Futurama/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Futurama

  • In "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles" if Fry is over 1,000 years old why did he de-age the same as the others, since they go back by years not by ages (since the professor did not go through the same ages as the others), why did Fry age at the same rate as the others?
    • There's a difference between biological age and chronological age. His biological age stopped progressing during the freeze. The real question is why Bender's head aged back ate the same rate. Of course it could all be answered with averages and ratios.
  • In the episode "The Duh-Vinci Code," the characters meet Da Vinci himself, and more importantly, recover the "Last Supper" painting and look at it. But in Bender's Big Score, Bender steals the "Mona Lisa" painting and is asked "Did Da Vinci give you any trouble?" to which he replies, "Let's just say he won't make it to The Last Supper." I always thought that meant he killed Leonardo, but it at least means that he erased the creation of "The Last Supper" from history. So, what's up...?
    • Paradox correcting time code.
    • If not, then the explosions and dimension rip at the end of "Bender's Big Score" fixed it.
    • Leo painted The Last Supper before the Mona Lisa. Bender Did Not Do the Research.
    • I always figured it was just a pun of sorts. "The Last Supper" in this case referring to Da Vinci's own last supper.
  • In "The Mutants Are Revolting". . . Seriously? The mutants' acts of protest could easily be declared WAR CRIMES. Yet, they get their freedom with a "Sure, why not?"? The fuck? No military backlash? Nothing?
    • Well, they didn't really do much except make a stink about it. Plus the facts that we don't really know how civil uprisings work in the 31st Century, and the general public is pretty easily swayed by equality causes in the Futurama verse according to "Proposition Infinity."
      • They switched a fire hydrant with a fuel pump. Then, they brought the sewage to the surface. That would have caused all manners of disease to spread throughout the city. I understand that it wouldn't have mutated the surface dwellers, but you can't do that without expecting at least a few dozen casualties.
    • I think the people accepted the poetic justice that the mutants had been forced to live in sewage for decades (centuries?), so is it really so bad for the mutants to force the humans to live in sewage for few days? I think the only odd thing is how quickly people accept the mutant revolts, but it's a 22 minute show. Also the police and military are pretty incompetent in the Futurama universe, so they wouldn't have helped much.
    • It's been long established that Mayor Poopenmeyer is easily swayed by anyone with a dynamic personality.
    • As for the casualties, the show has a frequent theme of deaths being Somebody Else's Problem.
    • Military backlash? When in the show have Zap Brannigan and the Earth military ever actually WON a fight? They surrendered to a faked alien invasion! They were probably afraid the mutants would win if it came to a fight.
  • Why program a robot to feel pain? (I know, I know, Rule of Funny, but even the creators get mad about things like Hedonism Bot and the Don Bot. I bet their answer would be something like "He can feel pain far more efficiently than our puny human nerves.)
    • So bad robots can be punished in Robot Hell
    • To cut maintenance costs, possibly.
    • The reason why pain evolved in animals is that it is useful for stopping the animal from repeatedly doing something harmful - if sticking your hand in a fire hurts the first time, you probably won't do it a second time. The robots' designers probably thought along these lines and made robots that didn't want to damage themselves.
    • Looks at header note, then reads first IJBM, cries himself to sleep.
      • This may be an animated comedy series, and it may be set in the 31st Century, but nonetheless David X. Cohen has insisted that the show's writing staff is determined to avoid the "Plotholes are okay because it's just a cartoon" mindset. In light of that, it seems like there's a good chance that if someone doesn't understand something on the show - or doesn't see any possible justification for it within the rules of the show's universe - there's a real explanation for it out there. It doesn't sound as though the writers are prone to saying, "This makes no sense, but what the hell - Rule of Funny." (Also, in the past, when the writers have used illogical plots because they're funny, they've lampshaded it, like the comments the characters made about Bender's cigar burning Zoidberg's underwater home.)
        • Well FWIW, they did lampshade it. It just took them five more years. And remember that Rule of Funny is a subjective trope. I for one found it hilarious that robots could feel pain, even though there would be no logical reason to program them that way. If you didn't, well, that's humor for you. EDIT: And of course, despite the writers' determination to avoid the "Plotholes are okay because it's just a cartoon" mindset, they still did it anyway from time to time. See for instance "Lethal Inspection" which shows Bender rolling off the Momcorp. production line as an infant-sized robot and being inspected by Inspector #5 aka Hermes, which doesn't square with an earlier episode where Bender is shown coming off the production line as an adult-size robot and Inspector #5 is nowhere to be seen.
    • In "Lethal Inspection", we learn that robots can't truly die -- if their physical body is damaged beyond repair, their mind is just downloaded into a new body. When the crew bring up the Fridge Logic of this, Bender just tells them he's a drama queen.
      • It still makes sense to program robots to feel pain and want to avoid damage even in these circumstances. New robot bodies are presumably expensive.
        • No, still doesn't make sense. It's one thing to program a robot with the ability to sense when something is damaging its body. It's another thing entirely to program a robot to actually feel physical discomfort when something damages its body. I'm going with the "so bad robots can be tortured in Robot Hell" theory.
      • The robot needs to be able to sense when it's taking damage, but for this to be any use it also needs to be programmed so as to want to avoid that sensation where possible (with the further complication that they may want to accept some damage if the damage is sufficiently low and the reward is sufficiently high). That's basically pain right there, and considering that Futurama robots tend to act with something like human behaviour it makes sense that they would respond to pain / negative-utility-generated-in-response-to-physical-damage in a similar way to humans. Once again, this is basically the same reason why humans and other animals feel pain - "Hmm... this lump of coal I just picked up is very hot..." is not as effective a way of avoiding damage as "ARRGH!!! HOT! HOT!" *Drops coal*
  • How old is Mom, and how old are her sons? She had an affair with the Professor when they were apparently at least middle-aged, possibly older. (Her hair was already white and he was balding.) So they must be of roughly comparablne ages - even if she's ten years younger than he is, she'd still be damn old. She recounts the story of the affair to her sons as if they don't know it, so they must not have been born yet or were at least too young to be aware of it. Yet they don't seem that old - maybe in their thirties. While I suppose we can imagine futuristic fertility treatments, is Mom of all people really going to randomly decide to bear three kids in her dotage?
    • The Professor is over a century old. And artificial wombs.
    • The Professor doesn't look over a century and a half old, by 20th-21st century standards, and the older two siblings could easily be in their 40s, if not all three, by 21st century standards. The possibility exists that they're older than they look, and anti-aging processes have advanced since The Professor's and Mom's time. Especially since, in flashbacks between 60-80 years ago, the Professor is shown with orange and only partially-receded hair.
    • It's worth noting that the older a woman gets, the greater the chance that any children she gives birth to will be born with mental disabilities such as autism or Down's Syndrome. Mom's sons also seem to get progressively dumber as they get younger (i.e. the eldest seems reasonably intelligent if a bit of a bootlicking mama's boy, while the youngest is quite obviously suffering from some form of mental retardation). Coincidence?
    • It's worth noting that ten years have passed since Fry was defrosted, and no one has aged at all. Since Dwight and Conrad don't age either it could just be Comic Book Time, but it isn't unreasonable that there's some freaky anti-ageing treatment going around.
      • Of course it's not Comic Book Time. Fry was STILL frozen in 1999 and awoken in 2999 as of the movies, and the first one was set in 3007 IIRC.
        • Fry's time travel duplicate in Bender's Big Score aka Lars was shown to be noticeably aged by 2012. In the new episodes, it's 3011 and Fry still looks 25.
      • Said time travel duplicate had also spent a good chunk of those 12 years on a Narwhaling boat in the arctic, and then was nearly blown up, while Fry Prime has had full access to the kind of future medicine that can keep heads alive in jars for thousands of years. It's not the years, it's the mileage.
    • Humans might just have longer lifespans and age more slowly in the future. I don't know about Fry though.
      • Fry could use cosmetics to hide his age.
  • In "Rebirth" how did Zapp Brannigan become a head on skeleton guy like the rest of the characters. Everyone else had protective bubbles around their heads, but he probably didn't. Also, how would the Professor get Zapp's body? Also, why did Kif go back to working for Zapp afterwards? And for that matter, was Kif even shown getting rebirthed? I mean, he was on the Planet Express ship when it crashed, right?
    • Kif is shown being reborn during Fry's comment of "And the others!"
    • How do we know he didn't? I don't remember seeing the inside of Zapp's ship in the moments before the crash.
    • They probably installed defenses in order to deal with Zapp's recklessness.
  • Who was flying the ship at the end of "Time Keeps on Slippin'"? The autopilot's good, but that good? And was it even on?
    • Duh, Fry. After his angst moments, being the colossal idiot he is, then had a "Oh crap who's driving the ship?!" moment and ran over to the controls.
    • The ship has been shown to have AI. Surely it would know how to get back to Earth.
  • Why didn't Fry use the canned anchovies to clone some more? For that matter, why didn't somebody else do it long ago?
    • Zoidberg ate the leftover pizza before they had a chance to, and there were only two verified cans of anchovies in existence, so Fry and the Professor might have been the first combination of people to know about the anchovies, want them, and care about cloning.
    • Because apparently nobody but Fry and the Docapodians actually like anchovies, and they're all too busy juggling idiot balls to care.
    • Can you even clone something that's been killed, frozen, and sealed in a can for at least 7,000 years?
      • 700 years, yes you probably can. And Mom thought Fry would clone them but he was to focused on eating them to think 2 seconds ahead.
    • Fry being an idiot probably has something to do with it.
  • The Futurama episode "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles" has all of the cast turned into teenagers by tar, and an attempted cure just spreads the tar throughout their bodies, making them continuously younger until they'll go through "pre-life" and die. They find a "Fountain of Aging" which changes them back to adults, but that doesn't explain why they quit getting younger.
    • Also, Bender's head is 900+ years old at that point and his body only ~5. Why are they de-ageing at the same rate as everyone else?
    • Well Bender wasn't actually reverting through previous ages - as shown before, he was 'born' as a fully assembled adult robot, and he was just progressing back through some theoretical child forms present in his "RNA." So since the fact that he was de-aging made no sense whatsoever anyway, I think we can probably forgive the writers that it made slightly even less sense.
    • The Fountain of Aging was filled with anti-chronitons which destroyed the chronitons in the tar.
    • Real Answer: Bender's part was played for laughs.
    • Wasn't the whole episode revealed to just be a story told by Pazuzu(sp?) That's what I told myself, anyway.
      • It was, but it could have been a true story told by Pazuzu.
    • Bender was built as a fully functioning adult robot, according to Lethal Inspection, thought he seems to "Grow" to adult size in at least 3 months.
    • Also, it's possible that the Chronitons age proportionately.
    • The tar washed away in the fountain.
  • Why is it that no one seems to remember (or care) that Fry and Bender are both bazillionaires from their deal with Fishy Joe?
    • They probably wasted all their money on ridiculous stuff shorty after making millions. Also, it is likely that Fishy Joe later decided to change the deal that he made.
    • Or they got sued for endangering the Earth like that, or Bender stole it all for himself and did whatever the hell he does with all the stuff he steals.
    • Fry found another can of anchovies at auction and finally got his damn pizza.
    • Being the colossal dumb asses that they are, Fry and Bender probably signed a deal that got them screwed out of every single penny the Popplers were worth. Not to mention the whole parents coming down in a roaring rampage of revenge would kind of kill any sales.
    • Maybe they had to pay reparations to the Omicronians. For an aggressive race with a hair-trigger temper, they took mass infanticide pretty well.
      • I always assumed that the Omicronians just didn't have the same level of respect for their poppler aged young. This makes some sense since they apparently just fertilize their egg clutches on a nursery planet and let them mature on their own. Humans (and most mammals) are very attached to individual infants due to the large resource investment required during gestation. A species that lays large clutches of fertilized eggs would probably be less concerned with individual well being.
  • In the episode "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings", why didn't Leela just marry the Robot Devil and then divorce him? That way Fry could have kept the hands and he and Leela could have still been together.
    • She would have got a lousy divorce settlement. Hell has all the lawyers.
    • In the words in Anna Russell: "You can do anything in an opera as long as you sing it!" Leela couldn't improvise a verse describing her divorce.
      • Furthermore, wasn't Robosexual Marriage still illegal when that episode happened?
        • Why should the Devil care if something's illegal? Also, there might have been a fine-print clause that forbade her from divorcing him or something (Hell does have all the lawyers, afterall).
    • On another topic: how could Leela understand the Devil's deal after she went deaf?
      • If you watch the scene carefully, the Robot Devil uses hand gestures to get his point across, and Leela says a few things that only make sense if she's following these rather than the actual words (paraphrased from memory - Devil: "OK, just the one hand." *Points to Leela's right hand* Leela: "You want my right hand?"). The DVD includes the first draft of the animation for that episode and the scene in question is a bit longer here making the joke more obvious, for example when the Devil points to his ears Leela misinterprets this as asking her to sit on his head.
