| "The Late Philip J. Fry" | |
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| Futurama episode | |
Fry, the Professor, and Bender accidentally arrive in the year 10,000 AD. |
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| Episode no. | Season six Episode 95 |
| Directed by | Peter Avanzino |
| Written by | Lewis Morton |
| Production code | 6ACV07 |
| Original air date | July 29, 2010 |
| Opening caption | "If you don't watch it, someone else will" |
| Season six episodes | |
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| List of all Futurama episodes | |
"The Late Philip J. Fry" is the seventh episode of the sixth season of the animated series Futurama. It originally aired on Comedy Central on July 29, 2010. In the episode, Fry attempts to make it on time to a birthday dinner date for Leela. He is sidetracked by Professor Farnsworth and Bender, who force him to test out the Professor's time machine, which only goes into the future. After overshooting and thus going forward to the year 10,000 AD, they must keep traveling forward in time until a backwards time machine has been invented.
The episode was written by Lewis Morton and directed by Peter Avanzino. From June 16 to June 23, as part of its "Countdown to Futurama" event, Comedy Central Insider, Comedy Central's news outlet, released various preview materials for the episode, including a storyboard of the time machine and character designs for the aged Planet Express crew. The episode was met with positive reviews from critics and won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program in 2011.
Contents |
Leela and Fry's growing relationship is marred by Fry's constant tardiness. After arriving late for work and standing her up at her birthday lunch date, Fry is determined to make it up to Leela by skipping a party hosted by Hedonismbot and meeting Leela for a birthday dinner date at "Cavern on the Green", a fancy restaurant situated in a deep cave with naturally occurring stalagmites. As Fry prepares to leave for the date, the Professor penalizes him for his tardiness at work by forcing him to try out his newly invented one-way Time Travel. The machine is only able to travel to the future (to prevent changing the past and the creation of paradoxes), and the Professor wishes to test it out by moving one minute forward in time. As the Professor, Bender, and Fry prepare to test out the machine, Fry records a message in a video birthday card for Leela, apologizing for being one minute late and explaining the situation. As he is about to finish, the Professor accidentally pulls the lever too far, sending them forward into the year 10,000 AD. During the trip, Fry loses the card in the time stream.
Finding the year 10,000 AD to be a five times over Post-Apocalyptic dissolution, they then decide that their only hope of returning to the 31st century is to continue forward in time until they reach a period in which a backwards time machine has been invented. In the 31st century, Leela leaves the cavern, thinking Fry had gone to Hedonismbot's party. A nuclear accident at the party kills all but Hedonismbot himself; the rest of the crew therefore assume that the missing trio had been there and are now dead.
Fry, Bender, and the Professor travel forward through time, encountering numerous periods of Earth civilization, including a dystopian war between machines and humans, where the humans are outnumbered. Though Bender is happy to stay, the team moves forward to the year Fifty Million, a utopia of beautiful and scantily clad women who have developed backwards time travel technology. They are happy to offer it to the team, but Bender sends them forward in time, still angered by their decision to leave the machine war dystopia. They are forced to continue their search, arriving in the year One Billion, only to find the Earth barren and all life extinct. Fry wanders off and discovers a message left in stalagmites on the floor of what was Cavern on the Green.
Meanwhile, Leela - seen in the years 3030 and 3050 - has taken over Planet Express and turned it into a successful company, but still harbors some nostalgia and hurt toward Fry for standing her up before his "death". The lost birthday card emerges from the time stream in 3050 and reveals that Fry did not abandon her after all. Realizing the truth, she goes to the empty Cavern on the Green, damaging the ceiling in a way that results in mineral water dripping to form stalagmites that create the message Fry sees a billion years later. It states that although their time together was brief, it was the best time of her life.
Having lost their opportunity to return home, Fry, Bender, and the Professor resign themselves to going to the end of time. After the last existing proton decays, they are amazed to discover that the universe behaves as a Big Bounce; after collapsing, it undergoes another Big Bang, endlessly and cyclically destroying and replicating the same universe and its exact events, instead of having unique inhabitants and history (Farnsworth at one point stops the time machine just to shoot Adolf Hitler). They realize that they can continue forward in time and eventually reach the moment that they left in the new copy of the universe. This is an example of the Poincaré recurrence theorem.
