Talk:The Late Philip J. Fry

Continuity Error
"The time machine is really useless, as it has nearly the exact same effect as freezing yourself." The time machine isn't useless at all. If one were freezing itself they would still be in the third dimension thus would have been destroyed by any of those attacks on earth, but being in a machine that puts them into the fourth dimension prevents them from being affected by any of those events.
 * Ah, I overlooked that. I am sorry.-Not awedfrgt

Paradox Error
when they finally come back and fall and kill the other versions of them, the professor states "pow! we took care of the time travel paradox!".... but there really is no paradox, they only went forward in time still. 72.133.55.59 07:54, 30 July 2010 (CEST)
 * It is a paradox, but not a paradox in the style of BBS (leading to the duplicate being doomed). Instead it's merely a confusing paradox that would lead to quite a few questions, not to mention a fight over who is "the real one" and who should be killed or whatnot. They solved it by simply killing them off right away, thus ending the paradox. Aki 08:10, 30 July 2010 (CEST)
 * I guess that makes sense, but by definition, it really wouldn't be a paradox, it would just be confusing. The line was hilarious nonetheless. I'm glad that had a very short conclusion dealing with the duplicates, instead of spending too much of the episode resolving it strangely.
 * "A paradox is a true statement or group of statements that leads to a contradiction or a situation which defies intuition" according to Wikipedia. "There are two of them but only one was ever born" sounds like a paradox to me. Aki 08:57, 30 July 2010 (CEST)
 * Technically there wouldn't really be two of them, as the other Fry, Bender, and Professor would have soon jumped forward in time as the others did. In actuality, since they didn't kill them in the 2nd Universe, there would be another set of them already. Polantaris 10:15, 30 July 2010 (CEST)
 * Yes, but the trio from universe 2 would probably have overshot universe 3. Additionally, this may explain where the Nibblonians came from 17 years before the big bang. - Quolnok 11:24, 30 July 2010 (CEST)
 * Time was explained to be linearly repeating, so even though each universe was the same, they would still be separate universes. Here's a metaphor.... think of an assembly line of cupcakes with cherries on top, (the cupcakes represent the different universes and the cherries represent bender, phil, and the professor). A normal time paradox would be like this: you go to the end of the assembly line and take the cherry off of cupcake 1, go back in time to some point and put the future cherry on top of cupcake 1 and destroyed the cherry already there. But what happened in this episode would be the equivalent to taking the cherry from cupcake 1 and placing it on top of cupcake 3.24.123.91.70 14:57, 30 July 2010 (CEST)
 * There is no paradox at hand. Let's assume, that time is linear but repeating and let's numerate the universes from 1 to infinity like my previous speakers already assumed. This implies, that there has to be a universe 1 and a universe 2. Now the following happens: the crew from universe 1 travel forward in time as shown in the episode and end up in universe 3 crushing the crew that was present there and the same happens with universes 2 and 4. Now the cycle changes, because no crew can depart from universes 3 and 4 and thus universes 5 and 6 remain unchanged and allow a crew to depart again. So in summary: crew 1 -> universe 3 | crew 2 -> universe 4 | crew 3 -> crushed | crew 4 -> crushed | crew 5 -> universe 7 | crew 6 -> universe 8 | crew 7 -> crushed | crew 8 -> crushed | ... It all fits itself together. But according to this logic, there could not be any Nibblonians in universe 1, because there was no universe 0 when they could have been created 17 years before the Big Bang of universe 1. -Kamikaze28 17:18, 30 July 2010 (CEST)
 * Great explanation! exactly. 72.133.55.59 23:11, 30 July 2010 (CEST)
 * Note that this means the current universe's Hitler was ALSO killed by Farnsworth2, while Eleanor Roosevelt was killed by Farnsworth1. -- LeandroTLZ 02:30, 31 July 2010 (CEST)
 * Yeah, Hitler did not die in its current form, I should say. A world without WW2 would have changed many things. --Sviptalk 02:52, 31 July 2010 (CEST)
 * That's how it has to have happened, though. Expanding on Kamikaze's post above:

LeandroTLZ 04:00, 31 July 2010 (CEST)
 * Universe 1: Original Futurama universe. Hitler and Eleanor die the same as in our universe. Trio1 travel to the Future, Fry1 drops the greeting card, Leela1 leaves the message, etc.
 * Universe 2: Bender1 kills the first fish to walk on land. Farnsworth1 kills Hitler. Trio1 arrives to the present, and instantly jumps to the future again. Trio2 travels to the future, Fry2 drops the greeting card, Leela2 leaves the message, etc.
 * Universe 3: Bender2 kills the first fish to walk on land. Farnsworth2 kills Hitler. Farnsworth1 kills Eleanor. Trio3 is killed by Trio1. Trio2 arrives to the present, and instantly jumps to the future again. This is the current universe in the series.
 * Universe 4: Farnsworth2 kills Eleanor. Trio4 is killed by Trio3.
 * Universe 5: Same as Universe 1.
 * Universe 6: Same as Universe 2.
 * Universe 7: Same as Universe 3.
 * Universe 8: Same as Universe 4.
 * Another possibility is that when universe n's Farnsworth overshot 3010 and landed in roughly 10,000 their time machine landed at the same timespace co-ordinates as universe n+1's time machine wiping it from existence, resulting in a universe loop size of 3
 * Universe (n%3 == 0): Original Futurama universe. Hitler and Eleanor die the same as in our universe. Trio(n%3 == 0) travel to the Future, Fry(n%3 == 0) drops the greeting card, Leela(n%3 == 0) leaves the message, etc.
 * Universe (n%3 == 1): Bender(n%3 == 0) kills the first fish to walk on land. Farnsworth(n%3 == 0) kills Hitler. Trio(n%3 == 0) arrives to the present, and instantly jumps to the future again where they accidentally erase Trio(n%3 == 1) in 10,000 after Fry(n%3 == 1) drops the greeting card, Leela(n%3 == 1) leaves the message, etc.
 * Universe (n%3 == 2): Farnsworth(n%3 == 0) kills Eleanor. Trio(n%3 == 2) is killed by Trio(n%3 == 0) before departing. This is the current universe in the series.
 * This model is better for two reasons, the numbering doesn't assume we're the first universe and anyone from universe (n%3 == 1) won't have had significant motivation for killing Hitler, as they'd know he was killed early on. - Quolnok 12:14, 31 July 2010 (CEST)
 * Universe 3: Bender2 kills the first fish to walk on land. Farnsworth2 kills Hitler. Farnsworth1 kills Eleanor. Trio3 is killed by Trio1. Trio2 arrives to the present, and instantly jumps to the future again. This is the current universe in the series.

How is this possible? Trio3 is dead because Trio1 killed them, therefore Trio4 still lives. Polantaris 07:30, 4 August 2010 (CEST)
 * 1) Universe 4: Farnsworth2 kills Eleanor. Trio4 is killed by Trio3. 
 * Trio4 will likely be crushed by Trio2 (who survived because Trio1 overshot them).--75.57.209.255 07:29, 10 August 2010 (CEST)

Decapodian Lifespan
I'm not sure if we really knew this already or not, but in the 3030 future, Zoidberg is shown to have aged at the same rate as everyone else, suggesting that his race has a similar lifespan to that of humanity. 173.70.156.252 10:13, 30 July 2010 (CEST)
 * Perhaps, or it could be that eating from dumpsters and living on the streets caused him to age poorly. - Quolnok 11:26, 30 July 2010 (CEST)

H. G. Wells Time Machine error
The allusion in Question:
 * The year five million, with humanity split into two species, one primitive and one intelligent, is a reference to the future depicted in ' .
 * The main basis for the episode, with a forward only time machine, is based on the story as well.
 * The main story basis of a forwards-only time machine and repeating universe is actually taken from Flight to Forever by Poul Anderson (1953) but I have found no references to support this. I see someone has already come to the same conclusion and added this info to Trivia.