    • On yet another topic: Fry got replacement hands in a matter of minutes on one occasion. Why couldn't Leela do the same thing for her hearing? And as another thing, she wouldn't immediately know she was deaf either after Bender's blast, or simply deafened briefly.
      • Because Leela, despite viewing herself as being the sensible, intelligent one (and occasionally actually being written that way) is actually just as big of an idiot as everyone else in the show. She panicked and went stupid.
  • In The Movie, how did Fry get that tattoo on his butt in the first place?
    • It's tough to tell what "in the first place" even means when you're in a Stable Time Loop.
    • It is it's own causality, it exist because Bender took it off Lars, and stuck it on Fry. Fry is in a similar deal himself, being his own grandfather.
    • This is known as an ontological paradox, in which a piece of information (the time code) is used to bring about its own existence. I.E., the characters know something because it came from the future, and it came from the future because the future versions of themselves know it, and the future versions of themselves know it because they know it in the past, which they do because oh no I've gone cross-eyed.
      • It's a paradox-correcting time code.
  • In 'The Beast with a Billion Backs' where the heck where the Nibblonians?!
    • They hopped to a safer universe at the end of Bender's Big Score.
  • Okay, so Fry is his own grandfather. That means he's also Yancy's grandfather, since, being full brothers, they have the same grandfather. So that means Professor Farnsworth is not merely Fry's X-greats-grandnephew, but his X+ 2-greats-grandson. So that means...wait, does that even mean anything?
    • Actually, if you consider his nephew (Philip J. Fry who was the first to land on Mars), it may make a case for Fry's decendants, sharing his odd DNA quirk, are genetically programmed for greatness. This may very well stem from the fact that Fry is destined to save the universe, so yeah, his descendants are gonna be awesome as well. (This explains how Prof. Farnsworth is a genius, despite being slightly psychotic, and umpteen years old (160, I believe). Since we never see any more of his descendant, it may very well be that having Fry for a great, great, great, etc something gives you a chance at some form of awesomeness. Furthermore, it might very well be that Fry's lucky clover, in fact, enhances this effect, perhaps emitting some form of radiation which interacts with his unique brain-waves to produce an effect not unlike the worms and oh no I've gone crosseyed.
  • Why doesn't the Earth's military just destroy Santa once and for all? He's just one robot.
    • Nixon is probably poker buddies with him.
    • Because Zapp Brannigan is preoccupied with the imminent threat of the deadly Gandhi people and the ever unbiased Neutrals. God help us all if those races were left unchecked.
    • A reliable boogeyman probably does wonders for keeping the Earth populace the morons that they are. Look at how easily they went and smashed the Ball Bouncing planet?
    • In the comic, Santa agrees to let the Earth military appear to defeat him every Christmas in exchange for a kickback. This allows Nixon to put on an annual show of keeping Earth safe. The Robot Mafia was also involved somehow.
    • You mean the military that treats Zapp Brannigan like the reincarnations of Sun Tzu and Napoleon combined?
      • Sunpoleon? I love that guy!
    • Because that would be very naughty!
  • Does anyone on the Futurama staff actually know what a paradox is? The one Leela tries to use on Santa is more of an unpleasant statement that might create a pair of separate orders contradicting each other, which is a paradox in the way saying, "Eat that fish. No! Wait! Don't eat that fish!" is a paradox. And in Bender's Big Score . . . well, let's not even get into that.
    • paradox-correcting time code, bitch.
    • The writers being self-admitted "nerdlingers", almost certainly. In fact virtually every question on this page could be answered with "Rule of Funny".
    • I agree everything her is either "Rule of Funny" or paradox correcting time code
    • That still doesn't explain Leela's paradox utterly failing to actually be a paradox.
      • To be fair,she still has a point. Since Robot Santa is naughty,and he's designed to destroy the naughty,he should logically destroy himself.It failed because Santa regards himself as nice.The real Fridge Logic is that it isn't a paradox,yet Leela says it is.
      • He was programmed to judge naughty vs nice. He was given a set of parameters to judge by; it's not his fault they were set incorrectly. When someone is judged naughty, he was given a set of actions to perform. (Note the spikes that emerge from the puff on his hat when he switches from nice to mean mode). He is not naughty; he is performing within parameters.
    • The Other Wiki defines a paradox as, quote, "a seemingly true statement or group of statements that lead to a contradiction or a situation which seems to defy logic or intuition." (all emphasis original) I think that's what Leela's statement is. Something that seems true and seems to defy logic or intuition. Santa's mission is to destroy the naughty. But he himself is naughty, so he must destroy himself. But if he destroys himself his mission to destroy the naughty will go unfulfilled. And so on. It's a pretty loose paradox, but it is technically a paradox. Besides, it didn't work on Santa anyway. So whether it really counts as a paradox is kind of a moot point.
    • In most robot fiction, the most effective paradox is specifically one in the robot's own programming. For example, HAL had to report all scientific data and keep secret all the, obviously scientifically important, information on the monolith. She's attempting to point out that his programming is self-contradictory, probably that since he is naughty, his directive to punish the naughty contradicts his self-preservation directive.
  • Bender's cigars. A robot who smokes cigars is perfectly justified by the Rule of Cool, but how does he hold the cigar between his teeth, when his teeth are an image on a screen in the front of his mouth? (It's not even partly open most of the times I notice)
    • 31st century cigars come with small, tasteless ordorless burnable magnets for just such a purpose?
      • Doesn't work. Magnets make Bender go insane and sing folk songs.
    • We've seen Bender open his mouth on several occasions. He just opens it a little bit to stick the cigar in.
      • I (the one who posited the original cigar issue) re-watched a bunch of episodes focusing on when he smokes cigars. Sometimes it's just on the front of his mouth, sometimes he opens his mouth (both in the middle, same problem as the one tooth issue, and from the bottom), and sometimes he opens one tooth. Despite his teeth being lines drawn on a screen, and presumably not separate based on their movement. I think it's just a way to tell your eyes everything's okay so your brain doesn't notice the discrepancy.
        • So maybe when his mouth is closed there's an image projected over his teeth to make it look like the lines between them are moving?
  • Why is everyone so completely clueless about the 20th century when countless people from that time, not just Fry, are still alive (and even running the country)?
    • Several people from the 1940's are still alive. Do you know what life was like in 1940? Besides WW 2? Once the records were destroyed, they were probably just taken as unreliable eyewitnesses.
    • Would you believe anything that Fry told you?
    • Or Nixon? Especially after he squished some people on live tv?
  • Bender's mom is a robotic arm. The robotic arm's mom is a bulldozer. Discuss.
    • Not only that, but Bender has an aunt who is a screw and an uncle who is a robot much like himself. I'm really curious about the story of the Rodriguez family, because seriously, what the hell?
    • It's funny.
    • Bender's grandmother was the bulldozer that cleared the land for the factory the robotic arm was installed in?
    • Bender's aunt who is a screw is only mentioned in Leela's coma-fantasy in 'The Sting', though, so she may not actually exist.
    • In Bender's locker, there is a nut (as in nuts and bolts). When Morgan looks at him, he looks down and says, "Hey, sometimes a guy gets lonely." Also: It's a screwed up family.
      • The nut was implied to be some kind of robot sex object/porn.
    • Recycling! The bulldozer was catastrophically damaged in a building collapse and the parts were salvaged into a robotic arm. When the arm wore out, it was melted down into scrap and formed into Bender's exoskeleton. Bender has never mentioned his father, but he may have multiple "parents" who all contributed material to his construction.
  • If all of Planet Amazon's inhabitants are women, how do they reproduce? How are baby alien amazons created?
    • Parthenogenesis, perhaps. Or maybe they're long-lived and the males of the species only died out recently. Or maybe they're the only ones left, the descendants of the Amazonians who snoo-snooed outworlders besides Fry and Brannigan to death.
    • Or maybe it's like the real Amazons in Ancient Greece. When they needed to reproduce, they'd go to neighboring tribes with men and have sex with them. If they had boys, they'd just give them to their fathers... or possibly worse. Only with Futurama, substitute that with neighboring planet.
      • This seems the most likely explanation. After all, where else would those male skeletons with the crushed pelvises have come from? And how else would they know about Snu-Snu if they hadn't done it before?
  • If Yivo didn't want Shklir people contacting any other universe, why didn't Shkle just close the anomaly after the golden escalators were withdrawn?
    • Religion analogy? "Hey, enjoy Paradise...just don't eat the easily accessible apples."
    • Everyone was free to leave if they wanted to, and perhaps he couldn't open the rift again if it was closed.
      • Trust is the basis of every good relationship! If Shkle sealed the rift, it would be implying that Shkle didn't trust Shklir loved ones to be faithful.
  • How in the hell did the entire population of the universe manage to fit on Bender's boat?
    • Somehow in his travels, Bender managed to steal a TARDIS... and that was it. (Hey, someone had to say it.)
      • No, Bender IS a TARDIS, that's how he can store all that stuff inside himself, and that means Fry isn't a Time TRAVELER, he's a Time LORD, and . . . *opens WMG page*
  • How come Fry's nephew isn't a head in a jar at the museum?
    • It is implied that the heads are artificially made, rather than being from actual people. There are heads of people who should have been rotted by the time the technology came out, and Grover Cleveland has two heads. It would also explain why they could talk...
    • I guess he chose not to be one. I would assume you'd have some say in being a head, with exception of the ones way before the tech could've possibly been invented, like George Washington and all the presidents. He has a memorial, I guess that was enough for him.
    • It's supposed to be like cryonics (cryogenics?). If you freeze just your head it's cheaper than freezing your whole body, and presumably they could just give you a new body in the future, when they figure out how to re-animate frozen people. By the way, I am not kidding.
      • Well, he does spend most of his time in his grave.
    • How do you even know he isn't?
  • Speaking of heads in jars, how do they speak without lungs? I always figured it was the metal thing under their neck, but in Bender's Big Score, Hermes was able to talk as soon as he was decapitated.
    • In the year 2568, after a wave of beheadings committed by Gabaale the terrible the government made a note to implant chips that allow such a thing inside the neck. This was mainly due to mass protests by the police complaining the heads would never respond to their questions. Or, Rule of Funny
    • Genetic engineering.If they can make talking heads and grow new hands,they probably applied something similar to Hermes. Or those with a delta brain wave can send telepathic messages,hence why Bender can talk in space.
    • The same way Spiro Agnew can still walk around and do things for Nixon even though he's just a headless body.
  • So in Beast with a Billion Backs, Yivo said that Shklir was alone, so what about Shklir Angels?
    • Shklir angels weren't sentient.
  • In Into the Wild Green Yonder, Fry can read minds. Now, Bender is a Robot. But Fry can read Bender's mind. So... how does that work?
    • In Futurama, every sentient being (except Fry) produces the Delta Brain Wave. Everything. Including some trees. He probably read minds via that principle. His lacking it is why his mind can't be read.
  • If Bender is such a horrendous chef, then how is it that he was able to bake a perfectly good cake for Nibbler in an earlier episode?
    • Baking a cake isn't hard. You just do what a book tells you to. Bender can't improvise and always tries to. Thats why he can't cook. Alternatively, Rule of Funny
    • Plus Nibbler seems to eat almost anything.
    • Alternatively, he's just gotten better with practice.
    • Baking is science, which Bender would understand, being a robot and all. Cooking is art.
    • In one of the comic book letter sections, the answer was that, like all professional chefs, Bender is awesome and terrible in turns at cooking.
  • Amazing that nobody noticed the thousands of bending robots with the same serial number under what would eventually be the site of the Planet Express. Especially considering Bender went back primarily before the year 2000, and New New York is built above (not on, but above) old new york.
    • Maybe it was a really deep cave and the Bender duplicates became really good at hiding over time. Their presence may have also led to stories about dangerous metal men causing people to avoid that place.
      • Also why wasn't there a problem when all the Benders met each other in the cave? Why did the rift only appear after they call came out of the hole, or was the rift nothing to do with the multiple benders?
        • I guess you don't understand the paradox. The clones weren't supposed to stay in the cave at all. They were supposed to have all come out and become the final Bender, who convinced all his clones to stay in the cave so they wouldn't become the final Bender. Comprende'?
        • So if I understand correctly, the Benders should each have gone back in time once, except the oldest one, who had been through the most loops and stayed in the future. Instead, one or a few of him went back before they should have, or multiple times, and thus split off from the others into "time clones" instead of still being the same Bender. All of the Benders that didn't go back in time when they should have, but instead stayed in the present, were thus paradox-causing time duplicates (with the exception of whichever Bender the universe designated as "the real one)?
        • They didn't really become doom clones until Bender convinced them to stay down until after they were supposed to come up. A time travel duplicate is only created when someone using the Timey-Wimey Ball interferes with the events of the past, causing that person to break their past and create a duplicate, since that person's timeline has to continue uninterrupted in order for them to actually go back and create the time clone. The multitudes of Benders beneath Planet Express didn't become time clones until Bender told them to break their timed re-entry and come up with him. The real question now is why they obeyed him, when most of them were programmed to obey the scammers (Damn you Nudar!).
