Fry gets involved in a crime and committed to a mental institution which drives him crazy.

SUMMARY

Zoidberg (Billy West) is being honored for his ten years in service to Planet Express. During the proceedings, Hermes (Phil LaMarr) mentions that Zoidberg’s retirement fund is zero, as he’s never paid into it. Hearing this, Fry remembers that he hasn’t paid into his plan either. He spends ninety-four of his $100 on lotto tickets then decides to put the rest in the bank. While there, Fry and Bender (John DiMaggio) run into Bender’s friend Roberto (David Herman), who proceeds to rob the bank, but gives Bender and Fry some of the money. They’re immediately arrested and convinced to plead insanity by their lawyer, the Hyper-Chicken (Maurice LaMarche), after Fry is threatened by Roberto. Bender is sentenced to a robot mental hospital, but so is Fry after the judge is told that the human facilities are full.

Once they get to the robot asylum, Fry is labeled a robot by the head doctor, Dr. Perceptron (LaMarche). Fry is put in a closet with his “roommate” Malfunctioning Eddie (Herman), who keeps exploding. Fry is starved due to the lack of human food, harassed by crazy robots, and later attacked by Roberto when he replaces Eddie. After a few weeks of this, Fry is finally released but is now convinced that he is, in fact, a robot. He attempts to determine what kind of robot he is, failing at being a calculator, a tool bot, and a food-mo-tron.

Meanwhile, Roberto breaks Bender out of the asylum and heads to Planet Express to hold them hostage. Fry, however, decides that he has finally determined what kind of robot he is: a battle droid. He attacks Roberto who stabs him in response, but the knife hits an oil can that Fry has in his pocket, which convinces the crazed Roberto that Fry is, in fact, a Robot. Roberto flings a knife at Fry and flees. The knife wounds Fry, making him bleed, which leads him to realize that he’s human after all.

END SUMMARY

This is an episode that was actually much better than I remembered it to be. It’s a great example of having two plot ideas and letting one feed into the other. The first plotline is the asylum and it’s filled with a bunch of gag characters which represent the traditional Futurama twist on established archetypes through making them all robots. When I first saw this episode, I hadn’t seen Girl, Interrupted or One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or most of the other films that revolve around mental health facilities, so I didn’t understand what most of these are satirizing. Now that I do, holy heck, some of these are on point. I think the best one is the guy who thinks he gets CIA radio signals through his teeth, which are revealed to be the announcements from the CIA cafeteria.

The second plotline of Fry believing he’s a robot is a great subversion of the typical Blade Runner-esque trope of a robot believing that it’s a human. It’s made much funnier by the fact that Fry cannot do anything as an android. He doesn’t just fail at the tasks, but he fails at doing anything remotely robotic, to the point of not consistently beeping or using robotic language.

Overall, it’s a pretty solid episode.

FAVORITE JOKE

It’s clearly when Fry spontaneously decides that robots talk like fake medieval citizens. Specifically, he believes that they say “ye.” It’s such a random and insane moment that still stands out in the midst of a montage of random and insane moments. It has no basis in any logic whatsoever, except perhaps that in Fry’s already dim and now addled brain, he has decided that since robots talk funny and olde timey people talked funny, they’re basically the same thing. It makes me laugh every time.

Backup joke would be Frankie, the robot that Fry is told has the specific delusion that he works in the lunchroom, so he… works in the lunchroom. The other insane robots even seem to pity him. It’s never confirmed that he’s not, in fact, just a normal person who chooses to work in the lunchroom at an insane asylum and the gag is that it would be impossible to tell the difference. In other words, if your life’s ambition is just to perform a menial task, you’re the real crazy one.

Well, that’s it for this week.

See you next week, meatbags.

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