The Time Machine in said novel did however have the capability to go backwards in time. -Kamikaze28 17:25, 1 August 2010 (CEST)

50 million AD

 * Is it possible that the women who live on Earth are descendents from Amazonians who evolve to become intelligent and beautiful?
 * 50 million AD Earth looks like Planet Amazonia because men are very rare.


 * The professor, Fry and Bender were aware that these women have had the technology to go back in time. So why didn't the stop at this period of time? They could have had sex (except Bender of course) and a way to go back to 3010 without experiencing another big crunch/big bang.Yach 19:55, 1 August 2010 (CEST)Yach


 * Sounds unlikely, men are more likely simply just rare by this point in history. I don't get why Amazonians would have come by (they are not taller these futuristic women).
 * They left it because Bender didn't like it. --Sviptalk 21:47, 1 August 2010 (CEST)
 * I know. But what I meant is that they COULD have stopped when they were in Universe 2.Yach 22:23, 1 August 2010 (CEST)
 * They could, but wouldn't it just be easier to just bring it around again? You just pull the switch.  I am sure Bender would probably have been upset even the second time around.  It may also not have occurred to them.  It did not occur to me until you brought it up either!  You could also ask; why did not travel to the pink ones five years or more earlier and ask for a backwards time machine?  Surely that would avoid them being destroyed by the Dumblocks before they could finish it. --Sviptalk 23:04, 1 August 2010 (CEST)

Nibblonians
What does this episode mean for the Nibblonian race? Since they have already been shown to have existed before the (original?) big bang, does this mean they've experienced all the intermittent universes that Fry and Co have? --That Sullen Piñata 14:54, 3 August 2010 (CEST)
 * I don't think so. They live long but are not immortal. Related to that: why don't we see Planet Eternium beeing created?
 * Because we are near Earth? --Sviptalk 16:36, 3 August 2010 (CEST)
 * Of course!!! It all depends whether the universe shrinks before big bang and expenses after.Yach 16:54, 3 August 2010 (CEST)
 * Since time is infinite, the universe never began where the Nibblonian race was created 17 years before the big bang, because the big bang has always been and always will be happening. Could it be that the Nibblonian race died out in whatever time, then 17 years before the big bang the planet was thus created again? Like Earth did? It would explain why they didn't know of Fry and the fate of their universe without him. 64.229.152.105 00:01, 4 August 2010 (CEST)

Leela as seen from the time machine
Probably not important enough to be on the article itself, but you can see old Leela when Fry loses his card inside the time machine: http://i.imgur.com/TPzWZ.jpg -- LeandroTLZ 04:24, 4 August 2010 (CEST)
 * I would think this is worthy enough of being in the Trivia section Polantaris 07:20, 4 August 2010 (CEST)

Goof not a Goof
I don't think the following is a Goof:
 * Older Leela is knocked to the floor by a floating birthday card.

* Osteoporosis often affects older women.

If anything, it's just there for comedic effect. A goof is something like discolorations, moving objects that shouldn't move, or something along those lines. It's clear that they wanted her to fall over from the card. That's not something you mess up. Polantaris 07:22, 4 August 2010 (CEST)
 * Sorry, but that's not what goofs are. If goofs are just tiny stuff like discolorations, then there is hardly a point for even having a goofs section. Unit 3.0 17:35, 13 September 2010
 * Actually, both of these things are goofs. This one can potentially be explained by her falling over in surprise (and may be more a nitpick than a goof), but Scruffy's wrong colours in AoI1 can't be explained. That said, any comic drawn by Mike Kazaleh could have several goofs pointing out where things are the wrong size, but we've mostly ignored this to avoid going crazy. - Quolnok 08:45, 17 October 2010 (CEST)