        • That's simple, though: the Bender who wasn't infected with the obedience virus deleted the virus from the others. He did have a thousand years to do it, after all.
  • If (supposedly) nobody on earth could read Alienese, and even Farnsworth couldn't recognize the language to feed it through the appropriate translator, or at least call an off-planet translator, how did the Director even know it was Alienese, and Leela's mother's PhD in exolinguistics cover writing it? Was it supposed to be an icebox moment? Or was it supposed to be funny right then? Is this the same Alienese that many street signs, clocks, and fliers use?
    • I figured he was using Alienese to mean, "some language that I don't recognize", rather than an actual language called Alienese.
      • You know, you don't have to know a language to recognize it.
      • Exactly. I don't speak German or Spanish, but I can recognize if something is written in it (well, I can make a pretty good guess)
      • I took this as an example of sheer Fridge Brilliance; Leela's mother's exolinguistics skills meant that she could write complete nonsense on the note in a made-up language that looks deceptively like Alienese to a lay-person but without actually meaning anything in Alienese. This would be like arranging Cyrillic characters randomly on paper and passing it off as Russian text to someone who is unfamilar with the language and its script. The reason for this is so that no-one will discover that Leela is not an alien, the lack of backstory adding further credence. That way, when an abandoned Leela and the note are found outside Cookieville Minimum-Security Orphanarium, Mr Vogel has no reason to attempt to translate the faux-Alienese because an abandoned child is pretty self-explanatory (given the Rule of Funny circumstances). This is also why Professor Farnsworth is unable to translate the note: it doesn't actually mean anything in a real language.
        • It actually does mean something, though. 'Your parents love you very much.' They say so on the DVD commentary.
        • That... Is actually incredibly reasonable. This is now part of my Fanon.
  • In Bird-Bot of Ice-catraz, Morbo says Bender had a blood-alcohol level of .8 (or .08) percent, well below the legal limit for robo- Wait. Blood-alcohol level?

'Bender': What about that time I gave blood?
'Fry': Whose blood?
'Bender': Some guy's.

    • I saw that episode, and he only said an "alcohol level of .o8%". Maybe you misheard him?
  • The dog with two heads, one at each end: Rex gets the pills, and rover gets the suppository. Would that mean Rex swallows all of them, or Rover swallows the suppositories?
    • No, Pepper eats the pills and Rover eats the suppositories. Simple.
  • It bugs me that they keep deliberately changing what Bender's made of. One episode he's made of iron-nickel alloy, another one has him being forty percent dolomite, and yet another one has him have titanium in his body. What bugs me is that I think they're doing this intentionally just to mess with continuity nuts like me.
    • I always considered that he was part titanium, part dolomite, and part other, and occasional changes like the nickel-iron alloy were due to repairs over time, or temporary coatings.
    • In total, we learn that he is 40% titanium, 30% iron, 40% zinc, 40% dolomite, 40% lead, 40% chromium, 40% scrap metal, and 60% storage space with a 0.04% nickel impurity, giving 330.04% of his total composition. It was almost certainly deliberate.
      • That or the writers forgot to keep track.
        • No, they kept track. In fact, almost every time Bender mentions what he's made of, David X. Cohen points this out in the DVD commentary.
      • He also points out that they weren't keeping track, which is how it got to be more than 100%.
        • Well what do you call it when they were keeping track of not keeping track?
      • I like to think he has some coating of dolomite on his body, instead of it just being 40% of his body, since then 60% of his body would have melted, and instead only his eyeballs melt.
    • Bender's been damaged, a lot. Maybe the differing percentages are just a result of all the repairs/upgrades he's received over the course of the series?
    • This is Bender.He's probably lying to make himself seem cool
    • Given all the hammerspace Bender has in his chest cavity, the extra composition could be stored there. He even claims to be 60% storage space, which could just be the amount of spare hammerspace he has left, and the rest of his revealed composition is just 40% of his total capacity.
    • Well the 60% storage space would be refering to his volume, not his elemental composition, so that 60% should be left out. Also, if we assume the dolomite (which is certainly different than what we know as dolomite, since real dolomite does cop out when there's heat all about) and scrap metal are made up entirely of those other elements, we can also get rid of that 80% too. And the impurity is an impurity, so we can assume that should not be counted in the composition list, since it would presumably take away from one of the factory listed elemental composition. So, now we're only down to 190%, which isn't quite as bad as 330.04%, I guess.
  • If new New York is built above the ruins of Old New York, why is the cryogenics lab still in a tower, and the building around it hadnt't been rebuilt despite going from a seemingly low-rent office building to a futuristic future tower?
    • That always bugged me, too. Also the cryogenics lab was not destroyed when the rest of New York was and Fry's cryo-capsule lasted 1000 years without being replaced.
    • A deleted scene shows that the Cryonics lab building is much shorter in the future, suggesting that only the top levels are above ground (in the underground scenes you can see a few buildings that reach the ceiling). As for how the building survived, maybe the Nibblonians protected it.
      • As seen in "Bender's Big Score", Old New York was destroyed by Bender. Of course he would spare the building his best friend was frozen in.
      • No, he didn't destroy the building because the Paradox-Correcting Time Code wouldn't let him.
  • How did Yivo genticle the heads in jars? They have no necks, or metal covering their necks. Also, it might not be everyone, but the tentacles went most of the way down the spine for at least Fry.
    • They have some neck.
  • Does Yivo produce the Delta Brain Wave? Shkle's sentient (or so we are led to believe), but shkle's also from an electromatter universe, and does not appear to have any problem interfacing with Fry.
    • Shkle probably does, but has no problem broadcasting the love telepathy stuff to Fry, as Fry has no problems receiving telepathy. In Into The Wild Green Yonder, Fry was perfectly capable of hearing thoughts, just nobody could hear his. The brains can't attack him, because they only target the Delta Brain Wave, but Fry doesn't have that. Yivo sends love (or something like that) through the tentacles, and apparently doesn't rely on the Delta Brain Wave.
  • So, how was Parallel Amy parallel?
    • She wears pink nail polish and a yellow jogging suit, spluh!
    • That and she had brown hair and tan skin.
      • And she was evil. And shallow...
      • She was not evil.
      • G'uh! D'uh!
    • She came from a parallel universe.
  • After the end of Into the Wild Green Yonder who's going to take care of Dwight and Cubert?
    • Aren't they on the ship at the end?
      • I don't think so, Morbo mentions that "there are no children here!" so it would be unlikely. Then again they could've been hiding on the ship the whole time anyway.
  • How did Fry move his furniture into his "closet" through the 3-feet-by-3-feet space?
    • Through the window?
      • There is a door that leads directly to the "closet" (shown several times). Actually, it's Bender's "apartment" that is not shown anymore. But who cares?
    • The window is shown to fully open when Bender is dating the Planet Express spaceship and she calls at the apartment to find Bender. If a spaceship can converse with Fry through the opening, furniture should be no trouble!
    • Maybe there's furniture that is doll-sized that can be turned into human-sized via a button. It is the future, after all.
  • The ending of Time Keeps On Slippin. Fry made a message saying "I LOVE YOU LEELA" using stars, with the O in LOVE being the star cluster that they originally constructed. How did they not see the message when they went there to plant the doomsday device? They should have at least been able to see the L or V.
    • Space is 3D. Their approach vector might have been at an angle that made the resulting constellation illegible.
    • Or they arrived at faster than the speed of light...
      • That's impossible, no one can go faster than the speed of light. That's why they changed it, remember?
    • Maybe they time skipped there.
  • If the cryogenics lab so frequently has people thawed out from hundreds of years ago (and thus would take up a machine for that whole time), how do all the machines fit in one building, much less that one room we always see them using?
  • Bender's Game: So, they run out of dark matter fuel... and Leela tells Fry to check Nibbler's litter pan for fuel. So, let's see... Dark Matter weighs the same as 5,000 suns... Bender grunted when he first had to load the Planet Express ship? But Fry can lift the ball? Hell, Farnsworth, during his explanation of the dark matter 'creation', he loads a few balls into a machine, and he's already middle age during the flash back...
    • Ah, but one pound of the stuff weighs as much as a thousand pounds as regular matter, which implies mass-changing properties, most likely following similar laws to narrativium.
    • Fry could have turned down the gravity for that part of the ship so he could load it with less trouble. Farnsworth was working in a futuristic science lab. Perhaps they have an anti gravity field to help with it.
    • We have seen localized gravity-changing devices in Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?
  • In Crimes Of The Hot, Bender states that he can get up off his back if he's slightly on his side. If that's true, why does Bender have to roll himself onto his stomach to get off his back later in the episode, rather than just roll himself slightly onto his side?
    • Bender has a hard enough time admitting his flaws. You don't think he'd make them look less severe if he had to?
  • He can't do that either.
  • In Beast with a Billion Backs, how did Fry's suit get into the electromatter universe, and how did they expect the missile to get in, if only living or organic matter (I never was too clear on that point) could get through the barrier? Fry's suit I could get being some sort of biotech, but not the missile.
    • Well, it was Zapp Brannigan launching the missile...
    • And Fry's suit didn't make it through safely: that's why the oxygen thingamabob on the back exploded causing Fry to start asphyxiating.
    • The Professor said robots and electrical items couldn't go through.Something totally inanimate like a missile could travel through.If not the glass window they later used would fail
  • In Bender's Game, why don't the Nibblonians just eat their way out of their pens? Okay, sure, I guess if they just ate through the bars or something they'd just get recaptured - but it's not like they can't just eat themselves and escape to another universe.
  • In Beast with a Billion Backs, Bender and the Robot Army of the Damned attack Yivo using blades whose edges are backed with electromatter torn from a letter Fry sent back to Bender. As Yivo's universe is electromatter and our universe isn't, plus the fact that electromatter is impenetrable by regular matter, this is the only way they could. Fair enough. But how exactly did they get so many weapons? We only saw Fry send one letter without any implication that he sent more, yet there are enough scraps of it to arm the entire army with Yivo-injuring weaponry.
    • The very fact that they had enough electro matter to make so many weapons implies that Fry sent many, many more letters.
      • Give that they were ageless and immortal, they could have been on Yivo for a very, very long time. (Though "The Late Phillip J. Fry" would seem to contradict that.)
    • The very fact that electromatter is impenetrable by regular matter should make it impossible to tear up those letters into weapon blades in the first place.
      • It makes it impossible to cut it. It doesn't make it impossible to tear it. Think of the difference between cutting a pile of silk fibers or titanium wires in half as opposed to pulling the pile apart, to use an exaggerated example, since they were using what appeared to be paper.
      • Also, they could have cut the letters into pieces with other letters. Or, they could have cut a letter with itself, by folding it.
  • The episode That's Lobstertainment! The first 20 minutes establish what a jerk Harold Zoid is. We're supposed to feel sympathy for him in the last five minutes.
    • Harold is a comedian (ie.a pathetic fool), who has no career prospects and lies to his poverty-stricken nephew to look important. I feel some sympathy.
  • Why couldn't Nibbler just eat El Chupanibre (sp?)? We've seen him eat bigger, more ferocious monsters.
  • Why did nobody mention that Star Trek was banned until that one episode, when they mentioned it in practically every other episode?
    • There were actually very few direct references to Star Trek in the series (as in characters actually mentioning the show, not just homages). Fry mentions it in the first episode just after being unfrozen and then gets hit over the head by a closing door - you could interpret this as deliberately giving a mild punishment, but either way it makes sense that someone who has just woken up from a 1,000 year sleep would not be expected to know all the laws of the future and so they would be lenient - and later in that episode, Leonard Nimoy goes out of his way to avoid mentioning Star Trek by name. Most other references to the show took place amongst Planet Express employees in their own building so they would probably be safe there.

      The one case that does seem problematic was "That's Lobstertainment" where Star Trek: The Pepsi Generation was up for an award. Maybe it was the unrelated show Start Wreck.
    • In "Brannigan, Begin Again," Hermes compare the DOOP to "the Federation, from your Star Trek program."
    • In the first episode, Fry tells Nimoy's head to do the Vulcan salute. Nimoy just replies, "I don't do that anymore".
      • He didn't say 'do the Vulcan salute', he said 'Do the thing!' and held his hand up with the four-fingered version.
    • If you take it as a given that only TOS is banned a lot of questions about this are cleared up. Because "Generations" and possibly the 2009 film are ok there could still be Kirk vs Picard debates on the internet, references that seem to reference TOS could instead reference the continuity of the new film, and Star Trek: The Pepsi Generation could just be another in a long line of Star Trek properties that are fine as long as TOS isn't aired.
  • Why did it take a thousand years for the radio waves to get to Omicron Persei if the speed of light has been increased in 2208?
    • Because the radio waves were going at the old speed, of course.
    • Because they were going at the speed of radio waves, not the speed of light. They lack Photon Power.
      • Bwuuuuuuuuh... radio waves are light waves! They're made of photons!
  • In "Where No Fan Has Gone Before", why was it just The Original Series that got banned for being too popular? Surely The Next Generation" was just as good (if not better)?
