Futurama/Bender's Big Score

Bender's Big Score
Season 6, Episodes 1-4
Airdate	November 27, 2007 (DVD) March 23, 2008 (Comedy Central)
Production Number	5ACV01 5ACV02 5ACV03 5ACV04
Written by	teleplay Ken Keeler story Ken Keeler & David X. Cohen
Directed by	Dwayne Carey-Hill
← 5x16 The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings	6x05 → The Beast with a Billion Backs
Futurama — Season Six

Bender's Big Score is the first, second, third and fourth episodes of the sixth season of Futurama, and the seventy-third, seventy-fourth, seventy-fifth and seventy-sixth episodes overall. The episodes originally appeared as a direct-to-DVD movie.

Starring: Billy West (Philip J. Fry/Prof. Farnsworth/Richard Nixon/Zapp Brannigan), Katey Sagal (Turanga Leela), John DiMaggio (Bender/Barbados Slim/Curly Joe/Constantine/Santa), Tress MacNeille (Marine Biologist/Linda/Turanga Munda), Maurice LaMarche (Fleb/Cryogenicist/Morbo/Kif Kroker/Clamps)

Guest Starring: Phil LaMarr (Hermes Conrad/Ethan "Bubblegum" Tate/Phil Fry), Lauren Tom (Amy Wong), David Herman (Nudar/Scruffy/Sweet Clyde/Turanga Morris/Father Changstein-El-Gamal), Dawnn Lewis (LeBarbara Conrad), Kath Soucie (Cubert Farnsworth), Frank Welker (Nibbler/Seymour/Schlump)

Special Appearances by: Coolio (Kwanzaa Bot), Al Gore (Himself), Mark Hamill (Chanukah Zombie), Tom Kenny (Yancy Fry, Jr.), Sarah Silverman (Michelle)

Plot Overview

After a lengthy role call, the professor informs the entire crew that they've been fired. Not only that, they were fired two years ago and haven't bothered to leave the job. According to him, the "asinine" executives at the shipping network "Box Networks" have cancelled their business. They're all about to leave when the professor gets a call saying that they're back on the air because those executives were themselves fired, beaten up and ground into a fine powder. The crew celebrates, but in the midst of a limbo challenge using swords, Hermes is decapitated. They rush to the hospital with his mangled body and the regular credits start.

In the hospital, Hermes head is transferred to a jar by Lars, an orderly who flirts briefly with Leela, although his body will apparently be functional in a few days. This isn't good enough for LeBarbara, who decides to go find Dwight a new father in the mean time. The crew assures Hermes that they'll be by his side until he's whole again, but when the Professor comes in with a package for the nude beach planet, they all abandon him. On the planet, the crew is tricked into signing a petition which does little more than send out tons of internet spam.

All of the members fall for various e-mail schemes like Leela donating to a bogus charity for endangered animals, Amy giving her credit card to a "pharmaceutical supplier," Bender getting a virus from porn and Zoidberg getting the standard dead Nigerian Prince who has willed everything to him scam. Hermes, Fry and Farnsworth are the only ones who see through the problem, but nobody's listening to Hermes. Instead they're using his jar as an umbrella holder. Farnsworth calls together a mandatory security meeting, but in the process of that he winds up giving away personal information to the "Spanish National Lottery," which turns out to be the creeps from the nude beach. Because he signed away the deed to the business, they now control it as well as the virus ridden Bender.

The three new bosses decide to set up their scam headquarters from Planet Express and immediately set to work, starting with Amy's "antidepressants," which are just gummy fungi. Later on, Lars arrives at Planet Express to change Hermes' jar and inform him that his body is behind schedule by months or years because the museum was scammed into giving away their money. Lars asks Leela out on a date, much to Fry's disappointment.

