The Route of All Evil

"The Route of All Evil" is the forty-fourth episode of Futurama, the twelfth of the third production season and the third of the fifth broadcast season, being the episode airing furtherest from when it was produced. It aired 8 December, 2002 on FOX. Cubert and Dwight form a competing business to Planet Express.

Act I: "We can all fight when we're drunk!"
When Fry, Bender and Leela are unable to decide on which beer to buy, Leela suggests that they brew their own. Meanwhile, the Professor, Hermes and LaBarbara are yelling at Cubert and Dwight for being suspended from boarding school for salting a bully. While the crew brew beer in Bender, the kids wander the office. After Cubert and Dwight trick the crew into wasting a week on a fake delivery to Dogdoo 8 (the universe ends after Dogdoo 7), Hermes and the Professor force their sons to get jobs. They start a delivery company, Awesome Express.

Act II: "Those newspapers won'ts delivers themselveses!"
The kids order a pedal-powered space ship from a magazine for use on the deliveries, and start a paper route. Bender is now swollen with beer. Sal drops off the papers for delivery and the boys get to work. A montage later and they are very successful. Awesome Express becomes more profitable than Planet Express, but this fails to impress Hermes or the Professor. Rejected, the boys decide to crush Planet Express instead, and hire away the crew. The fathers hope to fight back with their loyal dregs, namely Scruffy and Zoidberg. Before they get very far, Cubert is able to inherit Planet Express after discovering the Professor had been declared legally dead three years ago. They rename the entire company Awesome Express.

Act III: "You rotten kids!"
Hermes and the Professor leave the building, depressed. Bender "gives birth" to an ale (Benderbrau). Dwight and Cubert's failure to actually deliver the newspapers becomes apparent, they go to their fathers, who had been feeling sorry for themselves, for help. The four gather up the undelivered papers and deliver them. They head to the Blob household to apologise for breaking the window. Hermes and the Professor fight Mr. Blob and take a severe beating, ending up in hospital. Mr. Blob visits them to apologise, Bender shares some of his beer with the men, and Brett learns to be more like his father, by digesting Dwight and Cubert.

Trivia

 * The commentary for this episode was recorded before it aired on television, due to Bumper Robinson being out of the country. They had to wait for his return to re-record some lines.
 * Bender produces 5 gallons, 6 ounces of beer, or 646 liquid ounces (128 ounces to a gallon). Assuming that, in the 31st century, the United States customary fluid ounce is still defined as 29.574 milliliters, that equates to ~19.1 liters of Bendërbrāu.

Allusions

 * Bendërbrāu is an allusion to a few things:
 * The beer's name comes from an actual beer that the Futurama staff brewed in their offices at the time of production.
 * When the Bendërbrāu is growing inside Bender, the process is frequently compared to pregnancy.
 * The bottle label for Bendërbrāu says that it is a, a style of beer which is most popular in California.
 * Hermes sings a parody of the song "" while sorting his papers before Cubert and Dwight come in and dissemble his office.
 * The prince on the small asteroid, who is later knocked out by paper and speaks French is a reference to .
 * The dog chasing Dwight and Cubert (Awesome Express) as they fly through an asteroid field is eaten by a extending from an, a parody of a scene in , in which the  flies out from inside a similar beast as it tries in vain to re-eat the ship.
 * The various brands of alcohol in 7^11 contain references to real-life alcoholic beverages.
 * Pabst Blue Robot is a reference to.
 * Kleinz is a reference to the, a "non-orientable" surface with only 1 side in Euclidean space. The bottles the Kleinz comes in are Klein Bottles.
 * Olde Fortran is named after and the computer programming "language".
 * St Pauli Exclusion Principle Girl is named after and the.

Goofs

 * The seen on Dwight's lunchbox has been outdated since 1997 when the elements Hassium and Meitnerium were added; whoever was responsible obviously wasn't aware of the additions. Further elements have been added since the episode was made, and at least one of the many scientists on staff would have been aware of the growing nature of the table, so perhaps they chose to omit these elements.
 * This would show peoples bad perception of the 21 century.
 * The Little Prince speaks a few words of French when hit by a newspaper, despite previous claims that French was a dead language.
 * A "dead language" is not necessarily a language that is no longer spoken. It could be one that is no longer changing, like . Further, perhaps being an inhabitant of an asteroid immunizes the Little Prince from language changes on Earth.
 * Furthermore, commonly used phrases (such as Au Revoir) from dead languages often persist into living ones.
 * When pumping the Bendërbrāu out of Bender, Fry proclaims that they've created an . However, the bottle label says that it's a, which is neither an ale nor a lager, but a type of beer that has taste characteristics of both.
 * When Sal delivers the newspapers, a tall stack of papers appear, only to have no stack visible when the frame changes.
 * Cubert puts a sticker on the side of the bicycle ship to avoid "explosive decompression", but the ship doesn't have a pressurized chamber, the top is just open.
 * The kids are probably just playing pretend. Just because they have a paper business that put their fathers' delivery company out of business and find FOX's TV shows infantile doesn't mean they can't act like kids.

Characters

 * Amy
 * Bender
 * Debut: Brett Blob
 * Calculon
 * Cubert
 * Debut: Dwight
 * Fry
 * Hermes
 * H. G. Blob
 * LaBarbara
 * Leela
 * Mom (cameo in sticker box)
 * Monique
 * Debut: (cameo)
 * Orphans
 * Debut: The Little Prince
 * Professor Farnsworth
 * Sal
 * Debut: (cameo)
 * Scruffy
 * Zapp (on lunchbox)
 * Zoidberg

Episode Credits

 * Writer
 * Dan Vebber
 * Director
 * Brian Sheesley
 * Voice Actors
 * Billy West
 * Bumper Robinson
 * Dawnn Lewis
 * Katey Sagal
 * Kath Soucie
 * John DiMaggio
 * Maurice LaMarche
 * Phil LaMarr
 * Tress MacNeille
 * DVD Commentary
 * Dan Vebber
 * Maurice LaMarche
 * John DiMaggio
 * Billy West
 * Matt Groening
 * Rich Moore
 * Brian Sheesley
 * David X. Cohen