    • Slightly less frenzied fans. Slightly.
      • But aside from seeing Jonathan Frakes' head, there was no acknowledgement of it whatsoever.
      • That and the Kirk vs Picard chat room.
      • Equally, if Star Trek is punishable by death, why is there a Star Trek chat room?
      • Death Row?
  • If the speed of light has been increased, does the definition of a "light year" change? Do all distance calculations suddenly get thrown out, or does everyone just switch to astronomical units?
    • I just thought of something. Maybe when he said "the speed of light was increased" he meant it like "the sound barrier was broken", like it was something they learned how to do, rather than a permanent effect.
      • Word of God is that the speed of light has literally been changed and all light produced after that point travels at the new speed (light sent out before then, such as the radio waves that Omicron Persei 8 picked up, go at the old speed). The joke was that most sci-fi breaks the laws of physics with some form of FTL, so Futurama points out why this doesn't work and then immediately introduces something just as absurd with the same practical effect.
    • "Light year" gets used within the series and appears to have the same definition as in the present (most noticably, Omicron Persei is said to be 1,000 light years from Earth, which is correct). Presumably by the time the speed was changed, light years were used so much in science and space exploration that changing the definition would be more trouble than it was worth.
    • What's weird is that Cubert didn't know this despite all of the other things he knew after coming out of the tube. You'd think that if it was possible to travel faster than the speed of... wait. Farnsworth said it, then remembered that the ship can go faster than one light second per second because it does something to the universe's inertial frame of reference, then moves everything but itself while the ship stays still. The speed of light being increased was just the senility talking. Problem unraveled!
  • Here's one for you.. Why have they included SUBTLE! references to Fox and Comedy Central, bashing the former and praising the latter, but no mention of poor Adult Swim at all?
    • You're right, they should have wrote it with their knowledge of the future! But more seriously, it's very common for Fox comedies to bash on Fox. The AS deal was, more or less, just syndication but they could have thrown 'em a bone, I agree. I don't really remember them praising CC but in the line of the Fox bashing it's probably turned on it's ear a bit.
      • I meant in the post-AS era. The movies and such. The new episodes reference CC. Actually it's early, maybe they'll reference AS too.
        • May be a bit of a stretch, but in the first movie, one of the first things they did was go to a nude beach. Nudity = adult, beach = swimming.
        • Less of a stretch, the Carton Network picked up Planet Express after BOX canceled their contract. Although since they were then sent to the nude beach planet by their new network, maybe the above is not so much of a stretch.
          • Ohhhh, Carton Network. I must have missed that. Very good.
  • In Bender's Big Score, why didn't Bender just time travel once to the Stone Age and then collect all of history's treasures in one going instead of having to go back so many times?
    • Because Nudar didn't tell him too, of course.
    • Another possibility is because he'd have to travel all over the world. Sure, he could survive as shown by the immeasurable duplicates, but he's also incredibly lazy, and likely wouldn't want to travel the world collecting treasures, even under the control of Nudar's virus.
  • Fry is described as having 'stupid fingers' in "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings" and advised to get robot hands so he could properly play the holophoner. However, in the episode "I Dated a Robot" after getting his hands eaten off by a cloned T-Rex he goes to a place called "Hands Crafters" and gets replacement hands. Why couldn't Fry go there to resolve his problem instead of traveling to Robot Hell? Or, why couldn't the Robot Devil go there instead of needlessly harassing Fry?
    • The first time the holophonor appears, Leela says something like "only 10 people in the Universe can play one of those, and they're not very good at it." Maybe he needed robot hands to be able to play it properly. Alternatively, Fry is an idiot and Bender is a sociopath, so I wouldn't have too much confidence in them finding the best solution. As for why the Robot Devil didn't just get replacements, he does say they're very good hands so maybe he just can't find any of that quality, or maybe he has some emotional attachment to them or feels resentment towards Fry for taking them. Or hell, he's the Robot Devil, needlessly harassing people is what he does.
    • It could be that Hands Crafters can only replace the hands as they were; say, cloning them from Fry's DNA; ergo, any hands Fry would've gotten from them would be the same as his old ones. Likewise, they may specialize in biological, rather than mechanical, hands, and thus couldn't have helped the Robot Devil.
      • Alternatively, the Robot Devil is so unique that none of his parts can be remade to similar quality.
  • In 'Anthology of Interest I', Leela is shown to be a part of the Planet Express crew during the 'What if Bender was really giant?' story. This seems confusing since Fry and Bender don't seem to be part of the crew, so why would Leela not still be working at Applied Cryogenics? Similarly, both she and Bender are shown with The Professor and Zoidberg in the 'What if I never fell into that freezer-doodle and came to the future-jiggy' story, which is odd since presumably if they hadn't met Fry due to his non-freezer-doodlification, she'd still be in her old job and he'd have successfully used the Suicide Booth...
    • Leela wasn't happy. She wanted to run away from her old job, all she needed was someone--or heck, something--to show her that. Also, Bender, as a robot, is inordinately difficult to kill. Or maybe Mom doesn't let her robots get destroyed. Or some other random person mad Bender angry, got him electrocuted, and bam. Fry just stopped that person from meeting Bender by taking his/her place on the tube.
  • In Rebirth, why did Frybot and the Leelaborg ditch the human skins as soon as they found out that they were both robots? They had all the memories and emotions of Fry and Leela, respectively, so shouldn't they have kept the Fry&Leela look since that was part of what each other was attracted to?
    • And I quote: "I love Fry. Robot Fry." "And I love Leela. Any Leela." She wanted him as a robot, and he didn't care. Fry may not be the smartest guy, but he's got a good heart.
  • The ending of episode 2 of the new season. why did the writers make it so Leela had sex with Zapp again after the recent developments between her and Fry?
    • To torture Fry. I, for one, am glad they at least didn't use it to undo Leela and Fry's feelings for each other. Though Fry obviously objects, he apparently still knows that Leela doesn't like Zapp.
  • Why doesn't Kif just quit working for Zapp Brannigan? He obviously knows Amy, a rich girl, and couldn't he just ask for a job at the Planet Express?
    • Court order. DOoP reinstated him, and you don't argue with DOoP.
    • He's spineless. Literally and figuratively. We've already seen Zapp drag him back into service when they were abandoning the Planet Express ship.
    • Career ambitions? He doesn't work for Zapp, he works for DOOP. DOOP needs Kif to protect the universe from Zapp.
  • Also in Rebirth, why does Bender have to be recreated using stem cells? Um isn't he a robot? Can't they just rebuild him?
    • Same reason human stem cells worked on a Decapodian. They're just that awesome.
    • I have a better question: why on earth would an explosion kill a robot who survived the vacuum of space and reentering the atmosphere? Furthermore, if this explosion can kill Bender, Fry would not have been able to protect Leela with simply his body. Both would have died, with not even a trace of their skeletons (which is another thing that bugged me).
    • Actually, that's a good point. I guess the writers wanted their first episode to be a Fry/Leela one, but having Bender survive and having the plot revolve around him would have more sense.
  • Why did Zoidberg, the arguably largest and definitely most destitute employee, not simply eat the others?
    • You're from Omicron Persei 8... aren't you?
      • Of course not, we won't get Futurama for another 989 years, and my wife would kill me if she knew I was importing DVDs from The United States of Ear-...merica.
    • He considers them friends, like Nibbler does. Besides, Bender might beat him up if he ate Fry.
  • In Rebirth, how was Fry resurrected, when he was dumped into the stew before the Final Ingredient (a fly) was added?
    • Likely because his remnants were still in the gene-pool after the formula was completed.
  • How come Leela and Fry were a couple in "Rebirth" and "In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela", but they go back to just being friends in "Attack of the Killer App"?
    • Fry needed his space after the events of In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela, being more than a little uncomfortable with Leela after what she was forced to do, presumably.
  • OK you've Bender - a bending robot, and Flexo, a bending robot. So each bending robot has a different bending-related name. But presumably Mom's Friendly Robot Company has produced thousands or millions of bending robots, how did they come up with a bending-related name for every one of them? Does Mom have a Thesaurus company as well?
    • Well, bear in mind that Bender's full name is Bender Bending Rodriquez. We don't know Flexo's full name, but it wouldn't be a huge stretch to assume that he had a (possibly bending related) middle name and a (non-bending related) surname as well. With various combinations of these, the same amoung of bending-related names can stretch further without duplication. That, or multiple bending units DO have the same name.
    • If nothing else, they each have a unique serial number.
    • Humans can have the same name and it rarely causes any problem, even without serial numbers.
      • But humans don't all look exactly the same.
        • Neither do robots. For instance, Flexo has a spiffy goatee.
  • We all know that Fry is his own grandfather because of what happened in "Roswell That Ends Well" but in the past his grandfather (at least who his grandmother told him his grandfather was) was named "Enos", this throws off the whole family tradition in the Fry family of naming your first-born-son "Yancy" which Fry's father said dates back to the American revolution "Your name is Yancy, like my name and my father's and his father's, all the way back to Minute-man Yancy Fry". One could argue that Fry conceived his mother in the past except that at one point in "Roswell That Ends Well" Fry yells something along the lines of "Everything's Gonna Be Alright Dad!" at Enos's crotch, though it might not be too far-fetched for Fry to get his Grandparents mixed-up.
    • No, because Fry's dad specifically said that he was named Yancy just like his grandfather (or his father's father, I forget), and his father, all the way back to minute-man Yancy Fry. I noticed that and thought it was weird that he skipped his own father until seeing Roswell That Ends Well.
    • It could also be reasoned that Enos had an older brother named Yancy.
    • Or Mildred simply married a man called Yancy Fry to cover up her unwed pregnancy.
    • Or maybe Enos' first name is Yancy and he just prefers to go by his middle name.
    • Actually, Enos has the same hair color as Fry's mom, which might mean that Enos is from Fry's mom's side of the family. However, he has been referred to as Enos Fry, when he should have been Enos Gleisner.
  • In the most recent episode Proposition Infinity why was the entire crew so instantly supportive of the Bender-Amy relationship, when we already saw that they openly opposed robosexual realtionships in I Dated A Robot? I at first thought it was just because it was with Fry and a robot, but nope, they all agreed from the "Middle School Hygiene" video that any relationship like that is disgusting. Did they all just get Aesop Amnesia ?
    • No just an inverted No True Scotsman effect, and the stem cells, I guess. But from the same episode, I understand there is only so much they can do in this kind of episode, but to have the finishing blow be Farnsworth being a robosexual himself who happened to lose out to another robot being the reason that he has a problem with it? And his endorsement changes everyone's mind about robosexuality in general? Again, comedy, not meant to be preaching the word, and he's understandably bitter, but seriously? That's the best you got?
    • They got over it. The Professor was just posturing in the previous episode anyway, as we found out, and it's been known to happen: There are lots of real life cases of people being initially very, very bothered by gay couples/homosexuality, but eventually they change their mind, especially as they get to know more gay people. The same thing (exaggerated for timing and comedy, of course) probably happened over the last couple years in the Futurama universe and to the Planet Express crew.
    • If I recall correctly, the crew was never absolutely opposed to robosexuality, just to prolonged relationships with robots built for the single purpose of sex. Even in that case, they were perfectly okay with the disposable sexbots, for as long as it didn't turned into a long term thing. Since Bender is not a sexbot, but an individual with a complete personality (and them some) they probably saw it as a completely different thing.
      • That's another thing. The Professor was with a robot way-back-when, correct? That's all well and fine, but then I thought about how he's pretty much the inventor of modern-day (well, future-day) robots... The implications are... Yeah.
    • Just to add even further to this, while the message was pretty all-encompassing (DON'T DATE ROBOTS!) the details were fairly specific: entering into a relationship with a robot that's been implanted with the personality of a celebrity eventually leads to societal collapse. Fry was making out with a Lucy Liu-bot. The kid in the PSA video was making out with a Marilyn Monroe-bot. Also, from the video (and Fry) it seems they didn't do anything other than make out.
  • If robosexual marriage is illegal in New New York before "Proposition Infinity," how could the Robot Devil marry Leela in "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings?" Especially since Preacherbot specifically says "By the power vested in me/By the State of New New York," so one can't argue that it was just a religious ceremony. Even he has to obey the law, otherwise his whole Faustian angle falls apart, right?
    • Maybe he thought it was part of the play and was just playing along, no pun intended.
    • The Robot Devil had Fry's hands at the time. Perhaps robosexual marriage was illegal but human-cyborg marriage was legal.


  • Is anyone else bothered by the Amy and Kif pairing? It just seems forced to me.
    • Personally, I agree with you for the episode above, but I am chalking this one up to Amy needing to be the designated fall girl for this episode. Otherwise they have pretty decent chemistry, and I'm hoping that doesn't change with the renewal.
    • The pairing actually works awesomely, but for Proposition Infinity they both got hit hard by Flanderization just so they could break up and let them do a gay metaphor. Which is another good question: why did they have to do that? Why not just have Bender date a human that wasn't Amy?
