Recap / Futurama S 6 E 4 Proposition Infinity

Dictated But Not Read

When her relationship with Kif starts to go sour, Amy finds herself attracted to the ultimate bad boy: Bender! Now the two are in a fight to legalize robosexual marriages.

Tropes

• All Girls Want Bad Boys: Amy's still in this a bit, much to Kif's frustrations. However, he eventually shows that he can be 'bad' in his own way to make up with her.
• Armoured Closet Gay: A variant. Preacherbot runs an anti-robosexual camp, but is a heavily closeted robosexual himself, as he's implied to get off from Bender and the other robots making out with the human dummies.
• Big "NO!": Farnsworth, who's disgusted with Bender proposing to Amy, happily states that he's glad he didn't live to see this day. After a second of thought, he checks his pulse and raises his arms to the skies yelling no.
• Blatant Lies: Leo Wong insists Amy should only come home if it's her decision, then immediately lassos her.
• Boomerang Bigot: Farnsworth campaigns against robosexual marriage because his young love cheated on him for a robot. Well, it actually turns out Farnsworth's young love was herself a robot, which causes him to instantly renounce his views on the issue.
• Bowdlerization: In American syndicated broadcasts, Farnsworth's line, "Back when I was full of piss and vinegar, and my bed wasn't..." was changed to "Back when I was a young man bursting with hair and cartilage..."
• Brick Joke: Bender's graffiting URL's butt, which gets him arrested at the beginning of the episode, and then again during the Proposition Infinity montage.
• Clownification: Hermes catches a disease called circusitis, which makes him resemble a clown; his feet grow longer, his nose turns red, his head turns chalky white, and his hair turns orange. He also sneezes handkerchiefs and when he tries to open a container of pills to treat it, they spring out of the jar, much like the classic "snake can" prank.
• Compressed Vice: Amy's taste for bad boys is only a problem in this episode.
• Cure Your Gays: Bender gets dragged (quite literally) to "Camp Rectifier" to "cure" him of his desire for humans, a clear parallel to real-life conversion "therapy".
• Damned by Faint Praise: Bender's idea of complimenting Amy is to say that of all the people he's dated, she's probably in the top ten. Amy's still touched.
• Deadline News: The reporter in the crashed hovercopter early on.
• Decoy Backstory: Professor Farnsworth is a strong advocate against Robosexuality because, in his youth, his human girlfriend Eunice left him for a robot. Then he remembers that her name was not Eunice, but Unit, and she was actually a robot. Farnsworth realizes he too was a robosexual, so he gives up the crusade.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?:
  • The episode is an allegory for the debate on homosexual marriage at the time of the episode's production. The show repeats a lot of the talking points of the pro-legalization verbatim while putting it in the mouths of the characters, but it also plays with the allegory a little by having a character off-handedly mention that gay marriage actually exists and is legal in the setting, alongside interplanetary and ghost-horse marriage.
    • The infinity signs looks like a rotated 8. California Prop 8 prompted a heated debate around marriage equality.
    • The anti-robosexual ad parodied the Gathering Storm ad from the National Organization for Marriage.
  • Once again, Bender's antenna functions like a penis, shrinking when he and Amy are caught in the act.
• Exact Words:
  • After Hermes comes down with a disease that turns him into a clown, Leela notes that she thought it only affected children. Hermes then clarifies "children of all ages".
  • Fry notes gear marks on Amy's sweatpants. Because Bender is the one wearing them.
• First-Step Fixation: While imprisoned at the start of the episode, Bender gets threatened by another inmate and decides to make himself a shiv for protection. So he pulls a chunk of wood out of his central cabinet—then pulls out a full-sized combat knife to carve the wood with.
• Hypocritical Humor: Amy says the robot-human sex pride parade is all about family-friendly fun, as a BDSM-ready Hedonismbot heartily enjoys having a pre-op transformer pour its bodily fluids all over his stomach.
• Immediate Self-Contradiction: At the prison, Kif complains to Amy that she "flirt[s] with every bad boy in sight." She tells him to quit exaggerating. However, a criminal steals URL's lightsaber and puts it next to Amy's neck while exclaiming "Nobody move, or sweet cheeks here gets it!" She then giggles and seductively tells the criminal "Oh! You're bad!"
• Lipstick Mark: Bender has a kiss mark of Amy's on his cheek.
• Look Behind You: After Preacherbot tries to rally a mob against Bender and Amy for kissing in public, Bender draws their attention by claiming he can see a single mother.
• Making Love in All the Wrong Places: Bender and Amy. It's what gets them caught by the Professor.
• Masturbation Means Sexual Frustration: Hermes makes the point that two consenting adults should feel no shame for doing anything in the dark, which Zoidberg, the most pathetic and unfortunate character on the show, annotates with "Or one!"