"Scammers erased the code"
I have erased the addendum "The Scammer Aliens erased the time code (along with the mind control virus) after Bender thought he killed Fry," in the goof about Bender remembering the Time Code. Although they did erase the code as stated, Bender learned the Code again when he went back in time to place the tattoo on Fry's ass. Since there has been no mention of him deleting it a second time (as far as I am aware), it still remains as a legitimate goof. Legionaireb 08:24, 9 August 2010 (CEST)
 * I wouldn't say he should remember it though. Could certainly, but he may not have memorised it. Also, if he had; he might be scared of what would happen (as evidenced by the start of the episode) and/or was not sufficiently bored enough to use it. - Quolnok 13:30, 16 August 2010 (CEST)

Zoidberg mistake?
At the start of the episode, Zoidberg identifies Fry as "The only one of you who never laid a hand on me!", but Fry gave Zoidberg a pretty nasty beating in "Why must I be a crustacean in love", although he might have forgiven Fry. Notable? --97.124.181.147 23:43, 12 September 2010 (CEST)
 * I don't think so. I mean, Fry is hardly an enemy of Zoidberg's, as opposed to Hermes. Anyway, that can't be considered a goof. Fan Futurama 23:50, 12 September 2010 (CEST)
 * If we're going for nitpicking, Fry has touched Zoidberg on several occassions. I honestly don't think Zoidberg holds a grudge on Fry seven years later (especially since they seemed to be friends at the end of that episode), and "never" often means "almost never". Aki 00:33, 13 September 2010 (CEST)

Fair enough.--97.124.180.84 09:05, 19 September 2010 (CEST)

Hitler/Eleanor
What difference does it make in the episode when the historic characters in the title are killed? 213.106.180.214 17:47, 26 October 2010 (CEST)
 * It's merely a joke. We have an explanation of it as trivia, that's all. San Saber 21:22, 26 October 2010 (CEST)

Time cycles
OK, this is just my contribution to the discussion of what exactly happened to Fry, Bender, and Professor Farnsworth. This is going to be from some guy with an education that has absolutely nothing to do with science or mathematics. I could be contradicting anything said by the writers, directors, or creators, and I don't yet have the DVDs for this season so I haven't heard the commentary for the episode. Further, I might ramble, so apologies in advance.

Some religions (i.e. the ancient Greek, the Mayan, and Buddhism), hold the concept of time cycles. It is the idea that time and all existence consists of repeating cycles like on a wheel, i.e. everything starts on one point and eventually goes back to it in a single revolution. There is more complexity to it, but I am just stealing the core idea of it. It's the basis for the Mayan long calendar, whose misunderstanding has bred the whole "2012 is doomsday" nonsense.

A scientific time cycle is a completely different animal. Science, mathematics, and that calendar which is at the corner of your computer monitor tell us that planets and stars do move in predictable, literal revolutions. The obvious example of this would be the Earth, which takes roughly 365.25 days to go around the Sun once, and then starts the whole thing again as it has done for the past 4.5 billion years.

One final point: Fry claims that time is a straight line in The Cryonic Woman. He seemed fairly confident of that fact and even if one believes he is a dull knife in a sword factory, the delivery of the line seems like he would have learned it as an honest fact.

So lets now say that the time machine travels straight forward along the fourth dimension at the incredibly fast speed of 10^40 years (or so) in 22 minutes. They start their journey at the Planet Express building, witness the death and rebirth of the Universe twice, and proceed to travel an incredible number of years before finally arriving and crushing their duplicates. The Professor exclaims that the Universe has created an exact duplicate of itself.

What I propose is a combination of ideas, that they did not witness the rebirth of the Universe but the original birth of the Universe. I believe that in Futurama time is both straight and cyclical, in a literal sense. Everything travels forward on a rail so to speak, and upon reaching the end it has completed a revolution on the point in the "wheel" where it started, and begins spinning again. Time would be like a giant circle, so therefore the Leela that Fry finally goes out to dinner with was the original and not a reborn Leela. Upon reaching the end of time, Fry, Farnsworth, and Bender and the Universe itself revolved back to the beginning of time and proceeded again to the exact position they began in the same timeline that has been spinning for eternity.