Elsewhere, the bosses "sprunge" for information and discover Farnsworth's hidden safe behind a portrait. The make Bender knock down the wall and open the safe, which contains all of the crew's personal information including social security numbers and stool samples. But this is only small potatoes compared to what they discover in Fry. As soon as he enters the room, the three goons are all over him and are drawn to his mysterious Bender tattoo that he didn't know he had. When zoomed in, binary code reveals the "universal machine language time code" in the form of a time sphere from god/galaxy Bender once met. One of the goons explains that the code is the key to time travel. The gang immediately considers the stealing they could do with the sphere when Nibbler rides in on a guinea pig to warn them about disrupting time. They resolve to only use it six times maximum, so Nibbler calls in the Nibblonians to attack. They're all fended off by folding chairs, however.

Now that there's no opposition, the leader of the scammers uses the sphere to go back to the day before so he can meet himself for a drink. The two come back into the room where the sphere just was, but one of them is killed by the Smelloscope, resolving the paradox and retaining the space-time continuum's integrity. But, there's a problem. The time code can bring people to the past, but it can't bring them back to the future.

Bender suggests that he steal everything in the past then wait it out in the limestone cavern beneath the company. He steals the Mona Lisa, King Tut's sarcophagus, MC Svensson's Nobel Peace Prize for brokering peace between East Coast and West Coast rappers and ultimately the Professor's doomsday device handcuffed to his wrist. Seeing Bender hack off the professor's hand with a saw gives Hermes an idea. He asks Bender to go back in time to get his undamaged body so that he can win his wife back from Barbados Slim. The operation is a success, in a manner of speaking, but Zoidberg attached his head backwards. He chases Zoidberg into the meeting between Farnsworth and the Globetrotters, trying to disprove the possibility of time travel without paradoxes, and explains what he's done. According to Bubblegum, the duplicate body is always inherently doomed (hence the early death) and Hermes is going to need to work fast to win back his wife.

Meanwhile, the crooks have succeeded in stealing every valuable object in history. Now that they're concerned about the universe being destroyed, they blank Bender's memory and try to vaporize Fry. Worse yet, he's still bitter over Leela's date with Lars going well and (while in mid-peril) escapes to the year 2000. But since Bender knows that Fry always comes back to the year 2000, he comes back earlier to kill him at the behest of his masters. But, of course, Bender gets bored and drinks a cheap six-pack of beer while waiting. He realizes he needs to go to the bathroom and goes back again, so one Bender can wait for Fry and the other can go. While Bender A is gone, yet another Bender (from the end) comes to put a rub on tattoo of the time code on Fry.

Eventually Fry shows up (again), but Bender B malfunctions and gets stuffed into a cryogenic tube for a million years. Fry escapes and Bender decides to kill himself instead of try to find Fry. But there are no suicide booths in 2000 and Bender winds up in a "street corner telephone parlor," where he finds a phone book. Bender goes around looking for Philip Frys in the city, but he can't find him. Figuring that he's left the state, Bender goes on a rampage, attempting to assassinate every Philip Fry in the country. Twelve years later, Bender walks to Long Island, NY to kill Yancy Fry's son (named for his uncle. Bender threatens to kill the kid, but he's directed to a fishing boat on the North Pole.

Finally, Bender sees Fry getting into a taxi and attempts to force another taxi, a hybrid driven by Al Gore, to follow. But, the taxi gets into a high-speed wreck that launches Bender to Panucci's Pizza, coincidentally, where Fry was living. Bender fires off his weapon, which blows up Fry's room and flash fossilizes Seymour. Bender breaks down in tears when he realizes that he's killed his best friend and apparently mourns for the next thousand years. But, the aliens erase his memory in the year 3007 and the rest of the crew holds a memorial service in his honor.

But, Fry isn't dead at all. He explains that it all started when he went back in time. Hungry, he decided to go eat the pizza in the cryogenics lab, but it's cold at this point. So, he went back in time to a hour before when the pizza was lukewarm. After a brief exchange between versions of himself, he decides to rob the original frozen Fry but winds up falling into the cryogenic tube. A thousand years later, Fry B is unfrozen and Fry A sets his timer again for 7.95 years so that he'll wake up in the present. He wonders aloud what the other him's life was like, but Scruffy assures them that they'll never know.

