The Planet Express crew gets blown into the past and Fry tries to keep his grandfather safe… with sexy results.

SUMMARY

The Planet Express crew is viewing a supernova. Fry (Billy West) attempts to make popcorn in the microwave, but puts metal in it, resulting in microwave radiation hitting the supernova’s radiation, which blows the team back in time, though they don’t initially realize it. When they return to Earth, they crash due to the presence of an Ozone Layer and the lack of GPS navigation. Bender (John DiMaggio) gets ejected from the cockpit during the crash and is smashed to pieces. Zoidberg (West) offers to pick his parts up as Leela (Katey Sagal) fixes the ship, but Zoidberg ends up getting abducted by soldiers from a nearby air force base located in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. The Military starts experimenting on Zoidberg, mostly to their detriment more than his.

Farnsworth (West) realizes that they can only return to the future if they go through the hole in space-time that they came through, but they need a working microwave for that. He and Leela go to get a microwave, only to find out that they aren’t available commercially yet (which isn’t exactly true, as the first one went on sale in 1946, but we’ll assume it just hasn’t gotten to Roswell). Fry reveals that his grandfather, Enos Fry (West), is stationed at Roswell, which presents a problem as he’s the only one in the ship that can infiltrate the military base to recover Zoidberg and Bender. Naturally, he quickly runs into Enos, who introduces Fry to his fiance, Fry’s grandmother, Mildred (Tress MacNeille). Fry tries to protect Enos from dangers, but ends up killing him by putting him on a nuclear test site. 

Leela spots a radar dish on the base which would produce the radiation, but Farnsworth is hesitant to interfere with history. Fry then reveals he killed his grandfather, but still exists somehow. Fry breaks the news of Enos’s death to Mildred, who responds by coming on to him. Fry realizes that Enos can’t be his grandfather, meaning Mildred isn’t his real grandmother, so he gives in. The next morning, the remaining crew tracks him down and Farnsworth points out that Mildred is his grandmother, but Fry is now his own grandfather. Abandoning any thoughts of preserving the timestream (because Fry banging his grandmother is more ridiculous than any of the damage they could do at this point), the ship breaks into the base, rescues Zoidberg and steals the radar dish. They drop Bender on their way back to the future, but dig his millenium-old head up and put him back together. 

END SUMMARY

This is one of the funniest episodes of this show and also one of the most important to the overarching “plot” of the series, even if it’s not established at the time. Because of that, it’s also one of the episodes that is most frequently referenced in the future. It’s interesting because the writers established in the beginning of the series that they never wanted to do much with time travel, despite the fact that the pilot episode’s spoiler ends up being dependent on Fry getting down with his grandmother. I suppose maybe they originally had a different mechanism for Fry becoming the chosen one, but this one is funnier. I think it helps that it reminds everyone of Back to the Future, though in this version Marty does bang his mom.

While Futurama has never been adverse to subplots, this episode clearly plays them up more, having three plot threads going at once: Zoidberg being dissected, Fry and Bender’s head trying to protect Enos, and Leela and the Professor trying to find a microwave. Zoidberg’s is a hilarious subversion of the normal alien dissection, because not only is Zoidberg unaffected by most of the organs that they remove, his constant chattering and eating ends up making the soldiers, and eventually President Truman (Maurice LaMarche), get increasingly frustrated. Fry’s is made funny by the presence of Enos, who is a Futurama parody of Gomer Pyle (including having a catchphrase “Gadzooks” like Pyle’s “Shazam”). Enos is shown to be a complete rube, unable to realize when he’s eating metal, not noticing when Fry keeps shoving him into danger, and finally dying from his own ignorance of the testing grounds. He’s also shown to be homosexual, or at least bi-curious, something that seems to eliminate the obvious solution to how Fry survives his destruction: Enos had already impregnated Mildred. Farnsworth and Leela’s plot is shorter, but it contains some strong criticisms of the 1940s, particularly the salesman’s sexist attitudes. It also mocks the fact that we lose any concept of time periods as the years pass by having Farnsworth and Leela have no idea what people are like during that time period, including having the Professor order a stein of mead and two mutton pills. 

Overall, this episode managed to do a lot of things at the same time, but all of it is easy to follow and amusing. Very impressive.

FAVORITE JOKE

The Conspiracy Nut who is brought with the President in order to provide a version of events that nobody will believe. Everyone always wonders why the witnesses to alien abductions or bigfoot sightings tend to be people who aren’t exactly “normal.” It turns out this is on purpose, and that the government always chooses to leak information by giving it to people who will completely remove any credibility from their claims. Basically, by having a crazy person spout the idea, they make the idea seem crazy. It’s made even better by the fact that when the conspiracy theorist takes photos, they emerge as photos from completely different conspiracy theories. His photo of President Truman at Roswell is revealed to be the 1997 Arizona UFO sighting…

and the photo of the Planet Express ship is actually the “Surgeon’s Photograph” of the Loch Ness Monster. 

Well, that’s it for this week.

See you next week, meatbags.

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