The Impossible Stream

This is the first episode of the show's third run. After the events of the prior episode, Fry tries to watch every TV show ever made to find a purpose in life.

Act I
The show opens with a voiceover by the Professor, recapping the end of Meanwhile. The Professor presses the time-reset button, and things revert to a time before the timefreeze.

Fry, realizing it is now July, 3023, and that he is getting old, decides to find a purpose in life. The purpose he settles on is to watch every TV show ever made. Leela is not impressed, but supports him in his life-goal. He sets about his task, starting by watching an episode of The Scary Mirror and a Humorbot 5.0 Stand-Up Special.

Later, Fry announces to the Planet Express crew at the conference table that he's watched everything except for the final season of All My Circuits. Bender tells him that there are 13,020 of episodes in that season. Fry decides to binge the entire season, a process that, in the year 3023, involves a pair of goggles that drill into the brain.

Act II
The Professor gives Fry a stillsuit (reminiscent of the stillsuits in Dune), a special chair, and he is hooked up into various food- and waste- storage barrels for his long task. He begins watching.

Most of the plots in All My Circuits involve a shocking tale of love between the 6 combinations of Calculon, Monique, Boxy Robot, and Human Friend.

By April, 3024, Fry has watched the same show for so long that his brainwaves are exactly the same as the TV signal - a situation so dangerous that, if the TV show ever ends, his consciousness will be severed. Worse, there are not many episodes of All My Circuits left for him to watch. The only way the crew can think to save him is to reboot All My Circuits on the Fulu streaming service.

They bring the idea to the Execu-Bots, who initially reject the idea, but decide to go ahead with it after the see a large increase in purchasing from ads on the show (all of which is due to Fry). They agree to pick up All My Circuits for 20 episodes (with an option for 20 more, and maybe a movie).

The one problem in their plan is that the star of the show, Calculon, is dead; that's fixed, though, when the Execu-Bots negotiate with the Robot Devil, and Calculon is shot out of Robot Hell by a resurrection canon.

Calculon is shot directly into the set of All My Circuits, where the Director, Leela (as Executive Director), and others are preparing to start filming. The professor tells them that, at this point, Fry only has two episodes of the show left, meaning that they will need to produce a new hour-long show every hour to keep Fry alive.

Act III
The situation worsens, as Fry has started streaming at double speed, meaning a new hour-long episode needs to be created every half hour. Luckily, Calculon informs them that a robot actor of his calibre can act at speeds far beyond a mere human actor.

They begin producing the show at double speed. However, the show writers are incapable of writing an hour-long episode every hour. Luckily, Bender is able to write speeds far beyond a mere human writer, and he becomes the sole writer. Eventually, the Director suffers a heart attack, and Leela takes over as director. This continues until the Execu-Bots come in and cancel the show (again).

Act IV
Fry, at this point watching the last episode of All My Circuits, seems doomed. The Professor offers a solution: gradually shift Fry's focus back from the streaming world to the real world. This is done by having the actors act out the same episode Fry is watching, but directly in front of him in the Planet Express headquarters.

The actors begin acting, the Professor gradually decreases the speed of the show Fry is watching, and then gradually decreases the opacity of his binging goggles. All is working well, until a love tetrahedron that Calculon builds out of dynamite and grenades is accidentally ignited by Bender's cigar.

There is an explosion. Boxy Robot is thrown into a wall, and others are tossed about the room, but the worst effect is that Fry's stillsuit is on fire. Amy tries to put the fire out with some 5-Hour Battery Acid, thinking it's something other than a giant container of battery acid. The stillsuit and chair explode, then crumble into a pile of dust.

They all mourn the loss of Fry, until Fry walks into the room. He tells them he had left the stillsuit days earlier, in order to catch up on his reading; he had found the last few episodes to have poor writing and poor executive producing.

Although Fry failed in his life goal, Leela isn't disappointed in him, and - after the disaster caused by being supportive of him this time - resolves, out of kindness, never to be supportive of him again.

There is a fade to black, and the credits temporarily start.

Act V (coda)
Fry gives a televised testimony at a hearing at the capitol, with President Nixon presiding. He gives thoughtful advice on how often a show should be rebooted, how many episodes a viewer should watch while binging, and that a show which respects its audience should be cancelled every few years. Following this, Nixon calls Fry's speech "sobering thoughts from some drug-addled weirdo," and bids the viewers farewell.

Production
The writer of record for this episode is Patric M. Verrone.

