The Late Philip J. Fry

"The Late Philip J. Fry" is the ninety-fifth episode of Futurama, the seventh of the sixth production season and the seventh broadcast season. After the Professor invents a forward time machine, he, Fry and Bender accidentally go into the year 10,000. To return, they must keep going further into the future until an era when a backwards time machine has been built.

Act I
Fry is unable to sleep when Bender brings a female robot to their apartment and they spend all night loudly having sex (as well as intentionally keeping Fry awake). As a result, Fry oversleeps and shows up late for work at Planet Express the next morning. The Professor chides Fry for his chronic lateness, saying that he expects Fry to show up for work on time, just like all the other employees; when Fry points out that Leela hasn't arrived yet, he is told that Leela came in on time, but left because a man was taking her out to dinner for her birthday. Fry realizes that he was supposed to take Leela to lunch, and is now late for that as well. Fry arrives at Elzar's restaurant to meet Leela, but Leela has already finished her meal (and Fry's); she, like the Professor, is fed up with Fry's inability to be on time for anything.

Upon returning to Planet Express headquarters, Fry offers to make his earlier blunder up to Leela by taking her out to the ritzy, subterranean Cavern on the Green restaurant that night. Leela is skeptical, particularly when Bender announces that Hedonism Bot is getting married to a house in the suburbs and will be throwing a huge bachelor party that same evening, but Fry says that he "can throw up on a stripper any time", and promises that he will not stand Leela up again. Fry purchases a record-your-own-message birthday card for Leela and prepares to leave so he can meet her precisely on time, but is stopped by the Professor, who tells Fry that since he was late for work that morning, he must help the Professor test his latest invention: a time machine. The Professor says that the machine was designed to only travel forward in time so as to avoid altering history or doing "something disgusting", like sleeping with one's own grandmother.

Fry, Bender, and the Professor enter the machine. Fry begins recording an apology for being late again on Leela's birthday card, while the Professor intends to test the machine by sending it one minute forward in time. However, the Professor trips and falls down while clutching the activation lever, sending the machine hurtling out of control; in the process, Fry loses Leela's birthday card out the window. The Professor gets back to his feet and shuts down the machine, but the occupants find that the interior of the Professor's laboratory has been replaced by a ruined city. The date on the machine's display reads: 3 December, 10,000 AD.



Act II
Fry is stunned at being thrown so far forward in time, saying that he can't be late for his date with Leela; however, the Professor reminds Fry that Leela, as well as everyone else they have ever known, has been dead for thousands of years. The trio explore their ruined world, but are unimpressed with the post-apocalyptic setting. The Professor realizes that while they cannot travel backward in time, they can travel forward to a point where someone else has invented a backward-traveling time machine, and use that to return home. They make a series of progressively larger jumps through time while attempting to find a sufficiently advanced civilization, and while they encounter a number of strange sights, they have no luck in finding a way home.

Back in 3010, Leela endures another lonely birthday dinner. When she returns to Planet Express, she inquires as to Fry's whereabouts, and is told by Cubert that he, Bender, and the Professor are probably attending Hedonism Bot's bachelor party. Just then, a breaking news bulletin states that a nuclear-powered stripper robot underwent meltdown at the party, killing everyone except Hedonism Bot. Leela is overwhelmed with both anger and grief, believing that Fry died after standing her up again.

Bender, Fry, and the Professor arrive in the year Five Million AD; a race of enlightened, purple-skinned humanoids live on Earth's surface, while Dumblocks - savage, primitive creatures - live below ground. The Professor asks whether these advanced people have invented a backwards-traveling time machine, and is told that they have not, although if they focus their mental efforts toward the problem, they should be able to perfect a solution within five years. The three promptly jump forward another five years, only to discover that in that time, the Dumblocks have risen up and slaughtered the entire surface population.

In 3030, Planet Express has become a larger, more successful company following the death of the Professor and Leela's subsequent takeover of the business. Leela is proud of her success, but admits to Hermes that she still misses "the old days" while looking at a photograph of herself and Fry. Leela notices that Cubert has grown up to possess a strong physical resemblance to Fry, and begins to flirt with him, much to his surprise.

The year Ten Million AD is a nightmare where machines are engaged in a violent, genocidal war against the remnants of mankind. Bender cheerfully observes that this "seems like a nice future", and suggests that they remain there, but the Professor and Fry quickly engage the next jump. They next arrive in Fifty Million AD, a paradise inhabited by beautiful and brilliant women who immediately recognize the group as time travelers and actually have a method of traveling back in time. Fry and the Professor are invited to a sensual "fertility banquet", but Bender, unhappy about being unable to stay in the future he liked, spitefully activates the time machine. This triggers a fight among the three, and they travel a large distance forward in time, finally arriving in One Billion AD.

