Decision 3012

"Decision 3012" is the third episode of the seventh season of the animated sitcom Futurama. It originally aired on Comedy Central on June 27, 2012. The plot is a parody of the Birther Movement.

Plot

The episode begins as Bender jumps off the Planet Express ship after seeing an ad for free beer. As Earth's election time nears, President Richard Nixon's Head builds his reelection campaign platform on the promise to order the construction of a giant fence around the southern part of the Solar System, which will keep out illegal extraterrestrial aliens. Leela, angered at Nixon's non-existent competition, tries to become involved by attending a debate of the other candidates. Though most of them simply cater to the crowd, she finds one, Senator Chris Travers, who appears honest and with strong ideals counter to Nixon, most of which are ridiculed by the audience. She later finds him alone at his campaign headquarters, attacking his own posters in despair. She attempts to encourage him, and becomes his campaign manager.

Leela's efforts soon put Travers in the spotlight as a front-running candidate, quickly gaining momentum. Nixon discreetly employs Bender to try to find dirt about Travers' background. Bender struggles to find any blemish on Travers' history, eventually coming across that his middle name is "Zaxxar", which Nixon claims is an alien-sounding name, and demands that Travers show his "Earth certificate". Travers states that he is Earth-born, having been born in a hospital in Kenya, but refuses to show the certificate. As the populace swing back in favor of Nixon, Leela takes it upon herself to retrieve the certificate, with Fry and Bender's help.

At the hospital, they are unable to find any record and learn Travers is waiting there for them. He reveals that he has no Earth certificate because he has not been born yet — he is a time traveler. He will be born in this hospital tomorrow. In the future, with the fence erected, there are no aliens to do the menial work on Earth. This causes Earth's economy to collapse and starvation and civil unrest becomes common around the globe. Nixon then eliminates the remaining working class and turns them into "Soylent Majority" soup to feed the poor. Nixon assigns those tasks to the robots. The robots, led by Bender, turn against humanity. Travers was sent back from fifteen years in the future (using a copy of the time travel code from Futurama: Bender's Big Score) to stop Nixon from winning this election. Travers, after arriving in the past, had spent the last several years becoming the best candidate to run against Nixon to prevent this future from happening. Leela realizes that this is a compelling story, and arranges for Travers' birth to be broadcast live to the world to prove definitively that he was born on Earth.

Travers soon handily defeats Nixon at the election. Unfortunately as Bender points out, this means the robot uprising will never happen and thus Travers would have never been sent back in time. A temporal paradox occurs and erases Travers from time, undoing all the events of the episode. Now running unopposed, Nixon proclaims an uncontested victory while Leela and the Planet Express crew forget all about Travers.

Reception

Zack Handlen from The A.V. Club gave the episode a B+, focusing on the episode's social commentary. Handlen remarked, "It seems to be saying something, only it isn’t really, but you still kind of care a little. And also there are robots." ^[1]

References

External links

• "Decision 3012" at the Infosphere, the Futurama Wiki.
• "Richard_Nixon" at the Infosphere, the Futurama Wiki.