“Futurama” Season 6 Episode 7 “The Late Philip J. Fry” allows the show to examine a number of time-travel clichés and make fun of them, stretching all the way back from “The Time Machine” by H.G. Welles.
Spoilers follow.
Fry has a problem common to too many people, which is a total inability to manage time. He is always late for things, even important things like a birthday dinner date with Leela. Partly, as with almost every disaster in a “Futurama” episode, it is partly Bender’s fault for having very loud sex with a fembot all night long.
Proceeding with the theme of time, the Professor has invented a time machine that only goes forward and would like to test it by going forward a minute. Fry thinks he has time to do that and still make it to a makeup birthday dinner date at “Cavern on the Green,” presided over by an alien version of Emeril.
Naturally, things go wrong and the Professor, Fry, and Bender find themselves in the year 10,000 with civilization having been destroyed several times, each represented by a different version of the Statue of Liberty, allowing Fry to do a Charlton Heston riff from Planet of the Apes.
The timenauts keep skipping forward into the future, hoping to find an era when a backward time machine has been built. Among the futures they encounter are:
The Eloi future from H. G. Welle’s The Time Machine.
The Moorlocks conquer the Eloi future a few years later.
The machines take over the world future from The Terminator. Bender wants to stop in this one.
The luscious-women-take-over-the-world future from some cheesy scifi movie. Even though they agree to provide plenty of sex for the Professor and Fry and a backward time machine, Bender, still peeved about not stopping in the future in which the robots have killed all humans, forces them to go forward.
And hence they find themselves having a beer bust at the end of the universe.
Meanwhile, back in the 31st Century, Leela, while angry and sad that Fry, the Professor, and Bender have gone, turns Planet Express into a going concern. But she lives a very unhappy life, with a bad marriage, and issues about Fry.
Back to the timenauts, they discover that the universe goes in cycles, so the idea is to arrive exactly after the point in which they vanished in the 31st Century and all will be well. After several false starts, they accomplish this goal, squashing their alternate selves. Fry is actually able to arrive at the birthday dinner date on-time, for once, and all is now well, at least until the next episode. Lesson: A working time machine is the appropriate gift for someone who is constantly late for things.
Source:
Futurama, The Late Philip J Fry, TV.Rage