      • Because it seemed more personal and less like a cheap floozy. Amy's a main character, so it added a bit of plausibility to it, not much, mind you, but still.
  • In "Bendin' in the Wind," why couldn't they just remove Bender's hard drive like Morgan did in "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back" and put it into a new body? The latter episode shows that without a hard drive, a bending unit is basically a mindless drone, so putting Bender's hard drive into a new body, as demonstrated by the end of the episode, would solve the problem entirely. I mean, yeah, doing that would negate the entire point of the episode and we wouldn't get a funny cameo by Beck, but still.
    • They would still have to wait for a new Bending Unit to come in the mail before they could transfer Bender.
      • As "The Route of All Evil" shows, mail is very quick in the year 3000.
      • Mail, yes, but requisitioning a new Bending Unit Body for Bender, even if he still had insurance and it was valid in the event of giant can-opener accident, would take a long time and cost a lot. There'd be stacks of forms higher than a green snake could climb on a sugarcane stalk!
      • That was a terrible metaphor. However, I will accept it, being that it involved both green-snakes and sugar-cane.
      • And you're also all forgetting the crucial fact that ordering a new one would cost $30 dollars with a $10 mail-in rebate.
  • So pigeons have been replaced by owls, but a pigeon picked up hologram Hermes in the episode on Chapek 9?
    • Rodentia have been replaced by Owls. Pigeons don't live in mouseholes.
    • Pigeons are basically flying rats. You don't see rats running about on the streets of Old New York.
  • In "My Three Suns", Zoidberg, a saltwater creature from a mud planet, spits out salt water along with the others. Why? Two episodes later, he even calls out Hermes for removing the salt water cooler.
    • There's more than one possibility of concentration for saltwater, you know. Maybe the water was too salty for Zoidberg, what seems very, VERY plausible, given that it is "salt with water in it", according to Bender's words. That's way more salt (per volume) than one would expect in the shore region of an ocean.
    • Everyone was doing it. He just wanted to be popular.
  • I'm not sure if someone has already brought this up, but what is with all of Bender's gadgets? In addition to the super strength required for a bending unit, for some reason he also has arms that stretch 50 feet, a pencil sharpener in his ass, a water heater, a container in his chest, etc. Do all bending units need all that? Or did Bender get extra modifications from the professor?
    • The extending arms could be useful for bending large objects and the chest cavity is just generally useful for storing stuff. The other things could just be extras that Momcorp adds on so that they can advertise their robots with a huge list of features (and jack up the price), or Bender could be buying upgrades for himself.
      • Or a little bit of both. Momcorp sells additional stuff for extra. Either Bender's employer(s) was/were suckered into buying it, or he bought it for himself.
        • BOUGHT it himself? This is Bender we're talking about here! Most likely Bender just stole it from some "blind robot while their blind seeing eye dog was taking a wizz."
    • Could also have something to do with the fact that Bender was considered "defective," but was cleared for use anyway. Perhaps he was too versatile for the single-use nature of most other robots in the universe.
    • It wouldn't be unexpected of the Professor to tinker with Bender in his spare time.
  • In "Lethal Inspection", Mom says that all defective robots are immediately destroyed. How is Santa still around then?
    • Who said he was defective? He works perfectly well, its just that his programmer had unreasonable standards.
    • Wait, was Robot Santa built by Momcorp? And anyway, I'd like to see her try... hell, Robot Santa would probably love to see her try.
    • Yes, he was indeed built by Mom and his standards are high because of a programming error so he would certainly be considered defective. With all her vast amounts of money and resources, there is no reason for him to still be around.
    • Santa was built by The Friendly Robot Company in 2801, while it's possible that this is a precursor to Mom's Friendly Robot Company it was still well before her time.
    • Santa's a tough SOB. He probably killed the machines that came after him until it got expensive to keep making them, so Mom decided to cut her losses and let him live. He's also wanted by the law. Lots of people want him destroyed, but nobody has enough firepower to counter him.
    • The military lets him roam free for the purpose of instilling fear in the people of Earth, allowing them to keep their bloated out-of-control budget. I bet Zapp Brannigan's grampa or something came up with the idea.
  • I know it's probably Crowning Moment of Funny, but in The Late Philip J Fry when the Professor had to make another "round trip", why didn't they just stop at Fifty Million? The had a backwards time machine, wouldn't it make more sense to just get it from there?
    • Because they realized by that point that they didn't need a backwards time machine. They could just stay put and use the time machine they had.
      • Not to mention they know from the limestone message they won't get back to the present.
      • But why didn't they do it for the second time around, then? Instead of restarting the universe for a second time?
      • Even if you've seen it once before, would you pass up a sight like the universe ending and being reborn?


  • The fact that the Fry, Bender, and Professor of the third (shown) Universe are killed off like they're not even people. That, and that the Leela we've come to know since the beginning of the series grew up miserable and died. Sure, everything will seem the same, but aside from the 3 time travelers these are an entirely new Planet Express Crew.
    • By that logic, we should've felt ubersad every time a time-paradox duplicate was killed in Bender's Big Score. This might be an entirely new crew, but they're exactly like the previous ones except their universe is 10 feet lower and 5 feet to the right. Also, all of existence ended TWICE. Do they not matter just because they weren't shown suffering?
      • Bender's Big Score had the same problem. It's too bad, because the show averted What Measure Is A Me so nicely in "Rebirth".
    • Twice? For all we know, the universe died and remade iteself an infinite number of times before the series. Judging by how Bender nonchanlantly said they need to go around again, it will probably keep ending and remaking itself for more infinity.
    • They pretty much had to get rid of the other three, and I certainly prefer that they made a joke about it rather than just having them get into the time machine and have the other guys take their place.
    • I thought of this very same thing, but I assumed that the time machine did not anytime to move forward to so it was schunted to the beginning and it is still the same universe.
      • If that's true there would be a massive paradox seeing as how they crushed themselves.
        • The Time Code was worked into the forward-only time machine. The only difference is, Professor Farnsworth didn't have it memorized perfectly, and so changed one digit: now the forms from that world die instead of the duplicates.
  • Another question about The Late Phillip J. Fry (a damn fine episode though it was): when the universe ended, what happened to God?
    • Either that God is mortal like the rest of the universe. Or, God is the reason why the universe remakes itself after ending (and they just didn't see God during the vast emptiness since God is so far away).
      • Or it's not God, but the remains of a computerised space probe that collided with God.
  • In The Late Phillip J. Fry, how did the time machine survive the Universe being destroyed? Wouldn't it have been destroyed with the Universe? Also, the characters were first going to stop at a second universe, but had to go to a third. If that is true, then where are the second universe's versions of themselves that are stuck in the time machine?
    • It survived because it was outside of time, Universe 2 versions probably merged with the Universe 1 people.
    • The Universe 2 characters presumably went through the same arc as the Universe 1 characters and took the place of their duplicates from Universe 4.
      • By that logic, the time machine two universes before the main one would have appeared and/or crushed the main cast.
        • Not if they were killed before they had the chance to do so. Think about it, the time machine from Universe 3 can't crush the inhabitants of Universe 5 because the Universe 1 guys killed them, similarly the Universe 4 cast die before they can reach the Universe 6 cast. But this leaves the crews from Universes 5 and 6 alive to continue the cycle. You get a pattern of (Jump 2, Jump 2, Die, Die), and if we extend this backwards then the crew from Universe -1 can't appear in Universe 1 because they were killed by their duplicates from Universe -3.
    • See below. Farnsworth killed Hitler in the reality of which you speak. Clearly this had some sort of butterfly effect, stopping the Planet Express Crew from existing. Though, yes, the skipping also works and relies a little less on Fridge Logic/Brilliance.
      • Except we saw the team in brief clips in the timeline where Farnsworth killed Hitler.
  • Again, in the Late Phillip J. Fry, how did the time machine end up in Germany to assassinate Hitler? Every time the time machine arrives at a destination, it's in New York City.
    • Either Rule of Funny or Farnsworth eyeballed it from across the Atlantic.
    • Hitler was visiting New York.
    • He did step out to get Hitler. He might have taken a teleporter or hovercraft to Germany offscreen or something.
    • A more pressing question is why did he do it? The whole purpose of the forwards time machine was to not alter history, yet killing Hitler would do a lot of altering.
      • The universe ended twice. Farnsworth tends to go 'screw history' when stuff like that happens.

"Choke on that, causality!"

    • The time machine can travel through space as well as time, which accounts for how they ended up in NNY every time despite the fact that the Earth rotates and moves around the sun, and the sun itself is probably moving. And if you don't subscribe to the theory of fixed places in space, then it really doesn't matter anyway.
      • Well that explains my question about how it ended up exactly where it started, despite floating around in the ocean in "some year that ends in a 20."
  • In season six, are Fry and Leela together or not? It's been ambiguous, but "The Late Phillip J. Fry" seems to indicate that they are. But then in "That Darn Katz!", the very next episode, Leela laments to Nibbler about how she doesn't have a man.
    • It seems to vary depending on the episode. In context, you could construe it to mean that, at that moment, Fry was too busy having fun with Bender to pay attention to her.
    • Besides, Leela and Nibbler needed to be alone to have their heart-to-heart. They probably are together, we just aren't reminded of it every episode.
    • As of 'Ghost in the Machine', they're either not together or it's a casual/open relationship: Fry's always seen sleeping alone and Leela has no reaction to Fry saying he just had sex with Mrs Poopenmeyer.
  • In "The Late Philip J. Fry," why didn't Bender use the backwards-only Time Code to return them to the year 3010? Though Bender's memory gets erased at one point in "Bender's Big Score," he re-learns the code when he takes the tattoo off Lars' butt and travels to put it on Fry's butt. (Granted, there's the problem of the doomed time duplicates, but the episode handily resolves that anyway.)
    • The time code may have been deleted from his memory sometime after that episode, in order to prevent him from tearing another hole in the Universe. He has never used it since then.
  • Just one more comment about "The Late Phillip J. Fry." Am I the only who who finds the ending of that episode horrifying? Keep in mind that Leela, the Leela Fry loved, the Leela that we've been watching for the last five (or six) seasons? That Leela is dead. Really, actually dead, most likely alone and having never found love again (though Nibbler probably would still have been with her). Fry hooks up with a Leela at the end, but even if they're identical, when you get down to it she's just a Doppelganger Replacement Love Interest, and the Fry she loved is also dead. After seeing that ending, pretty much every other episode of the series becomes really creepy, since you know what has/is going to happen to these characters.
    • While I don't have anything regarding the Doppelganger Replacement Love Interest thing save the MST3K Mantra, it's pretty obvious that the original Leela didn't turn out that badly. The only reason she was miserable during the scenes we see was because she was still angry at Fry because(in her POV) he died as a direct result of being a jerk(standing her up to go to Hedonism-bot's ill-fated bachelor party. When she realized that wasn't the case, she was able to look back and realize that the time she had with Fry was a great one overall, and she was finally able to truly move on. If I remember the years given correctly, she was only about 80 or 90 in her last scene, so she still had plenty of time to live in, she was filthy rich from owning a wildly successful Planet Express, and, believe it or not, it is possible to be happy without a significant other. So yeah, Fry or no Fry, the original Leela likely turned out fine after Writing Back To The Future.
    • All the main characters have died, come back, and lived alternate lives so many times now that there's no point worrying who the "original" Leela and Fry are. The events of any one episode, especially a time travel/alternate universe episode, should be viewed as one of many possible ways the characters' lives could play out.
      • Actually, they all clearly lived the exact same life.
    • I like to think that when someone in the Futurama universe dies, they are reincarnated as their counterpart in the next universe, meaning that technically the characters are all the same. This doesn't entirely work out for Bender, Fry, and Farnsworth, though. But also, since they traveled outside of the universe and into the next, the universe shouldn't have had enough matter left in it to recreate Fry, Bender, and Farnsworth at all. This could be Handwaved by saying that there's two men and a robot somewhere who are missing from the universe. That means that they could actually be reincarnated as Fry, Bender, and Farnsworth in the next universe (taking on their respective personalities as well), killed, and then become themselves again in the next one. Going by this, that means no one really died.
  • In the first Xmas episode, the writers wasted a perfectly good opportunity to make a programming joke. Bender is established as being incredibly naughty, and then Santa adds another count to Bender's record; I was waiting to discover that Naughtiness was stored in an unsigned int, and that adding one more to the Naughtiness count reset the whole thing to 0. And then the joke never came. Rule of Funny, maybe - except that the joke they actually used ("Santa takes a long time to write, allowing them to get away") wasn't funny.
    • Maybe you didn't think it was funny, but answer this: How many people are going to get the "unsigned int" joke? Compare that to how many people are going to get the "Santa takes a long time to write" joke. You're gonna find one number is really small, while the other isn't.
    • Also, it could be awkward to get all the necessary facts into the dialogue without seeming extremely forced. The robots don't generally explain how they store data in conversation, but if they didn't mention that it's an unsigned int nearing its maximum then Santa would just seem to change his opinion of Bender for no reason.