Here, in the far future, Earth has been reduced to a scorched, barren wasteland, and all life is extinct. Fry wants to keep traveling forward, but the Professor says this would be futile, as Earth is now a dead world. Distraught, Fry wanders back to the remains of the Cavern on the Green, where he apologizes to Leela for being a billion years late for her birthday dinner. Glancing down at the ground, he is shocked to find a message written there, one that is apparently addressed to him.



Act III
In 3050, Planet Express has become a massive corporation. An aged Leela and Cubert are divorced, and Cubert is now dating Amy, who has become a head in a jar on a robotic body. While discussing her regrets over marrying Cubert with Hermes (who is a head in a jar on a pogo stick), Leela is struck by her birthday card from 3010, which has finally emerged from the time stream. Leela opens the card to hear Fry's message, in which he explains he will be delayed by the Professor's time travel experiment, and tells her that he loves her, before the experiment visibly goes awry. Leela is crushed; she has spent the last 40 years being bitter and angry with Fry for something that wasn't even his fault. Dejected, she returns to the abandoned Cavern on the Green, and - drawing upon a lesson about stalagmite formation she learned from a waiter the last time she was in the restaurant - fires her laser pistol at the ceiling several times, causing droplets of water to fall to the floor. Satisfied, Leela nods her head and leaves.

By One Billion AD, these droplets of water have accumulated into a series of small stalagmites which spell out a brief message from Leela to the time-lost Fry, stating that while their time together was short, it was also the happiest of her life. Touched by the message, Fry returns to Bender and the Professor, saying that he has lived a good life, and proposes that they watch the end of the universe together. Turning the time machine to its maximum setting, they watch as the sun explodes and then fades out, followed by all of the other stars, eventually leaving nothing but darkness. This, to their astonishment, is followed by a tremendous explosion that the Professor recognizes as a second Big Bang; he realizes that time must be cyclical, resulting in the creation of a new universe that should be identical to the previous one.

The time machine rapidly accelerates through the formation of the Earth, the extinction of the dinosaurs, and subsequent events in world history (with the Professor pausing only briefly to assassinate Adolf Hitler with a laser cannon). As they near their own time, they throttle the machine back, but accidentally skip forward to 10,000 AD a second time after the Professor falls down once more, forcing them to "go around again". The third trip happens without incident (although this time the Professor fails to kill Hitler and mistakenly shoots Eleanor Roosevelt), and the time machine materializes in the Professor's lab a short time before it originally left. However, this universe appears to be displaced a few feet from the last one, as the machine appears in mid-air and crashes to the floor, killing this new universe's versions of Fry, Bender, and the Professor (and avoiding a time paradox). Fry is able to make his date with Leela on time; she admits that she thought he would be late, but he replies that was "the old Fry... he's dead now". Fry and Leela share a romantic moment atop a bridge, while beneath it, Bender buries the bodies of the deceased duplicates.

Storyboard
Another storyboard released from Act 1 of "The Late Philip J. Fry" previews a scene entitled "Time-Machine". In this scene, we see the Professor showing his time machine to Fry and Bender, then Bender says that he can't go back in time.

Time travel
In this episode, Futurama deals with a more complicated form of time travelling issue than past episodes such as "Roswell that Ends Well" and Bender's Big Score tackled; the question of cyclical time.

However, according to the Professor, time isn't cyclical, all that happens when a universe ends is that an equal version is created in its place. It is not an alternative universe, but rather a recreation of the very same universe. Or in short, any parallel/alternative universe must always contain a version of its own universe.

During their time prior to the events of 31st century, Farnsworth makes one change on the two times they are circling through each timeline; first he kills Adolf Hitler and secondly he kills Eleanor Roosevelt. However, in the first time, the crew does not manage to kill themselves, which means they must also have travelled forward in time and ended up experiencing and doing the same, but the second time around, this issue was fixed.

So to recap, the time loop that the crew created consists of 4 versions of the same universe. The crew can either start in Universe A1 or Universe A2. If they start in the former, then the universe they end up in have both Adolf Hitler and Eleanor Roosevelt killed, if they are in the latter, only Eleanor Roosevelt would have been killed.

Production


The Table read for this episode took place on 21 October 2009 with Maurice LaMarche commenting through his Facebook page that this episode is: "Hilarious, touching, meaningful, philosophical, even metaphysical. And did I mention, hilarious?"

Another person present at the table read said that this episode is "the Emmy shot".

