The Six Million Dollar Mon

"The Six Million Dollar Mon" is the seventh episode of the seventh season of the animated sitcom Futurama. It originally aired on Comedy Central on July 25, 2012.

The episode was written by Ken Keeler and directed by Peter Avanzino.

Plot

Hermes starts performance reviews so that he may rid Planet Express of its worst employee, heavily implying that this will be Zoidberg. However upon completing the review, Hermes determines that he is the worst-performing employee, spending too much time on performance reviews. He fires himself and has the Central Bureaucracy replace him with a simple but efficient robot to handle the basic tasks of accounting for Planet Express.

Hermes begins to feel useless as a human as LaBarbara serves him Curried Goat which is so spicy a drop of the sauce melts through the table and floor, eventually reaching Robot Hell where it hits the Robot Devil on the head. Hermes' uselessness is compounded by the fact that he and his wife LaBarbara are attacked by the psychotic robot Roberto and eventually saved by the robot police officer URL. After Roberto is executed by electromagnetic chair, Hermes goes to a black market "upgrade" shop run by Yuri where he obtains a robotic upgrade from used robot parts. He finds the upgrade helps to improve his life, and starts returning to the shop frequently, upgrading his human body more and more despite promises to LaBarbara and his son Dwight that he would stop. Eventually, he has replaced all his human parts except his brain, and proves that he is more valuable than the simple robot that was put in his place. He is brought back aboard as part of the Planet Express crew. The crew later learns that Zoidberg had been getting Hermes' disused human parts and has stitched his body back up to use as a ventriloquist dummy called Little Hermes.

Hermes feels that he needs to perform the last upgrade, by replacing his brain with a computer. When Yuri does not want to do the brain replacement, Hermes, Professor Farnsworth, and Bender head to the robot graveyard to exhume a robot body for a processor card. Unbeknownst to them, the processor card belonged to Roberto. In order for the procedure to work, Hermes locks LaBarbara, Dwight, and the Planet Express crew in the lab until Professor Farnsworth completes the transplant. LaBarbara and Hermes' friends convince Professor Farnsworth to stop this. Unfortunately Hermes still wants to continue with the implant. With the professor's refusal, Zoidberg agrees to complete the operation using Hermes' human body to help him. After the removal of the brain and placing it in Little Hermes, Hermes comes back to life in his original body and realizes that he has given up his humanity for the pointless pursuit of perfectionism. The crew later learns that after the transplant the processor card was that of Roberto (whose processor card was installed into the Hermes robot) as Roberto reshapes his head. Still wanting to eat Hermes' skin, Roberto used the new robot body to remove a piece of Hermes' skin off his forearm, but realizes too late he cannot eat it because of LaBarbara's curried goat she cooked over the many years. Roberto's new body then starts to melt quickly, thus saving the crew. Hermes ends up thanking Dr. Zoidberg for his part of restoring him.

Cultural references

• The title of this episode is a parody of the hit seventies television show The Six Million Dollar Man.

• When Hermes shows his new arm to his wife in bed, he is seen reading "The Invisible Mon," another title parody, of the book The Invisible Man.

• Opening caption may refer to credit card points, airline miles, or similar rewards membership credits.

• The song sung by Zoidberg during the operation on Hermes is a parody of "Monster Mash."

• Hermes' replacement 'Mark 7-G' could be a reference to Homer Simpson's workstation in 'The Simpsons', another show produced by Groening

• The grave robbing and the transplantation of an executed insane criminal, including the muted color saturation of the operating room scene, reference the Mel Brooks film Young Frankenstein.

Reception

The A.V. Club enjoyed the episode and gave it an A-.^[1]

See also

• Ship of Theseus, a philosophical problem on which Hermes' transformation is based

References

External links