    • They made pretty much the same joke in "Love's Labors Lost In Space" when Zapp Branigan explains how he defeated the killbots by sending waves of men for them to kill until they reached their limit and reset. There's also a deleted scene that makes it a little more like your programming joke.
    • I don't think using one joke instead of another counts as Rule of Funny.
  • Also in the first X-mas episode they say Pine trees are extinct yet pine trees have been seen throughout the episode
    • I think those were hinted to be artificial, though it doesn't explain why they couldn't get an artificial pine tree instead of a palm tree.
      • Because pine trees weren't considered X-mas trees anymore. Presumably between the extinction of pine trees and the invention of cheap, realistic artificial pine trees like the ones in other episodes, palm trees were used as X-mas trees and are now considered traditional.
  • Okay, the episode where Bender and Amy get together. Everybody except the Professor support the relationship. Did they all forget about Electro-Gonorrhea, the Noisy Killer?
    • It would have complicated things. The point of the episode was that people who oppose non-traditional relationships have silly and indefensible reasons for doing so. Introducing a valid concern like sexually transmitted disease would have made the debate too nuanced for the episode to work as written. But yeah, it would have been a great callback.
    • And remember, Farnsworth was the only one who wanted to screen "Electro-Gonorrhea, the Noisy Killer." None of the others reacted to the idea. It's possible that electro-gonorrhea is an outdated or overstated sexual risk that only a prude like Farnsworth would worry about. The film he did screen during Fry's Lucy Liu-bot phase certainly didn't seem up to date.
    • Considering the sexual history of the two characters involved, Electro-Gonorrhea might be the least of their concerns.
  • The way Amy reacted to Professor Farnsworth's admission that his lover left him for a robot really bugs me.
  • The episode where Zoidberg eats the Earth flag always bugged me. It's obviously supposed to be an alegory for flag-burning, but shouldn't Zoidberg's act be considered an act of vandalism, not treason? I mean, if I went up to a courthouse and burned its flag, I should rightly be arrested for vandalism. It wouldn't be an issue of freedom like its presented as in the show.
    • It's just because it's Freedom Day, where you're supposed to be able to get away with stuff like vandalism. On an ordinary day Zoidberg would get beaten with lightsabers for eating something he didn't own, sure. And that probably is part of an ordinary day for Zoidberg. But on Freedom Day, to punish him for it suggests that it's a special kind of evil, so the allegory holds.
      • If people are supposed to be able to do anything they want on Freedom Day, shouldn't they be able to beat Zoidberg with lightsabers for doing something they didn't like?
      • It's the principle of the thing. Freedom Day is supposed to be about doing whatever you want without any consequences whatsoever. Presumably you're not supposed to, either by custom or law, take retribution for being wronged (short of things like rape, murder, etc.). If you can beat someone for eating the flag, then hey, why not hit someone for doing any of the things Bender did? Pretty soon, you're right back to a normal day which defeats the purpose.
      • The whole point of the Freedom Day episode was to make fun of how Americans use the word "freedom" all the time without really having a stable definition of what it means. Basically, the Earthican government is saying "You're perfectly free to be beaten with lightsabers if you do anything unpatriotic."
  • In the epsiode where Nixon gets Bender's body and runs for president, Scoop Chang says he can't run for president since he already was elected twice. Um, Nixon was president of the USA, not Earth. USA ≠ Earth!
    • The Earth government seems to have evolved from the US government, note that the White House is the seat of government and they mention senators and congressmen.
    • Not to mention the word "Earthican", and also the flag (which has Earth in place of the Stars, where the Stars represented each State in the Union. Logically, this means the entire Earth was eventually conquered by, or otherwise acquired Statehood within, the United States.)
    • He was elected twice in the intervening one thousand years.
  • How did "Fryberg" and "Lellsworth"... you know...?
    • Butt stuff.
    • Zoidberg probably has a cloaca or something.
    • Better yet,how is Fryberg alive? Decapodians die after sex, and Fry looked very pleased with himself.
      • He said they die after passing on their genes. You can have sex without passing on your genes.
    • Perhaps they both have to be Decapodian?
      • Or maybe Leela was the "man". I kinda expect that from her.
    • Or maybe they just didn't go all the way.
  • So when our universe went through the second and third Big Bang, did Yivo's too?
    • Presumably, but according to the sped-up events we see from inside the time machine, things appear to have happened as exactly in Yivo's universe as it did in "ours", so the end result would be a negligible difference (aside from Yivo's universe also possibly being 10 feet lower).
    • I guess the question I was trying to get at was "does the Big Bang cover all existence and not Futurama's main universe?" I suppose that scene answers that question, at least in Yivo's case.
  • How can Zoidberg attach Fry's head to Amy's body in a way that keeps him alive? We can't even do that today, and Zoidberg is at most as competent as the Middle Ages physicians who suggest bloodletting when it comes to being a doctor.
    • Actually... it was done with dogs in the 1950s. Head Transplant. Warning; probably high Squick factor. Presumably the procedure has been simplified in the interfening thousand years to the point where even a hack-quack like Zoidberg could manage it.
    • Just because we can't do that today does not mean the far off year of 3000 has not invented such a technology. Also, Zoidberg may have next to no knowledge of human anatomy, but he is competent enough to reattach anything severed to a body, even if he doesn't do it right. The future probably has some neat tech that makes it fairly easy.
      • So what, does he have a "How to sew a head on someone" instruction sheet? If so, why don't they just give Zoidy an instruction sheet on the human body?
    • Becuase he'd put it upside down
    • He saw it done in a commercial.
  • If robots can also run on mineral oil seen in Hell is Other Robots, why does Tiny Tim ask for some booze? He's essentially a kid, why don't he ask for mineral oil?
    • He's not a kid. He's a robot. The robots run on alcohol by default. The mineral oil is a substitute for really devout robots of that particular robotic religion.
      • For a human comparison, we normally run on food that is nutritious, tasty, and easy to digest (in no particular order), but there have been sects in the past that had their followers subsist on water and unflavored grain mash. You wouldn't make a kid eat only unflavored grain mash because normal food doesn't cause drunkenness, so why would you expect a kid-robot (who may be Really Seven Hundred Years Old) to only eat mineral oil?
  • The ending of Bender's Big Score: Those hordes of Benders should still be under the scammers' control, but they don't have red eyes and were able to disobey the scammers' command to get back to them. How?
    • Main character Bender, not being infected, probably debugged them wirelessly or something. They could have done it on their own if the virus didn't make them not want to.
    • The Bender who wasn't infected with the obedience virus had a thousand years to debug the others. In that time, he did. Simple.
  • I can't watch the show comfortably without being bothered by the fact that there is no character in the show with a chin.
    • ...k. This isn't exactly a rare animation thing.
    • Hello~, Robot Devil? Also (and this is surprising, although it could be that he has a second chin that only appears to be a normal one), Hermes Conrad.
      • I know I noticed that. I Think the way Hermes is dressed makes him like that way.
        • He's still got it when nude.
  • How do we know that Fry is his own grandpa? I doubt they ever did any sort of paternity (or grand-paternity?) test to see if it was true, since they assumed it right away. He could still be Enis's grandson for all we know. Or should we assume that being your own grandfather the only thing effed up enough to make you lack the delta brainwave?
    • Because the show tells us time and time again that Fry is his own grandfather, and evidence supports this (at present). Maybe they'll roll around with a new episode contradicting this story at some point, but it's a pretty big staple of the show's story. I wouldn't expect them to treat it lightly.
    • The Nibblonians seemed convinced that Fry was his own grandfather, and they are portrayed as nigh-omniscient. Also, Fry is apparently the only sentient being ever in the Universe to lack a delta brainwave so whatever caused it has to be insanely rare.
      • Not necessarily the only sentient being ever - remember that Fry's father is also his own grandfather.
      • The lack of a Delta brain wave is probably a genetic, instead of a direct consequence of being your own grandfather. And maybe the gene skips a generation?
  • In the episode "Fear Of A Bot Planet", it makes sense that the Robot Elders would stir up anti-human sentiment amongst the robots of Chapek 9 in order to distract them from their real problems. What's less clear is why they feel the need to conceal their intent to kill Fry and Leela from the public (who are instead led to believe that they've been sentenced to a lifetime of robot-style labour), when the planet is filled with posters, movies and other such campaigns explicitly calling for human slaughter.
    • The elders are idiots.
      • SILENCE! You are exactly right.
  • Does anyone else find it kind of horrible that Mildred ends up alone and pregnant in the 1940s at the end of the Roswell episode? I understand that Fry couldn't stick around to help out, but the fact that Fry actually fathered a child is never even mentioned again.
    • If by "never even mentioned again" you mean "is a major plot point in several subsequent episodes over the course of the series."
    • As an extension on a JBM above, Mildred married Enos' brother Yancy to cover up the pregnancy and to the rest of the world the child was considered Yancy's, continuing the naming tradition. Only the family knew Enos was the real father.
      • Not impossible, but Yancy (Fry's father) never said what his father's name was - he only mentioned his grandfather "and so on, all the way up to Minute-Man Yancy".
  • Why did the group rush to buy a Mom product knowing that she's evil?
    • Same reason people do it with morally suspect corporations in real life. Its the only, best, or cheapest product of its kind on the market.
  • This one's been driving me crazy ever since I first saw the episode: In "Parasites Lost", why did Leela get so upset at Fry when he mentioned his previous relationship with Amy? I'm pretty sure she already knew they dated during that episode ("Put Your Head on my Shoulder"), and even if she didn't, why would she care at all who he used to date?
    • Obviously she knew they dated, and it's not the fact they dated she was mad about. It's just that a current/prospective girlfriend does not want to hear about previous girlfriends. It's an especially bad idea to talk about them when you're about to get it on with said prospective girlfriend.
  • In "Bender's Big Score", Bender go back in time to steal Hermes' body. However, the only way to bring it back was to wait in the cave with the body. Wouldn't it have rotted?
    • I didn't get what you meant at first, but not necessarily. Maybe Bender drugged him and let him sleep down there, THEN removed his head just in time to bring it up to the building.
  • During the demo derby in Bender's Game, why did they make George Takei's ship look like the NX-01 Enterprise and Scott Bakula's ship look like the TOS-Era Enterprise instead of the other way around?
  • So in the year 5 million humanity is split into two different species but in the year 10 million the people look like modern humans again?
    • That bothered me too. The best I can come up with is that in the intervening 5 million years, the people of the world idolized the human race before the "split" (much as Renaissance Era people idolized the Greeks and Romans, I suppose), and technologically engineered themselves to once again resemble humans from our time.
    • There's plenty of other options, such as off worlders recolonizing or the "split species" was just a regionalized thing
  • Hermes' entire willingness to almost murder everyone does not fit in with his saving of Bender as a child.
    • Hermes' willingness to kill people was a gag ... people other than Zoidberg anyway. Hermes came to the defense of the Crew - especially Bender! - when Morgan Procter put Bender's consciousness into the Master In Pile without begrudging anyone (Because when push comes to shove, you gotta do what you love - even if it's not a good idea!), not to mention his defense of the entire Earth during Bender's Big Score. Though Hermes maintains a fastidiously Lawful Neutral facade, he's always had a Lawful Good layer deep inside. Really deep.
      • He asks Leela to pick him up an application for a license to kill ("Weapons or bare hands?" "I don't know, what does piano wire count as?"). We've seen people born and die in the waiting line at the Central Bureaucracy. Sounds serious to me.
    • I'd go Chaotic Good, myself. Remember how long it took him to decide to not press the button in The Farnsworth Parabox?
  • My question about "Bendin' In The Wind" is this: What wass the big deal if Bender could move? I understand it would look like he was a liar, but he raised the money for OTHER broken robots, not himself, so why would they take the check back? Even if he was lying, the cause remained he same. Also, why did he apologize to Beck for lying? He didn't lie. He WAS paralyzed when they met. Even arguing that Beck couldn't verify that (though they met in the hospital where he was very obviously injured), why would Bender cop to lying? He DIDN'T, he merely didn't confess he'd gotten better the moment it happened, but that had nothing to do with his cause. He WAS a broken robot that realized broken robots could be useful.
    • He DID try to steal the check at the end...
    • I was wondering about this too. If someone is an activist for a charitable cause, being directly affected by that cause is certainly no prerequisite for getting involved. That's the whole point of charity!
    • Bender thought that people would have a problem with him being able to move. Everyone else had a problem with Bender because they thought he pretended to be disabled to gain fame. This would have been avoided if only Bender explained his situation.
  • In Lrrreconcirable Ndndifferences, everybody pronounces Ndnd's name differently than it had been pronounced throughout the pre-movies series; everyone puts brief pauses between the Ns and Ds, rather than just letting the name flow. Ndnd was my favorite Futurama character name but I don't like it nearly as much when pronounced the way it is in that episode.