Now, I know there are big holes in this. For example, if the gang was reliving the same Universe, why didn't they get crushed in the beginning by themselves and thus negate the whole travel through eternity? In addition, they killed Hitler and then shot Eleanor Roosevelt in two different travels. I'm not pretending it's a flawless theory. And given the writers' strict adherence to science and things that are theoretically possible (even if still goofy and outlandish), I could just be talking out of some orifice. But I liked the idea and thought it would be worth sharing. -- DeepSpaceHomer 05:58, 14 January 2011 (CET)
 * It really is worth sharing, in my opinion. But I think what the writers were going for should be something close to what the Professor said. Then again, I, like you, don't own Volume 5 yet, so my assumptions are probably not that valuabe. What would you add, for example, to the Time travel section about this? Sanfazer 23:25, 14 January 2011 (CET)
 * I agree that the writers were probably using the Professor to espouse what was actually happening. They are the ones with the PhDs.  My theory was based on religious and cultural understandings of time, rather than purely scientific.  I recall that Godfellas brought up many philosophical issues about God and the nature of existence, issues that went outside the vein of science and were open to interpretation.  But then again, I'm a snooty liberal arts major who would latch onto something like that.


 * If I had to condense that into something less than a paragraph to fit in the time travel section, it would probably be: there is a possibility that Fry, Bender, and Farnsworth experienced some macro-form of the philosophical/religious concept of time cycles, where they started at a fixed point in time and then returned to that exact point (or near it) in the history of the Universe, including crossing the end of time and returning to the moment of the Universe's birth, thus witnessing the restart of the eternal rotation of events. -- DeepSpaceHomer 23:52, 14 January 2011 (CET)
 * I'm going to add this cleaned up, better-looking version of my theory to the time travel section, if there are no objections: "Fry, Bender, and the Professor could also have experienced a form of the "wheel of time", a concept in some religious and philosophical traditions. In this scenario, upon reaching the end of time, the machine crossed a boundary back into the beginning of time and of the Universe, like a wheel returning to the spoke where it began.  The Professor's statement that "[i]t appears, this universe is exactly identical to the old one" could suggest that it only appears to be a new Universe.  So when it arrived back at Planet Express, the machine finished a revolution along the fourth dimension of time and stopped at the point when it left in the original Universe.  Although in this case, the Professor stopped the machine early, ending up ten feet above their time duplicates and crushing them, preventing any paradoxes." --DeepSpaceHomer 04:30, 15 January 2011 (CET)
 * I've just seen it, and it looks great. Nice job. Sanfazer 02:42, 16 January 2011 (CET)

Cavern on the Green
This led me to check the third DVD of Volume 3 for an appearance of Cavern on the Green in 3ACV14, but I can't spot it. The edit tells me the place's supposed to appear between 0:30 to 0:40 in the episode. Can anyone with better depth perception find it? Sanfazer 23:22, 13 February 2011 (CET)
 * I'll check right now. Teyrn of Highever 23:26, 13 February 2011 (CET)
 * Didn't see it but will check a few more times. Teyrn of Highever 23:28, 13 February 2011 (CET)
 * Nothing. Anyone else wanna try? Teyrn of Highever 23:32, 13 February 2011 (CET)

Nested too deep
I removed this from the "Goofs" section:


 * The events of the second and third universes explicitly show that the events of The Beast with a Billion Backs reoccur exactly as before. This is despite the fact that Yivo would still be aware of the original encounter with the universe and would already be with Colleen.
 * It could however be that all universes end and begin in the time of the episode, so everything would start over with a new Yivo.
 * But at the same time, Yivo claims to have witnessed the Big Bang
 * Time in Yivo's universe could be slightly offset compared to ours. Or Yivo might have been lying to impress us.

Fourth-level bullet points are ridiculous. We are not TVtropes, this point-counterpoint nonsense has no place on the Infosphere. If you wish to refute the point, then find a way to reword it into the same bullet point. It's not a discussion forum. If someone wants to rework this into ONE level, or two, tops, then go for it and shove it back in. --Buddy 04:04, 19 September 2011 (CEST)