Fry manages to get Lucy Liu to go out with him… by downloading her personality into a robot that is programmed to go out with him.

SUMMARY

Fry (Billy West) tries to convince the Planet Express crew that everything in the future is better than it was in 1999 after he sees a mind-altering ad for the Discount Shoe Outlet. They agree to take Fry on a trip to do all of the things that he wanted to do in the past, such as riding a dinosaur and seeing the edge of the universe. An hour and a half later, the only things Fry hasn’t done is be naked in a chocolate factory or be romantically linked with a celebrity. In order to satisfy the latter, the team logs onto the internet and goes to Nappster, a company that uploads celebrity personalities into robot bodies. Fry selects Lucy Liu and downloads her into a robot that is instantly in love with him and somehow convincingly sexually aggressive despite just being a metal entity with a hologram covering. 

Fry and Lucy start dating, but Bender (John DiMaggio) is against humans and robots dating. Leela (Katey Sagal) agrees to help him break up the couple and the Professor (West) shows him a propaganda film saying that dating robots destroys society, but Fry continues to just make out with his robot Lucy Liu. Bender and the crew decide to take down Nappster, but they discover that the company has actually been holding celebrities hostage and that their real name is Kidnappster. They rescue the real Lucy Liu and plan on taking her to the authorities to get rid of the company. In response, Nappster activates all of the other Lucy Liu robots in New New York and sets them to track down and kill the crew. The only one that seems unaffected is Fry’s. Fry, Bender, and Zoidberg (West) take down one of them, which makes the real Lucy start falling for Bender, but they are quickly chased by an army of Liu-bots.

The group flees to a movie theater where  Fry and his Liu-bot are watching a Charlie’s Angels III: The Legend of Charlie’s Gold. Fry’s Liu-bot sacrifices herself to kill the other robots with popcorn. Fry ends up shutting her down at the behest of the real Lucy Liu, who is now in love with Bender.

END SUMMARY

This episode honestly is only okay. I think there are some good jokes and the premise is pretty funny, but it just doesn’t have the same level of punch as most of the other episodes of the show. 

A big problem with it is that they’re clearly trying to make a comparison between dating a robot and the old stereotypes behind interracial dating, with Bender even calling it “Robo fever.” The problem is that dating a robot is completely different, because the robot is literally a pre-programmed entity who has no free will (at least, the Liu-bots are) whereas a person of a different race is STILL A PERSON. There are legitimate philosophical questions to be brought up about giving something some semblance of sentience but also chaining it to you, as well as questions about copying someone’s consciousness and modifying it. It just doesn’t come off as a fair analogy. I do admit that the anti-robosexuality propaganda film comes off as one of the homophobic propaganda movies that some organizations used to put out mixed with Reefer Madness, which is clever, but other than that, I just don’t think they handle the issue as well as they do a few seasons later.

The Napster reference is so dated that even I have a problem remembering what the hell Napster was, but I do admit the idea of crafting something illegally out of a celebrity’s image is way ahead of its time. Hell, we have organizations already warning us about Deepfakes, how long is it until we can just make a sexbot out of any celebrity?

Like I said, it’s not a bad episode, but it’s only okay.

FAVORITE JOKE

I think the best joke just has to be the episode of The Scary Door that opens the episode. It goes through at least a half-dozen Twilight Zone cliches in only a minute, including having a guy think he’s in heaven, then realize he’s in hell, then being on an airplane with a gremlin, then being Hitler, then Eva Braun turning into a fly. Even though Bender’s response of “saw it coming” is incredibly predictable and cliche, it’s still funny.

Well, that’s it for this week.

See you next week, meatbags.

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NEXT – Episode 48: A Leela of Her Own

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