Than They Look: Bender angrily notes, on beginning the programming merge with the Ship, that she's got tubes in her circuit board, having lied to him about her age.
• Planet of Hats: Zoidberg mentions two gangster planets and a cowboy world as those destroyed by the candy heart radiation.
• Poorly Timed Confession: Bender decides to break up with the Ship while the crew is trying to escape from the Omicronians. The ship is so distraught that she slams on the brakes and lets them get hit by the incoming Omicronian missiles, leaving the crew stranded in space. Later, Bender said "the moment seemed right" and he likes his break-ups to be as devastating and memorable as possible.
• Power of Love: Spoofed; When Leela dumps the thousands of candy hearts into a quasar, it creates a wave of "love radiation" that destroys many planets, but inspires romance on Earth.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: The Ship, once she starts getting "a bit less rational" and devolves into Hulk speech.
  Ship: ME. WANT. ENGULF BENDER! RAAAARGH!
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: Bender's eyes flicker red when the Ship starts speaking through him at the end.
• Remember the New Guy?: The Planet Express Ship's AI has never been seen before this episode, nor seen since. ^note Though it's possible that he/she was the autopilot that Bender was having a martini-drinking contest with in "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back".
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: The Lovey Bears: they are adorable stuffed animal toys, made by genetically engineering super-adorable little bears, raising them in a cutesy, loving environment, and then on their first birthday, finding the cutest, murdering them, and stuffing them full of fire-retardant love fluff. Even Bender and the Professor actually look unnerved after learning this (although shortly after the Professor nonchalantly stuns one that is trying to escape capture).
• Shoot the Messenger: The misspelled saccharine message on Earth's peace offering of candy hearts confuses and infuriates the Omicronians to the point where they try to kill the Planet Express crew.
• Shout-Out:
  • As they're fleeing the angry Omicronians, Fry notes the shields are at "maximum yarnell." For those who don't get it, it's a reference to a husband/wife mime team, Robert Shields and Lorene Yarnell. You can read all about the duo here.
  • The episode stops just short of being a Whole-Plot Reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey but includes tapirs merely for the reference, Bender singing "Daisy Bell", and the process for deactivating the Planet Express Ship's brain is very similar to deactivating HAL.
    • A major difference from the film is when the trio hide in the ship's showers. We see them describing their plan inaudibly, with the Ship watching, only for her to lament she can't tell what they're saying. The plan in 2001 went sour because Hal could read the crew's lips.
  • Romanticorp's wire suitors are a nod to Dr Harold Harlow's research in which wire 'mothers' which could feed young monkeys competed with plush ones they could hug.
• Sickeningly Sweethearts: The owners of Romanticorp are an overly affectionate married couple. The Professor has to repeatedly zap Leela with a cattle-prod to keep her from expressing her revulsion.
• Smash Cut: After upsetting the Omicronians, the scene cuts to Fry, Bender and Leela escaping their fleet in the Ship.
• Stepford Smiler: Enforced by the Professor, who tells the crew that in order to get the Romanticorp contract they'll have to prove they're not "bitter husks of humanity who long ago abandoned hope of finding love in this lifetime", before expressly telling Leela she'll have to act.
• Take That!:
  • Lrrr and Ndnd complain about Friends, and only bother seeing Planet Express because the episode they're watching is Joey-heavy.
  • On tasting the candy hearts, Lrrr and Ndnd start gagging, declaring them "chalky and unpleasant". Leela later dumps them into a quasar.
• Took a Level in Dumbass: The Ship gets increasingly irrational as Leela deactivates her brain.
• Totally Trusting Love Interest: Bender starts dating the Planet Express Ship, when she has a femme personality/voice installed. After a while, he decides to cheat on her, jerkass that he is. When she catches him dating two other fembots, he gives a lame excuse, which she immediately accepts, since she's a computer and therefore able to control her thoughts on the fly.
  Bender: I want to be completely honest...those two women were...my accountants!
  Planet Express Ship: Oh, Bender, I deeply want to believe that...so I do!
• Unexplained Recovery: Before the commercial break, we see the Planet Express Ship caught in the explosion of the Omicronian missiles; after the break, Leela says they survived with minimal damage, but it's never explained how, or why the Omicronians stopped attacking them.
• Valentine's Day Episode: The second of the series.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: At the end of the episode, the Ship merges with Bender and walks away happily... which is never brought up again.
• What Is This Emotion You Humans Call Wuv?:
  Lrrr: Surely you mean "love"?
  Ndnd: No, "wuv", with an Earth "w". Behold!
  Lrrr: This concept of wuv confuses and infuriates us!!
• X Days Since: The establishing shot of Omicron Persei 8 has a caption showing the days since it last invaded Earth that updates from 246 to 247.
• Yandere: The Ship goes nuts when Bender breaks up with her. And by that we mean, "Flies the ship towards a quasar in order to be fused with Bender" nuts.

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