  • In one of the early episodes ("A Fishful of Dollars"), it turns out that due to 1000 years of compound interest on the 93 cents in Fry's checking account he has amassed $4.3 billion. Other people from the past have been unfrozen from the cryogenics lab; even if they weren't frozen for so long, they'd still have the potential to increase their wealth in the meantime if their bank accounts remained. So why aren't there other people who have similarly discovered previously unanticipated fortunes in their possession? Or if there are, why hasn't the local economy adjusted in response to this, preventing Fry's brief fortune?
    • Because they all squander it nigh-instantly on insanely rare and expensive nostalgic mementos of their bygone era.
    • The economy would only adjust if a large number of people became billionaires through cryogenics. My WMG was that sometime after Fry's freezing an anti-cryogenics movement sprung up and made a lot of bad press for the cryogenics lab. Debates were deadlocked until Congress came up with the compromise that they would outlaw any future freezings but allow the few people already frozen to run out their timers as planned. The only purpose of the cryogenics lab is to help people who unfreeze in the Future acclimatize to the 31st century, and once they all unfreeze the lab will be mothballed.
    • One word: inflation. Yes, 93 cents at 2.25 percent interest for 1000 years is $4.3 billion... in year 2000 dollars. But after a thousand years of the dollar being devalued due to inflation, Fry's $4.3 billion would probably be worth about 40 cents in "today's" money. You can't just invest money for a long time and watch the interest pile up; your return rate has to beat the inflation rate. It could be done, but not with a simple interest-paying savings account like Fry would have.
      • Except for the bit where the episode shows that $4.3 billion dollars does in fact make Fry insanely rich in the future, so.
  • Am I the only one who sees the Harlem Globetrotters as Marty Stu Scrappies? Bubblegum is always depicted as being leagues better than the Professor, and even in episodes with which they have no direct involvement, they'll show up at the end to solve the episode's plot ("The Prisoner of Benda").
    • It seems to be intentional. Anyone who's seen a Globetrotters game knows the real-life Harlem Globetrotters are real-life basketball Marty Stus (and, depending on your viewpoint, also real-life Scrappies). The Futurama Globetrotters appear to be an intentional parody.
  • The Eyeless Universe in the Farnsworth Parabox should by all accounts have no concept of sight.
    • Maybe they evolved to use sonar like the bats, and call this sense "sight".
    • Or that it's a universe where a recent disaster made everyone eyeless, so they are familiar with the concept, because they had it once.
      • The problem with that one is that they say "ever".
      • If the event that removed everyone's eyes happened before they were born (and was somehow genetically inheritable) then it would still be true that they never saw anything ever, yet they would still know of the concept from history.
    • Isn't that exactly the entire joke? It's a "that doesn't make any sense" joke (whatever we call those around here). Heck, why would there even be a Planet Express crew?
    • The first response to this mentions bats using sonar. As humans we understand senses like that even if we don't biologically have them. In the eyeless universe maybe cats and dogs have eyes so the human crew are familiar with the concept of seeing, even though they can't?
  • Okay, so in "The Series Has Landed", Amy is introduced for the first time as Planet Express's intern and one of Professor Farnsworth's engineering students. But in "Mars University", Farnsworth teaches only one class, "The Mathematics of Quantum Neutrino Fields" -- and he made up the name "so that no student would dare take it." Continuity Snarl?
    • The class he taught was apparently a first-year undergraduate module since Fry was able to take it, Amy is (or was until she graduated recently) a Ph.D. student. Amy would have been performing research under the Professor's supervision rather than attending this sort of class.
  • It really feels like season five, the episodes were each clear cases of "Tip the scales from status quo, and then rebuild until everything's fine again"... WHY?
    • I don't get what you are trying to say, is Season Five a bad thing? What are you talking about with whatever that crap about tip the scales?
    • Is it possible she was an undergraduate at that point in the series? It has been going something like 11 years, and I'm no Futurama continuity buff, but doesn't that compress to like 7/8 years in the show? Also, in my experience engineering students often enjoy maths so maybe that's why she took the class based on its nonsensical title?


  • In the episode with Bender and Amy getting 'married', the episode starts out with Bender 'graffiti-tiling' everything, and then, after the one time Bender tiles the Proposition Infinity onto the cop bot, the whole side plot gets dropped... WHAT the HELL?
    • It was never a sideplot. More of a Red Herring Twist. Matt Groening does this a lot, where an episode will start out with a certain plot device, then suddenly pull a massive left turn into something completely different. I can't think of a single episode of The Simpsons that didn't follow this formula.
  • In the episode Cryonic Woman, Fry responds to, "I just figured time was cyclic," with, "Nope, straight line...", which as we know by now, has been disproven by the new season's time travel episode...
    • Fry didn't know time was cyclical at the time. Also, it technically isn't; each new universe is distinct in some way. The one the crew end up in is ten feet above and to the side of their old one.
      • Actually, it wasn't: the time machine floated to the surface and was paddled a few feet over when they stopped in the flooded era, and that was the only time it ever moved. The Professor must have forgotten to take that into account when he said the new universe was lower.
      • Plus, the guy only froze himself for 1000 years. It takes more than 1000 years for time to repeat itself. Plus I thought it was a Brick Joke.
      • Not to mention that being in a freezer tube wouldn't exactly help you out there considering, you know, the universe has to be destroyed first. Plus, from what's seen in the episode, the cryogenics lab didn't even look like it survived to the year 10000; it sure as hell ain't making it to the end of all things.
    • It's a subtle distinction, but time isn't actually cyclic, just repetitive. At the end of "The Late Phillip J. Fry," they're still in the far-off future, just a future that's nearly identical to the time they came from. If it was cyclical they would have reached the end of the universe and wound up in the actual past.
  • In the worms episode where the holophoner first shows up, Leela says "Only a few people in the universe can play one of those! And they're not very good at it!", indicating that it's a very rare instrument that's incredibly hard to play, which is why it's so amazing that Fry can play it so well, which is all well and good. But then the next time it shows up, there's a class teaching children how to play it in New New York, and it's apparently cheap enough (and has a low enough entry requirement) that Fry can get in, which implies (at least to me) that this is now a relatively widespread instrument like the guitar or saxophone or something. So what's the deal with that? Is this the only class in the universe that teaches it, or has it suddenly taken off in popularity since Fry had worms?
    • ...Yes?
    • There wasn't any change in the instrument's popularity or quantity. It's simply a situation whereby numerous people (incorrectly) consider themselves as having a decent chance of becoming a master player. This isn't terribly uncommon; it's related to the Dunning-Kruger effect, and also to the popularity of lotteries, which only have a few winners and (given how often the winnings are squandered), "even they're not very good at it". Also, so long as folks are willing to shell out money for holophoner lessons, at least one teacher or two isn't going to care much about entry requirements. Finally, of course, it's possible that Leela was exaggerating (or repeating an exaggeration she heard and believed).
  • At the end of "The Farnsworth Parabox", they've somehow gotten each universe inside itself rather than the other one. Putting aside the total Mind Screw of trying to figure out the topology of that switcheroo, what I'm wondering is: What would happen if you opened the box and stepped inside? (Prior to this switch, you fell out of and "up from" the box in the parallel universe, making them work as "doors", but this time it should somehow be a portal to… itself? Aggh…)
    • Theoretically, the portals should have folded so that the "open" sides faced each other, instead of out into their universes (assuming the tension snapped the portals in place instead of requiring enough space that the Farnsworths could remove their fingers from the edges). Topographically and in practice, the result was virtually (and probably completely) impossible. It's remotely plausible that the universe was inside-out in the box, and that the z-axis was aligned with the external z-axis (which makes sense), but the team obviously fudged the reality around the boxes. If you weatch closely, there's an animation blip around the boxes while they are pulled through each other, which means that even the writing and animation team (including David X. Cohen, who wrote and proved a new mathematical theorem just for an episode that didn't actually need the answer shown on-screen) wasn't able to figure out how to get it to work.
  • Is anyone else bothered by that fact Leela didn't seem to give a crap about how her parents and the other mutants were forced live until the episode, "The Mutants Are Revolting." AKA, the episode where it became her problem. IMHO, it makes her motivation seem less like, "I'm freeing these oppressed people and fighting for them because it's the right thing to do." and more like, "I'm freeing these oppressed people and fighting for them because there's no way I'm living in a shithole like them."
    • Her parents, and the other mutants, seemed pretty okay with it, possibly because they hadn't known any other life and were more or less used to it. Sure, they know on some level that they're getting the raw deal, but they've learned to live with it. Leela, who's seen and experienced the good life on the surface, is the only one among them that really understands just how bad it is by comparison. Plus, up until then, she hadn't been directly exposed to how aristocrats like Mrs. Astor viewed mutants, so the freedom thing was as much about that as it was about their general oppression.
      • No, her parents knew what it was like to be non-mutants. Her mother had a degree in xenolinguistics, remember?
      • We don't know how she got it; could've been a correspondance course she took from home, or at that university in the sewers that's brought up in this episode.
      • Also, Leela lived down in the sewers before, in "Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles". That episode implied she was living there for days without complaining once about the living conditions. (Except maybe that she couldn't have any beer until she finished her tequila.)
      • And that whole time she was indulging in the normal(ish) childhood that she didn't have when she was a kid. She didn't have to go down to the sewers, that was her choice, while in the latter case she was forced down there. Plus, in that episode, she knew, if only in the back of her mind, that it was a temporary thing, while in the more recent episode it was supposed to be permanent.
      • Original poster: One of the things that bugs me about Leela never once complained about the suffering of once before this episode, not even trying to find an online protest group or something, but once she has to suffer through this, she resorts to what could easily be classified as terrorism.
      • Leela's always been at least a bit selfish. It's not really out of character for her to care more about something when it directly affects her as opposed to when it's someone else's problem.
      • Do you protest every injustice in the world? Or just the one's that seem relevant or make sense to you?
  • Why would Mom need to make a bunch of living zombies to buy the eyePhone 2, when hordes of people did it willingly for the first version? It's not like the populus of New New York is exactly intelligent enough to refuse a novelty.
    • I thought it was just a forced viral ad that she sent out on the hijacked feeds, not an actual mind-control virus. If I'm wrong, that just makes it More Than Mind Control. Anyway, a lot of people actually don't go out and buy every upgrade, but only buy upgrades that make significant jumps or wait a couple of levels until their current thing is (in their opinion) truly obsolete.


  • In The Late Philip J. Fry, how come 5 million years down the line, humanity evolved into two divergent strains, but in the next time-jump forward conventional humans somehow reasserted themselves?
    • Because the song told them to.
    • Earth might have been repopulated by humans from another part of the universe, or the Dumblocks evolved back into something resembling humans.
  • In "A Fishful of Dollars", would $4.3 billion really be worth that much after a thousand years of inflation?
    • Prices in most episodes seem to suggest a lot of deflation, so that wouldn't be an issue.
      • More likely, the dollar has been redenominated several times over the intervening millennium. A thousand years of inflation, even at a reasonable 3 percent, would turn $1 into $7,000,000,000,000. Rather than make people use trillion dollar banknotes to buy a Slurm, the Central Bank of Earth would say "a thousand old dollars is now one new dollar" every 300 years or so. So a dollar in the Futurama universe can have about the same purchasing power as a dollar now, but its value still reflects a thousand years of inflation. They just trimmed some zeroes off the end.
  • How old is Nibbler? In the episode where his tooth chips, the doctor says that he's five from counting the rings. But apparently he was also the one who sent Fry to the future 1000 years ago?
    • Nibbler is thousands and thousands of years old. The doctor's counting the rings was based on "if he's anything like a tree," which is a blatantly ridiculous assumption to make on every conceivable level, which was probably the point.
      • Compounding the ridiculousness is the fact that they decide to celebrate his birthday immediately, based on even flimsier evidence.
    • The doctor didn't know what Nibbler was, so he was guessing.
  • In the Christmas episode they mention that pine trees have gone extinct. Except, there have been pine trees everywhere throughout the entire episode. There are even pine trees in the background while saying pine trees have gone extinct. There is no way something as simple as Rule of Funny or MST3K Mantra could cover up such a huge plot hole.
    • Since these trees fold into the ground when one says, "Trees down." It's wholey possible that those pine trees are artificial.
    • It should be noted that the entire Christmas episode was just for fun, and not canon. So it's possible that the contradiction was done on purpose and Played for Laughs.
      • We're not talking about the 2010 holiday special, we're talking about "Xmas Story", which is definitely canon, or at least isn't subject to Negative Continuity like The Simpsons is.
        • Oh, my bad. Thought you were talking about the most recent one where everybody dies over and over.
    • Presumably they're either Fir or Spruce.
  • How does Fry know about the Kardashians?
    • Because their heads are probably still alive.
  • In Benderama they treat it is though Bender is the only one affected by the alchohol shortage, and the only one not affected by the water turning into alcohol. What about all the other robots? Running out of fuel for all the robots on Earth should be a major problem.
    • The Benders than began turning all the water on Earth into alcohol, so the problem was quickly solved.
