How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back

"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 title references the 1998 film and popular novel How Stella Got Her Groove Back.

Plot

Hermes 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 from the cryogenics lab at the office that night, and Bender cheats via the use of X-ray glasses. Bender is caught cheating and takes refuge in Hermes’ office, but the other players find him, and the savage beating he receives trashes the office.

The resulting mess costs Hermes his promotion, and the inspector, Morgan Proctor, places a suicidal Hermes on paid vacation, which Hermes considered a penalty. Morgan appoints herself as acting Planet Express head-bureaucrat. Doctor Zoidberg suggests Hermes and his wife LaBarbara take a trip to Spa 5, the sauna planet which gives him a bucket of krill for every patient he sends there.

Morgan, who has a fetish for men who aren't "neat freaks", begins a secret affair with Fry for his messy instincts. Fry is promoted to Executive Delivery Boy, who no longer goes on actual deliveries. After Bender discovers the illicit affair and tries to blackmail them, Morgan downloads his personality and intelligence to a floppy disk, turning him into a mindless drone who can only say "I am Bender. Please insert girder." She then sends the disk off to the Central Bureaucracy for filing.

At Spa 5, Hermes discovers it is actually a forced labour camp, and he begins to use his natural managerial skills to reorganize the labor camp for efficiency, oblivious to the torment of his fellow workers. The rest of the Planet Express staff infiltrate the Central Bureaucracy in order to recover Bender’s mind. After bypassing several employees and security systems, the crew discover the master in-pile, which is 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, who has regained his love of bureaucracy, and LaBarbara return from Spa 5. In a musical number, he sorts and files everything in the pile with amazing speed, finding the disk with Bender’s brain in the last tube. He is restored to his original rank of Grade 36 by Number 1.0, the head of the Central Bureaucracy, but immediately demoted to Grade 38 for finishing two seconds early, since bureaucrats should not finish early. Because Morgan is still in charge of Planet Express, she fires Fry for exposing her affair. However, Hermes exposes a mistake she made on her high school prom date papers, having stamped them only four times instead of the standard five. Number 1.0 promotes Hermes 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, but at severely reduced pay; Hermes does the same to Fry in turn, then cheerfully cuts everyone else's pay as well. Zoidberg begins to sing a song of his own, but the episode's credits appear abruptly after the first few words.

Continuity

• Leela's old co-workers from "Space Pilot 3000" appear.
• The Australian man who Hermes eventually forces to do all the work in Spa 5 is later seen as a slave helping to build the Sphinx in the episode "A Pharaoh to Remember" and mining diamonds in "Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences".

Cultural references

• In the DVD audio commentary, Matt Groening and others mention Terry Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil having an influence over the depiction of the Central Bureaucracy.^[1]
• When Dr. Zoidberg is announcing his hand in the poker game he says he has "three human females, a number, and a king giving himself brain surgery." The king giving itself brain surgery is a reference to the 'Suicide King'. The nickname often given to the 'King of Hearts' because on a standard pack of cards he is pictured as if driving a sword into his own head.^[2]

Broadcast and reception

In its initial airing, the episode placed 94th in the Nielsen ratings for primetime shows for the week of March 27 – April 2, 2000.^[3]

References

External links

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