Their first attempt to return to the time where they departed resulted in them overshooting, and needing to go through time again. The Professor attempts to kill Hitler once again, but misses and kills Eleanor Roosevelt instead.
Upon their second attempt, they manage to cycle back to just mere moments before they left. However, this universe is ten feet below the previous one, so they end up crushing their duplicates from this universe as the duplicates prepare to enter the time machine, killing them and avoiding a time travel paradox. Fry rushes to meet Leela, making it to their date on time. After dinner, Leela and Fry stand on a bridge, overlooking the river (while Bender quietly buries their duplicates below it) and Fry apologizes for losing his birthday card to her. She tells him that it is okay, because what she will always remember is their time together.
"The Late Philip J. Fry" was written by Lewis Morton and directed by Peter Avanzino. The table reading for this episode took place on October 21, 2009.[1] From June 16 to June 23, as part of its "Countdown to Futurama" event, Comedy Central Insider, Comedy Central's news outlet, released various preview materials for the episode, including a storyboard of the time machine and character designs for the aged Planet Express crew.[2] Comedy Central also released a preview clip of the episode online on July 23, featuring Fry's tardiness to the initial lunch date with Leela.[3]
The episode contains many cultural references, particularly to time-travel related fiction, including Planet of the Apes, The Terminator, H.G. Wells' famous novel The Time Machine, and Olaf Stapledon's classic future-history novel Last and First Men. Farnsworth takes advantage of the time travel to kill Adolf Hitler, a classic temporal paradox. When the Professor asks the year ten million soldier about the machine revolt, the soldier's response, "We built them to make our lives easier, but they rebelled," is taken from the intro text to Battlestar Galactica. The sound of the time machine is that of the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Original Series.[4] A parody of the 1969 Zager & Evans song "In the Year 2525" accompanies the scenes of Fry, the Professor, and Bender traveling through the various eras of the future.[4] The episode has also been interpreted as a light homage to Douglas Adams' series The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, particularly a scene in which Fry, Bender, and the Professor "casually drink beer and watch the end of the universe."[5] Depictions of the past also include several callbacks to events in previous Futurama episodes.[5]
"The Late Philip J. Fry" originally aired on July 29, 2010 on Comedy Central.[6] In its original American broadcast, "The Late Philip J. Fry" drew 100,000 more viewers from the previous week to 2.046 million viewers. It received a 1.3 rating/2% share in the Nielsen ratings and a 1.0 rating/3% share in the 18-49 demographic, up a tenth of a point from the previous week's episode.[6]
Zack Handlen of The A.V. Club was enthusiastic about the episode, stating that the episode's jokes and humor were solid throughout.[4] He was pleased that the relationship between Leela and Fry was "finally" addressed, also feeling that up until this episode, "[t]he writing on Leela hasn't been as solid this season."[4] Praising the episode's full use of science fiction and the smart structure of the episode, concluding, "It feels like we're back in the sweet spot here, mixing high and low comedy with sharp ideas, and a surprisingly uncynical sincerity. Everything old is new again, I guess, and that's a very good thing."[4] Robert Canning of IGN gave the episode a 7.5 citing it as another example of Futurama's "smart takes" on time travel. He felt that "it showed that there's still a lot of thought going into plotting out these time trips", although he also stated that the episode did not have enough laughs.[7] Merrill Bar of Film School Rejects praised the episode, describing it as "Every joke hits, every line was sweet, every emotion is true, every visual was eye popping, this episode is Futurama at its finest. If there is any complaint, it's that it took this long for the show to regain this level of quality."[8] He concluded that, "This combined with last week’s episode has restored my full confidence in the production team."[8] Sean Gandert of Paste rated the episode a 9.4/10, and wrote: "'Late' was definitely the best episode of the season so far, and ranks with the best the show’s ever done. Nearly every episode of this season has been better than the last, and it looks like it's finally reached the peaks it's hit in the past. As of now, I think any doubt about the Futurama's reboot should be pretty damn well silenced."[5]
Series creator Matt Groening considers this episode his favorite episode of the season.[9] On his Facebook account, Maurice LaMarche commented that he found this episode "[h]ilarious, touching, meaningful, philosophical, even metaphysical."[1] He also felt that the episode would be a contender for an Emmy Award.[1] The episode would go on to win the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program (for Programming Less Than One Hour) at the 63rd Primetime Emmy Awards in 2011.[10]
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