  • Why is nothing ever made out of the fact that Fry's father Yancy is also his own grandfather? Is he missing the delta brainwave as well? Could the Nibblonians have plans for him that Fry can't take part in?
    • Wouldn't Yancy be his own great grandfather? In any case, Yancy didn't get frozen, and is long dead, so he doesn't really matter.
      • On the first, no. Fry and Mildred conceive Yancy in 1947, Yancy and Fry's mom conceive him in 1974. On the second, chronologically, the last we saw of Fry's immediate family was a few glimpses in 2012, in Bender's Big Score. I think there is a potential story here - not necessarily a time travel one, maybe something involving Nibbler set after Panucci's was blown up in 2012.
      • Here's how it goes; Yancy begets Fry who goes back in time to beget Yancy who then begets Fry. Both Fry and Yancy are their own grandfathers.
  • The whole point of the episode "Lethal Inspection" was that if Bender died (or his body destroyed), then his software wouldn't be able to enter any other Bending Unit bodies (or, presumably, any other bodies period, since there was such a big deal made over Bender being mortal). Then comes the episode "Ghost in the Machines," in which Bender's software becomes a "robot ghost" (which has actually appeared in the series before, to be fair) and is able to take control of any mechanical device, from an electric toothbrush to the Robot Devil, and even Robot God. So, uh... wha?
    • Well, he wasn't alive, was he?
  • So what made all the Earth's water supply go back to being water instead of alcohol? Obviously the little Benders wouldn't be bothered with such a task.
    • I assumed that was the joke when the Professor started talking about his sweaters--you expected an explanation about the water but they consciously avoided the Plot Hole. A bit annoying, I'll admit.
      • I just assumed that the water righted itself in the end or they just drank all the booze so all was left was water. It's not like it's hard to make, just get some Hydrogen and Oxygen, not hard to find and BAM! You have water.
  • Was anyone else bothered by the Designated Hero thing the Ecofeminists had in Wild Green Yonder? Sure, Leo Wong was a Jerkass who bordered on Complete Monster, but that doesn't absolve the Ecofeminists of their own acts. They killed the Headless Remains of Agnew, vandalised Wong's golf course (Probably killing a few construction workers as a result), imprisoned the Planet Express crew in a cage because they were trying to do their jobs almost all of the Nimbus crew were killed chasing after them (Though Zap is probably more to blame on that one), and we're supposed to side with them all because of some stupid Anvilicious Aesops?
    • We were?
  • Despite the Casual Interstellar Travel, each time a hazard befalls the Earth and only the Earth, (such as when cats stopped the planet from turning, or when all the water turned to alcohol), everyone sits around bemoaning it - even though they have a working spacecraft and could leave the planet to think about solutions at any time.
    • Because they're all idiots, it's funny, and in the last one they were all to plastered to figure it out.
  • Law and Oracle how can a person get married to birds?
    • Future marriage encompasses a lot of unusual combinations. Even ghost and horse!
  • In Silence of the Clamps how come nobody realized that Francis was Clamps?
    • They probably thought he was a different robot of the same model; there's multiple bending units they've run into that all sound the same but act differently--including one in that very episode. It's not hard to believe there'd be other clamping units too that look like and have the same voice box as Clamps.
  • In Silence of the Clamps, Billy West wasn't Bender...But he still looked shocked and ran away when he saw the Planet Express crew?
    • He's hardly ever met anyone from outside of Aldrin's Gulch, and given his father-in-law's opinion of city folks, he was probably startled and frightened to see a group of out-of-towners. By the time they visited him at home, he's calmed down and his inherent friendliness asserts itself.
  • In "Lethal Inspection", Hermes looks like a teenager at the time of Bender's construction. Wasn't Bender stated somewhere to be created in the late 2990s, i.e. a couple of years before Hermes' first appearance in "The Series Has Landed"?
    • Just because he wasn't shown, doesn't mean he wasn't alive.
      • I think what the OP means is that Hermes wouldn't have been that young when Bender was made.
      • I don't understand the first reply's wording at all. Both characters WERE shown. Hermes was the one who allowed Bender to live a mortal non-brain-uploady life. Look at Hermes here, and look at him in episode 2 of the show. That was my question.
  • I'm a bit fuzzy on earlier episodes, but isn't the wheel extinct? If so, why did Farnsworth have that "chair with wheels on it"?
    • Fry re-invented them, and they became used again.
  • "Ghost in the Machine" - Why doesn't Fry know about Parade Day? He's lived in New New York for eleven years at this point, he's no longer a complete fish-out-of-water.
    • Maybe they were in space for every Parade Day?
  • At the risk of creating yet another Roswell That Ends Well discussion, there's one thing about it that always irked me. Before that whole Grandfather Paradox thing came to light, Farnsworth is adamant about Fry avoiding Enos. Okay, that's fine. He's a scientist, he fully understands the ramifications of a paradox like that. Is there any reason why he never mentioned, "By the way, your brother and by extension Enos are also my direct ancestors so for my sake as well as yours, stay the hell away from Enos so we both don't vanish"? Or did he mention it and I just missed it?
    • I suppose he assumed that appealing to Fry's sense of self-preservation would be sufficiant. Why bring up the indirect threat to your employer/umpty-great nephew when you can say "you do this, you die".
  • Bender's apartment/Fry's closet: Is Bender the only robot on the floor with a closet? From an architectural perspective, given the size of and how close together the "apartments" are, there's no way each one can have its own closet that size. There just isn't enough room.
  • What does M.O.M. stand for or is Mom her real name?
    • Her given name is Carol. Mom is her professional name.
  • The series pays some lip service to taking place in real time relative to production time (unlike The Simpsons, say)... at what point do you think they will have the characters visibly age?
    • People live to be 150+, I would assume the aging process is slooow.
    • In "Overclockwise" (set in 3011), Cubert is identified as being 12. In "The Route of All Evil" (3002), he was identified as being... 12. Harder to explain that.
  • If Career Chips were created for the purpose of everyone being employed in the 31st century, why do we still see homeless and jobless people. If Leela was correct then they should've been "fired"... out of a cannon and into the sun. Come to think of it if Sal keeps changing jobs then his hand would be extremely sore by now.
    • Maybe some career chips are less specific than others. Sal's career may be "Everyman". There could also be career chips for begging- beggars with prime positions in generous cities (often outside Wal-Marts) can make plenty of money annually.
    • There's also plenty of ways to lose your job without refusing to perform the function at all, and it was the refusal part that got your fired into the sun. You could be fired (Normally fired, as in dismissed for doing poor work), your business might shut down, your job might be outsourced, or you might quit that specific job but still accept that you need to work within that field. Career chips don't give you a job, they just say what job you're good at and are allowed to do.
  • Why did Fry think he wasn't going to use two of the dimensions in the Escher apartment? He clearly saw from Bender falling down and up and along the stairs that it would be easiest to just live in all three perspectives (certainly than to keep himself in only one). There are plausible reasons to not live in that apartment without testing the effects of walking from one perspective to the next (mostly disorientation and possible nausea), but while Fry is an idiot and a Cloudcuckoolander, that didn't seem to be a riff on his Cloudcuckoolander status, and he clearly showed that he wasn't enough of an idiot in that instance to make that mistake from idiocy (unless he was being a Know-Nothing Know-It-All, which seems to ring hollow but I can't figure out why it seems to do so). Most importantly, it didn't seem like the Rule of Funny was aimed at his comment, just at the apartment. Was that just one of those things where the writers say, "Move along, we're done with this scene", or am I missing something?
    • Sometimes people go househunting and don't want a house that's too big because they're paying more for space they won't use. Fry and Bender would've said the same thing about an apartment with four bedrooms but it's funny because it's an Escher reference.
  • Since Leela (somehow) lived in New New York under the charade that she was a alien up to the point where she discovered herself to be a mutant, then why don't other mutants pose as aliens as well. I mean it worked for Leela so it would work for them... unless they never thought of it. But it would be futile now that Mutants are now legal. Come to think of it, why would the New New Yorkians allow aliens to live among them and not mutants, some aliens are as grotesque as the mutants and yet a vicious alien like Morbo can hold a job as a anchorman.
    • They probably didn't think of it (the mutants are not presented as being particularly bright). And the reason humans might let aliens live among them and not mutants is because mutants are disenfranchised and weak, whereas horrible aliens have death fleets they can use to conquer the planet with. Remember when the Decapodeans did that because the people of Earth was going to execute Zoidberg? These are some of the nicer aliens.
    • Leela is the least-mutated mutant ever born. Even with one freakishly huge eye, she's very "human". And hot.
  • Why do we hardly ever see any robots made by aliens? The only autonomous robots in the show that I remember to have been built by an alien were the ones that Leonardo da Vinci made. I know that the episode with the Amazonian women had a fembot who came from a planet that was ruled by a masculine computer, but who's to say that they weren't of Earthican origin like the the human-hating robots from that robot planet? Does Mom hold a universal monopoly on robot production or something?
    • Considering Mom, it's a high liklehood she does. She had a monopoly on dark matter, it's not a stretch to assume she has one on robot production. However, we did see a robot expo where Wernstrom and others sold robots, though we don't know if they were all working for Mom or not. And in season one, there was an episode with a planet populated by human-hating robots.
      • I had wondered about that robot planet from "Fear of a Bot Planet," but they are indeed specified as having originated on Earth. The same can be said of the robot planet from "The Clockwork Origin."
  • The whole Earth-is-the-same-thing-as-america thing makes me scratch my head to a ridiculous degree. It wouldn't be so bad if it was ever used for jokes, but it never really is. And why are the former presidents of the USA concidered former presidents of earth?
    • Presumably, America took over, or united with everyone and managed to keep American culture dominant. And so the American history of rulers was what continued.
    • It *is* a joke. It's Lampshade Hanging on the fact that a lot of sci-fi series can't be bothered (or don't have the time, or don't have the budget) to come up with a complex realistic response to futuristic ideas of nationality. Futurama gets a lot of mileage out of the "what's the deal with X?" "it's a sci-fi show, it's that way because that's what happens in sci-fi".
  • What will Nixon do once eight years have passed and his term limits are over?
    • He was able to run in his election because he had a new body. Maybe he did got a second new one?
  • In the episode where Fry buys the last can of anchovies, why didn't he ask the Professor or someone to clone them?
    • Because Fry's an idiot.
  • If Bender thought he was immortal until the episode Lethal Inspection, why would he want to kill himself in the first episode? If he thought he was immortal, why do this? It's not like it would do him any good. Also, why would he want to kill himself when he could just as easily "Turn his On-Off switch to off," ?
    • As said in Lethal Inspection, he's a friggin' drama queen.
    • A plea for attention from Bender. I AM COMMITTING SUICIDE AND THIS TIME I MEAN IT
  • Don't go all Rule of Funny on me. I know it's probably the exact reason earth is taken over by scammers, but where the hell are the scambaiters? Surely someone who are used to dealing with scams and scammers wouldn't fall for their Nigerian prince/Spanish lottery/get rich watching porn crap.
    • There probably were a few people who didn't fall for it, but when they were surrounded by idiots who did, including the President of Earth, I don't think there was really a lot they could do about it.
    • Rule of Funny.
  • I was wondering about this for years but in the episode "Fear of a Bot Planet", Leela objects to being sentenced as a human by the human-hating robots because (at the time she believed) she is a one-eyed alien and eventually it turned out much later that she actually is mutant. Does this mean the robots know she's a human the whole time or what? This could've been a big clue for Leela's past.
    • The robots just didn't care: She looked human enough, ergo they considered her human.
    • It's possible that they did know. The writers claim that Leela being a mutant was planned from the start and a few clues were shown before the reveal, for example her parents are visible in a series 2 episode when the mutants first appeared. More relevantly Bender's HUD picks her up as human in 'The Bird-Bot of Ice-Catraz', so apparently some robots do have this ability.
  • Why is it that nobody has noticed the time-duplicate Bender in the cryogenic tube. It's not even the timeline trying to prevent a paradox, since that Bender was doomed anyway. And for that matter, wouldn't someone get suspicious that two of the same people are present(the duplicate Fry living his own life, and the original Fry being frozen)?
    • This is the same cryogenics firm that left their office unlocked and unoccupied with an open cryo tube that apparently defaults to 1,000 years as soon as you close the door, and then failed to notice that Fry had been accidentally frozen in the first place. Apparently once you're in there they don't care until it's time to thaw you out.
  • Is Mars under the jurisdiction of the Earthican government or not? Also, what is the Earthican state called? Just "Earth"? "The United Continents of Earth"? "The Republic of Earth"?
    • As Amy's parents own the entire western hemisphere, I think we can assume Mars is privately owned and governed by the mega wealthy who own most of it.
      • Then why did Nixon have jurisdiction to oversee the building of the casino in "Into the Wild Green Yonder"? Granted, he let Wong do everything he wanted and ordered sham environmental inspections, but still, it seems Wong had to go through Nixon. Also, what Mars University? Is that private too?
  • The "Lost City of Atlanta"; its existence is shrouded in legend, yet its main industry is tourism. What?

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