Everything is back to normal, but the scammer aliens have ruined Earth's economy and has fired the Planet Express crew from their jobs. They've also decided to buy New New York and turn it into panda hunting grounds, which includes Leela's apartments. They all huddle around a trash fire and suddenly realize that it's X-Mas Eve and Santa is on the prowl. He declares that he'll be back after he takes milk and cookies from orphans. While he's gone, they all sing about how lousy their lives are, except Leela who gets engaged to Lars mid-song.

The wedding occurs shortly after the reception dinner at Elzar's restaurant. Fry decides that he needs to do something to break it up, but all he can come up with is replacing the pen for signing the marriage license with one that has no ink in it. This doesn't work since Lars has a pen of his own, but Leela accidentally pokes Hermes in the eye. This sets off a chain of events that ends with Hermes being decapitated by a chandelier. The Professor angrily exclaims that he warned him about how all paradox copies are doomed, which gets an odd reaction from Lars. He claims that the day is ruined by the decapitation and calls off the wedding.

Later, Nixon announces to the world that he's working a deal that would allow him to buy Earth back from the scammer aliens. But, it just turns out that Nixon was tricked into handing over the planet's remaining land and water to the scammers and everyone's forced to evacuate to Neptune in the Planet Express ship. The build a shack on Neptune, but it's smashed by yetis. Later, Santa comes knocking with a missile, but he complains that the scammers scammed him out of his naughty list and his heart isn't in killing anymore. Leela finally gets fed up and decides to mount a "ragtag attack" with Santa, KwanzaaBot and the Hanukkah Zombie against the scammers' fleet of golden remote control death stars.

Santa and his holiday pals, in a musical number, outline their plan to turn the toyshop into a war machine and trick out their flying machines with napalm filled rabbits, missiles and a TIE Fighter. Once they're armed, Leela tries to lead the troops to war, but is replaced by Zapp Branigan. Of course, Branigan is an idiot and the Nimbus is blown out of the sky immediately. Leela takes over and tries to destroy the death stars, but she has a hard time coordinating so many ships. Hermes offers his brain to coordinate the forces. They succeed in blowing up all of the defense forces, but the scammers hold the Earth hostage with the professor's doomsday weapon as a last resort. But, it turns out that Bender stole the weapon away from them and Leela fires the real weapon at the aliens' ship, killing them all.

Bender explains that he was working a long con the whole time and decided that he needed the weapon more than the scammers ever would. He recounts the story during New Years 2008 to a grateful crowd and is awarded a medal for his trickery. Elsewhere, Leela sees Lars and is still depressed about the wedding being called off. She's certain that he's the only man she'll ever love, so Fry responds by asking her to meet him in the cryogenics lab in 5 minutes. He tries to get her and Lars back together so that she'll be happy again, but Lars claims that he can't be with her. He starts to say something, but is interrupted by Nudar, who was wearing a platinum radiation shielding vest. Nudar demands the time code from Lars, even though Leela insists that he never had it. Lars feigns giving in and opens the tube with the about to explode Bender in it. The blast kills all three and reveals the Bender tattoo on Lars' ass.

Though the crew didn't find out what happened in those 12 years of Fry B's life, the viewer found out. Fry rented the storage room above the pizza place because his girlfriend kicked him out and started living there for the rest of his life. He and Seymour delivered pizzas, he reunited with his family and cried constantly about how much he missed Leela. In 2003, he moved on and decided to become a surrogate mother to Leelu, an abandoned narwhal that washed up in Atlantic City. Fry spent 7 years caring for Leelu until the aquarium decided to set her loose in the wild. In 2010, Leelu was set free and Mr. Panucci told him that sometimes he needs to do something crazy to keep something he loves. So, Fry asks Mr. Panucci's cousin Leroy to take him on an arctic journey to capture Leelu. The journey takes two years and 108 narwhals later before Fry finally comes across Leelu. They manage to bring her aboard and put her in a tank in the boat, but she's not happy like Fry would have thought. She desperately wants to be with a male narwhal near by, but Fry just thinks he's upsetting her. They continue onwards, with the male following alongside them. Eventually Fry realizes that Leelu needs what'll make her happy, the male, instead of being captured by Fry. He lets her go and returns back to New York.