Trivia
This is the first episode of the third run.

Fry's food- and drink- barrels contain Bachelor Paste and Slurm.

Freeze-Frame TV Show Names
A total of 83 TV show names can be seen in freeze frame when Fry and Bender are looking at cable/Fulu show listings.

Cable TV Shows (on channels 211 to 249, 68 in total):


 * Cosinefeld
 * Jupiter's Next Top Model
 * Shatner's Creek
 * Friends Reunion Reunion
 * The Steady-State Universe Theory
 * Unexplained Friday Night Lights
 * Mets vs. Godzilla
 * Next Week Yesterday
 * The A-Team (with 'A' as the alien-alphabet 'A')
 * Truthbusters
 * Regular Ghost: Coast to Coast
 * Downton Crabby
 * Wide World of Quarks
 * Star Trek: The Original Reboot
 * Disenpantment
 * The Mare of Neutropolis
 * Better Call Cthulhu
 * A Quiet Place: Live!
 * The Queen's 8-Bit
 * Plaid Programming
 * The Marvellous Mrs. Poopenmeyer
 * Buckminster Fuller House
 * Fonfon Ru Crashers
 * Stanley Tucci: Searching for Alderaan
 * The Sex Lives of Amazonian Women
 * Pi's Company (with the math symbol for pi)
 * Melllvar Place
 * Alien vs Predator vs Bluey
 * Queer Eye for the Straight Line Segment
 * America Lacks Talent
 * Say No to the Overalls!
 * Married with Pupae
 * The Sim's Sons
 * Infomercial: The Bowflexo
 * Fleaborg
 * Pimp My Hovercraft
 * Grey Alien's Anatomy
 * The Botfather
 * Family Gorn
 * Will and Grkrk
 * 0.999 Full House (with 0.999 in math notation as 0.999 repeating)
 * Sandcrab and Son
 * All in the Phylum
 * Look Who's Glorbin' 2
 * 30 Rock from the Sun
 * Robot History Month
 * American Holo Story
 * Back to the Present
 * M*A*T*H
 * The Best Dental Dam Show Period
 * CSI: Ceti Alpha V
 * Just Disruptor Blast Me
 * News at root 11 (with root 11 written in math notation)
 * The Lego Newshour
 * Rick & Morky
 * Everybody Loves Raygun
 * Halitos 15
 * Blasterpiece Theatre
 * Frank Herbert's Name That Dune
 * TCU Hypnotoads vs Georgia Bullfrogs
 * Two and a Third Mutants
 * SporkCenter
 * Fargo But In Space
 * Quantum Nonlocal News
 * Smizmar Island
 * NYPD Ultraviolet
 * Yak Chat
 * Monday Night Rollerball

Fulu Shows (15 in total):


 * Slurm Dog Millionaire
 * Stranger Fonts
 * Smelly In Paris
 * Geiger King
 * The Clammaid's Tale
 * how i met your smizmar
 * Only Murders in the Hoverdome
 * The Great Neptunian Bam-Off
 * The Scary Mirror
 * Humorbot 5.0 Stand-Up Special
 * Blob's Burgers
 * Head Lasso
 * the Real Housecats of Thuban 9
 * It's Always Sunny on Mercury
 * `green-ish

Allusions
Bender's use of a old mechanical typewriter is an affectation similar to his use of an old film camera in The Thief of Baghead.

Quotes
"The thrill is all mine, Monique. I've never been on a swan boat before" - Human Friend

"I just hope that we can come to some kind of agreement. And that this boat can hold six tonnes of steel." - Monique

"I'm afraid he'll never calculate again. Or he'll do so inaccurately." - Monique, over the hospital bed of Boxy Robot

"Does this love triangle have room for one more vertex?" - Human Friend

Goofs

 * During the cold open, Zoidberg's eye can be seen overlapping his mouth frills when Bender starts spitting his beer into his mouth.
 * Right before the Love Tetrahedron explosion, Zoidberg's head is briefly uncolored and translucent (except for his eyes).

Characters

 * Boxy Robot
 * Calculon
 * Hermes Conrad
 * Robot Devil
 * Director
 * Execu-Bots
 * Professor Farnsworth
 * Human-friend actor
 * Fry
 * Eric Horsted's Head
 * Hyperchicken
 * Hypnotoad
 * Leela
 * Monique
 * Shirin Najafi's Head
 * President Nixon
 * Bender
 * Scruffy
 * Amy Wong
 * Dr. Zoidberg