How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back
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| Futurama episode | |
| "How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back" | |
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| Episode no. | 24 |
| Prod. code | 2ACV11 |
| Airdate | April 2, 2000 |
| Writer(s) | Bill Odenkirk |
| Director | Mark Ervin |
| Opening subtitle | As Foretold by Nostradamus |
| Opening cartoon | "Felix the Cat" cartoon from 1920. |
| Guest star(s) | Nora Dunn |
| Season 2 November 1999 – December 2000 |
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| List of all Futurama episodes... | |
“How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back” is episode eleven in season two of Futurama. It originally aired in North America on April 2, 2000. The episode focuses on the convoluted, grossly inefficient, and frequently counter-productive bureaucracy of the Futurama universe, and can be seen as a satire of bureaucracy in general.
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[edit] Plot
Hermes Conrad is excited because the Central Bureaucracy is conducting an inspection the next day, and he expects to be promoted to a Grade 35 bureaucrat. Leela hosts a poker game with her former co-workers at the office that night, and Bender cheats via the use of X-ray glasses. On the run from the other players, he takes refuge in Hermes’ office, but the other players find him, and the savage beating he receives trashes the office.
The mess in his office loses Hermes his promotion, and the inspector, Morgan Proctor (voiced by Nora Dunn), places a suicidal Hermes on paid vacation and appoints herself acting Planet Express bureaucrat. Doctor Zoidberg suggests Hermes and his wife Labarbara take a trip to Spa 5, the sauna planet.
Morgan Proctor, who has a fetish for slovenly men (in her words, she is “surrounded by neat freaks all the time”), begins a secret affair with Fry (a "dirty, dirty boy!"), while Hermes and his wife discover that Spa 5 is actually a forced labor camp. After Bender discovers the illicit affair, Morgan downloads his personality and intelligence to a disk, turning him into a mindless drone, and sends the disk off to the Central Bureaucracy for filing.
Hermes begins to use his natural managerial skills to reorganize the labor camp for efficiency, and the rest of the Planet Express staff infiltrates the Central Bureaucracy in order to recover Bender’s mind. When they arrive, they discover the master in-pile, an enormous pile of pneumatic tube capsules, only one of which contains Bender’s brain.
The Planet Express staff is daunted by the giant pile, but Hermes has returned from Spa 5. He had made the labor camp so efficient that they only needed one Australian man to perform the labor. In a musical number, Hermes sorts the master in-pile, recovering the disk with Bender’s personality. He is restored to his original rank (a Grade 36 bureaucrat) by the head of the Central Bureaucracy for sorting the master in-pile, but immediately demoted to Grade 38 for finishing two seconds early (something bureaucrats should never do). Since Morgan was still in charge of Planet Express, she fires Fry for exposing her affair. However, Hermes exposes a mistake Morgan made on her high school prom date papers, having stamped it only four times instead of the standard five. Number 1.0 promotes him to grade 37 for this, and in turn, orders his assistants to get the papers needed to have Morgan taken away. The professor re-hires Hermes, at severely reduced pay, and Fry asks if he can come back at a severely reduced pay as well. Hermes lets him and then gives severely reduced pay for everyone. Zoidberg begins his own musical number but the show immediately ends.
[edit] Cultural references
- The title of this episode references the 1998 film and popular novel How Stella Got Her Groove Back.
- The spherical creature with multiple eyes seen when the group enter the Central Bureaucracy is a Spectator Beholder from the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game.
- The “Central Bureaucracy” pictured in the episode, with its pneumatic tubes, obliviousness towards the outside world, lack of transparency or accountability, and walls of filing cabinets is reminiscent of the dystopian Ministry of Information described in the Terry Gilliam movie Brazil or the similar Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984.
- While stamping forms, Hermes sings "Stamp it, file it, send it over night." An obvious parody of "Get Up, Stand Up", a song by Bob Marley
[edit] Song
Hermes: When I was four, there was a hurricane in Kingston town, we had a foot and a half of water.
- Everyone was all right, but I cried all night — it blew my alphabet blocks out of order.
- And they said, this boy’s born to be a bureaucrat, born to be all obsessive and snotty.
- I made my friends and relations file long applications to get into my tenth birthday party.
LaBarbra: But something changed when my man turned pro,
Hermes: I was sorting but I wasn’t smiling.
LaBarbra: He forgot that's it’s not about badges and rank,
Hermes: It’s supposed to be about the filing! People!
- We didn’t choose to be bureaucrats, no that’s what almighty Jah made us.
- We'd treat people like swine and make them stand in line, even if nobody paid us.
- They say the world looks down on the bureaucrats, they say we’re anal, compulsive and weird.
- But when push comes to shove, you gotta do what you love, even if it’s not a good idea. Zoidberg!
Zoidberg: They said I probably shouldn’t be a surgeon.
Farnsworth: They poo-pooed my electric Frankfurter.
Leela: They said I probably shouldn’t fly with just one eye.
Bender: I am Bender. Please insert girder.
Hermes: Everybody sing Jamaica!
Everybody: Jamaica!
Hermes: Just the bureaucrats, Jamaica!
Bureaucrats: Jamaica!
Hermes: Just the grade nineteens!
Morgan: (reluctantly) Jamaica…
Hermes: Sing me home! When push comes to shove, you gotta do what you love, even if it’s not a good idea! (Takes Bender’s disk out of the case and tosses it into his head)
Bender: I’m Bender, baby! Please insert liquor!
[edit] Production notes
- LaBarbara's line “Spa 5? Is it good?” is read not by her voice actress Dawnn Lewis, but by Tress MacNeille, who recorded the temp lines (presumably for the animatic). This is mentioned in the audio commentary for the episode.
- When Hermes is attempting to sort the master pile, he is told that he has only four minutes. He musically completes the task in just over a minute and a half (assuming the song takes place in real-time). He is told that he finished 2 seconds early.