After Bender blew up Fry's apartment, it singed off all his hair (except for some of the beard) and burned his larynx. Fry realizes that he was Lars all along and goes to fulfill his destiny by stowing away in Michelle's cryogenic tube. After she was woken up, "Lars" got a job as a head feeder in the head museum.

At Lars' funeral, his video will explains the entire history and wraps everything up in a paradox-free bow. Except, someone needs to affix the tattoo to Fry's ass in the first place. Bender accepts the job, just as he did earlier on during the assassination attempt, and goes back in time. He emerges later along with a literal army of paradox clones that he convinced to come up after the aliens were gone instead of their logical times. Nibbler freaks out and removes himself from the universe. Thanks to Bender's transgressions, the universe splits apart and is apparently destroyed.

Notes

Alien Language

• Above Elzar's soup kitchen after Lars proposes to Leela, there's a sign written in the alien language. Translated, the sign reads "Human Broth."

Mathematics

• Equation of Time: When the Professor is attempting to disprove the possibility of time travel, he has an equation on the board which Bubblegum Tate fixes. That equations is "E = 9.87sin(2B) - 7.53cos(B) - 1.5sin(B)" and is commonly referred to as the "equation of time." It is an actual equation which gives the difference between time as it's read on a sundial and on a clock. The "doom field" is not part of the original equation, naturally.
• Doom Field: The doom field equation, written by Sweet Clyde, is "B = 2π(N-81)/364 - ʄⁿ(ɴ/3√tri)^3C"
• Greenwaldian Theorum: The second equation on the board which the Professor does not refer to is entitled the "Greenwaldian Theorum," after mathematician Sarah Greenwald. Greenwald is a math professor at Appalachian State University who lectures about the math jokes in both Futurama and The Simpsons. Along with her websites for Futurama and Simpsons, she gives a lecture on the "Bender's Big Score" DVD. The equation reads "a² + b² > c²."

Music

• "30 Century Man" by Scott Walker: The song that plays at the end of the movie after Lars has been revealed as a version of Fry is "30 Century Man," originally performed by Scott Walker. The version of the song used in the episode, however, is by "The Jigsaw Seen" off their album Songs Mama Used to Sing.

Referbacks

• 4x08 - Godfellas: When Bender first reads the binary code embedded in Fry's tattoo, the camera zooms out across the universe and settles on a purple star cluster which fires the time sphere down to earth. The cluster may or may not be God, or God combined with a super computer as Bender surmised. The two met while Bender was drifting through space and acted as god to a race of tiny people living on his chest. Incidentally, Ken Keeler wrote both that episode and this feature.

• 4x01 - Roswell That Ends Well: The crew did, indeed, travel back in time when Fry mistakenly put Jiffy Pop in the microwave at the same time as a star going supernova. They were all launched back in time to the Roswell alien crash, during which Fry managed to impregnate his own grandmother.

Fry: But, Professor, you've time traveled once yourself. Remember, when we went back to Roswell?

• 1x01 - Space Pilot 3000: It's revealed that it was actually Bender and his mob of decoys that destroyed civilization and New York City in the year 2304, rather than just a regular alien invasion. Additionally, Constantine is indeed the guy who Michelle dumped Fry for in the pilot before he was frozen.