• Meadow Run: In Farnsworth's flashback, he and his co-worker run across a meadow.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: The radio DJ at the end of the episode is Billy West doing his Casey Kasem impersonation.
• Not-So-Innocent Whistle: Lampshaded by Bender when he realizes that the Professor's whistling means bad news. And in comes Preacherbot.
• On Three: Leela's failed attempt when they try to trap the tornado.
• Partially-Concealed-Label Gag: Bender puts one of his graffiti pieces on a traffic sign, covering it up so the message "FREEWAY ENDS AT NEXT CORNER" instead reads "FREE CORN". The Hyper-Chicken gets excited at the prospect of free corn, then gets in a car crash just off-screen.
• Pressure Point: Used by URL against the criminal who tries to hold Amy hostage.
• Robosexual: The topic of the episode deals with the controversial issue of robosexual marriage. Well, not really. It's just a metaphor for gay marriage; the episode actually kinda dismisses the idea of a robosexual when Amy singles out that she only likes Bender and isn't attracted to an emotionless wine-dispensing robot (who is still rather upset that Amy doesn't love him that way).
• Robosexuals Are Creeps: Subverted. Once robosexual marriage becomes a pretty clear gay marriage allegory, most characters become more accepting of robosexuality, with Farnsworth being the only member of the main cast unaccepting of robosexuals, and that's only because he is the one who tried to suppress his robosexual urges after a robot lover of his cheated on him with another robot.
• Secret Message Wink: Amy and Fry exchange a few winks when the latter pretends to be a suitor to secretly bail her out of having to choose a human boyfriend in front of her parents. Oblivious to the plan unfolding in front of them, Amy's parents think they're winking at each other because they're in love.
• Ship Tease: The whole episode is dedicated to giving this to Bender and Amy obviously.
• Shout-Out: We see a house swirling around the tornado.
• Speak Ill of the Dead: Morbo is not remotely sympathetic to Jim the Cameraman's death, screaming immediately after he's blown up on camera how he hated him.
• Status Quo Is God: After fighting tooth and nail against their co-workers, society, and the media to ensure that their sexual relationship is legally recognized, Bender and Amy passionately kiss, as the latter happily announces the beginning of their monogamous marriage. Bender takes a step back and repeats "Monogamous?" in confusion, only for the shot to cut to him on a beach with two fembot bimbos while Amy reunites with Kif.
• A Storm Is Coming: Spoofed, with the Farnsworth Foundation ad.
  Man: A storm is coming. A storm of robosexual marriage that will rain down on us like fire.
  Other man: It's probably a firestorm.
• Straw Character: Farnsworth is suddenly an avid supporter of traditional marriage and hates the idea of robots marrying humans. He never argues or presents an opinion on the issue and instead grumbles like an old man the whole time until the debate comes and he remembers that he is actually a robosexual, switching sides and leaving literally no one thinking robot-on-human marriage is wrong.
• Strawman News Media: Morbo's news network reports that people overwhelmingly disapprove of robo-human marriage, right before cutting to an ad from one of their biggest sponsors, an anti-robo-human marriage group.
• Strawman Political: Any characters and groups in the episode who are anti-robosexual are portrayed as old, grumpy and/or religious, with the main reason for their views being that they are old, grumpy and/or religious.
• Take That!:
  • After being pointed out that some robots are built to be robosexuals, Preacherbot responds "Don't believe those lies, son! The only lies worth believing are the ones in the Bible."
  • In general, anti-robosexuals are stand-ins for people with anti-homosexual views.
• Tempting Fate: After having been outed by their making out, Amy says everything should be fine so long as her parents don't find out. Pan out to the Professor finishing a phone conversation with Amy's parents.
• Think of the Children!: The Farnsworth Foundation ad tries doing this, but it's lacking, since they can't actually think of any negative impact legalizing robosexual marriage would have on children.
• Title Drop: The name of Amy and Bender's movement is the "Proposition Infinity."
• Teeny Weenie: During the argument between Kif and Amy at the beginning of the episode, it's implied that Kif's penis size is unimpressive.
  Amy: Stop being such a spineless jellyfish.
  Kif: You know full well that I am more closely related to the sea cucumber.
  Amy: Not where it counts.
• Tropical Epilogue: At the end of the episode, Bender is upset that Amy wanted a monogamous relationship. We then cut to him on a beach, drinking from a pineapple and flanked by two fembots.
• Unreliable Narrator: Farnsworth's flashback to the Meadow Run of him and Eunice turns out to be fake. We then see another flashback with the real Unit 47 by Farnsworth's side.

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