• 5x02 - Jurassic Bark: The final shot of "Jurassic Bark" was of Seymour closing his eyes and going to sleep. Many interpreted this as a scene of the dog dying or giving up on waiting for Fry. In this movie, that theory is deflated entirely because not only did Seymour get to be with "Fry" for 10 more years than originally though, but he was flash fossilized right when Fry came home from his voyage.

• 3x10 - Luck of the Fryrish: When "Fry" is playing basketball with his brother, Yancy, Fry makes a game winning shot with the aid of a seven-leaf clover. The clover was introduced (along with Philip J. Fry, Jr.) in a series of flashbacks in a previous episode and gives the owner extraordinary luck.

• 3x03 - The Cryonic Woman: "Lars" stowed away in a cryogenic tube containing Fry's on-again/off-again girlfriend Michelle. Michelle explained when she was unfrozen early that her life was so lousy after Fry disappeared that she decided to freeze herself and start over with a new life in the future. The life involved her dumping Fry again for the recently unfrozen Pauly Shore.

Trivia

The Show

• Opening Subtitle: "It just won't stay dead!"
• Opening Cartoon: Instead of showing a public domain cartoon in the video monitor at the end of the credits (before the Planet Express ship smashes into it), a bit of the first episode of Futurama is shown.
• Alien Names: The names of the sidekick aliens are never mentioned in the episode itself, but in the script they were given the names "Schlump" and "Fleb." Fleb is the lighter colored sidekick and Schlump is the fatter one.
• Bender's E-Mail: According to the alien petition, Bender's e-mail address is "bender@ilovebender.com." ILoveBender.com is an actual website reserved for the show to serve as its official website.
• Subliminal: When Amy gets pop-up advertisement spam, the last ad to appear is one for Comedy Central. Comedy Central outbid Adult Swim for series broadcast rights, including the new episodes, beginning in 2008.
• Heads in Jars: A great deal of heads are shown during the scenes taking place in the head museum. Some notable ones include Charles De Gaulle, Matt Groening, Bill Clinton, Eric Cartman, Jon Stewart and Leonard Nimoy.

Behind the Scenes

• Carbon Neutral: During the credits, a logo with the professor's head on fire is shown to illustrate how Futurama reduced its carbon emissions to negligible amounts during production of the movie. A website was created to explain in detail how this was accomplished. This philosophy was inspired by Al Gore, who guest stars in the show, and by David X. Cohen's father, who is an advocate for carbon neutralism.
• High Definition: This movie was the first Futurama production to be shot in widescreen and high definition. Because it was animated in an entirely different aspect ratio from the series, any clips from old episodes required that animators draw on edges. In the scene taken from "Space Pilot 3000," they send the original drawing from that episode to Korea so that the entire scene could be reanimated.
• Binary Code: There were two details worked into the binary code by the writers. First, the code is a numeric palindrome so that Fry could read it correctly with a mirror. Secondly, the numbers were originally meant to also be the six winning numbers of a lottery ticket in the previous millennium. Bender was going to have a side plot where he was going to go back in time to win that money. The plot was later cut because it made the movie more convoluted than it already was.
• Cut Scene: Originally, during Bender's 11 month hunt for Fry, there was a 10 minute sequence where he walked onto a beach in Monte Carlo to find a "jaded Italian aristocrat" named Philippe Frye playing roulette. The scene was entirely about Bender trying to see Frye's butt and Frye winning a great deal of money to little excitement.

Allusions and References

• Cylons: When Lars and Leela are sitting in Lars' hover car, the camera passes a monument that reads "Cylon War Memorial." Cylons are the robotic menace of Battlestar Galactica who were created by an extinct reptilian race to serve in their military. After humans intervened in a war involving the race, the robots became singularly devoted to destroying humanity. They were later re-imagined to fit a more Blade Runner style as robots created as servants and soldiers by humans that later went to war against their creators.

Quotes

• Nudar: Like all rich people, we're gonna need weapons to shoot poor people.
  Goon: In self defense?
  Nudar: Yes, that too.