Trivia

 * Story basis is a re-telling of a Poul Anderson novel of 1953 "Flight to forever".
 * The time on the time machine when the trio initially get in reads 7/29 10:05 3010 AD, which is 1000 years to the minute after the scene first aired.
 * This also identifies Leela's birth date.
 * It also means that Leela and Fry scheduled dinner for around 10pm.
 * The three books Bender throws in the fire for warmth are The History of the Human Race, Backwards Time Travel Made Easy (written in AL1), and a first-generation Amazon Kindle.
 * Adolf Hitler said "Betrachten Sie meinen Schnurrbart!" which translates to "look at my mustache!".
 * In the original universe, the Professor unlocks and opens the time machine door using a remote control with a protruding antenna, but in the new universe, the Professor uses a device that resembles a car key.
 * The knight riding an ostrich is a reference to the classic Atari game.

Allusions

 * The scene with Fry seeing the human, ape, bird, cow and slug versions of the Statue of Liberty is a reference to, which ends with the main character seeing the fallen Statue of Liberty, and realising he is on Earth of the future.
 * The song during the first time travel montage is based on "".
 * 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 year ten million, in which the remnants of humanity fight a post-apocalyptic war against the machines, is a reference to the film series, as well as the  series.
 * Watching the temporal end of the universe as a show act is reminiscent of Douglas Adams novel "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe", where the end of the universe is used as a regular show act in said restaurant. Unlike this episode however, the restaurant then goes back in time for the next showing.
 * When Leela finds Fry's card, she realizes she's wasted the years being angry about something that didn't happen as she thought, a nod to "The Upside of Anger" starring Joan Allen.
 * The "Happy Birthday to Mew!" birthday card is a reference to the, a fictional character produced by the Japanese company.

Continuity

 * The birthday song Elzar sings to Leela was used in "I Second that Emotion" for Nibbler's party.
 * The creation of a forward only time machine is stated to be to prevent against paradoxes. Both Fry and Bender have previously caused such paradoxes.
 * The Professor refers to the previous time travel episode "Roswell that Ends Well", saying they won't do something disgusting like sleeping with ones grandmother.
 * Bender briefly refers to his time travelling in "Bender's Big Score", saying "Time?! I can't go back there!"
 * The concept of time being cyclical was previously mentioned in "The Cryonic Woman" by the man who wanted to meet Shakespeare.
 * In the end of the episode, as the trio travels into the year 3010, we see moments from several old episodes:
 * "Space Pilot 3000" - the destruction of New York City and the medieval reconstruction from when Fry was frozen.
 * "Love's Labours Lost in Space" - the Professor showing a hologram of Vergon 6.
 * "Amazon Women in the Mood" - Amy, Leela, Zapp and Kif discussing their upcoming double date.
 * "Future Stock" - Fry and That Guy waking the crew for a meeting.
 * "A Taste of Freedom" - Fry and Zoidberg dancing the Freedom dance.
 * "The Beast with a Billion Backs" - the Professor having been infested by Yivo, scaring Leela, Amy, Hermes and Wernstrom (who is coloured differently from the previous universe).
 * "Attack of the Killer App" - Fry, Hermes, Bender, Zoidberg and Amy playing with their eyePhones, and Leela crashing the ship.
 * A defrostee Fry met during his time as a Cryogenic Councillor had frozen himself hypothesising that time was cyclical, evidently this was correct. However the man would have been unable to meet Shakespeare through cryogenics, because the cryogenics lab wouldn't have survived the destruction of Earth like the time machine does. Also, the end of the universe would have occurred somewhere around 10^38 years after the destruction of the Earth. The metal in the chamber would have broken down long before that.
 * Once again, Bender plays the washboard, having previously played his body as a washboard in "Bendin' in the Wind".
 * The 'slug' Statue of Liberty resembles a Trisolian, though this may be a coincidence.
 * The Professor already worked on a time machine as mentioned in "A Clone of My Own", however it was unsuccessful and had set him back 15 years.

Goofs

 * Assuming the time machine stays in the same place in New New York because it follows the natural rotation of the Earth, it still would not occupy the same space as the newly formed Earth until the year 3002, when the events of Crimes of the Hot move the Earth to a new orbit farther from the Sun. The Earth would be "born" and most of its history happen far away from the Time Machine.
 * Robot 1-X units may have removed enough greenhouse gases to allow the Earth to be put back in its original location. Also, Robot Party Week has not been mentioned since Crimes of the Hot.
 * 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.
 * When we see the events of The Beast with a Billion Backs, Wernstrom is coloured incorrectly.
 * The ruins of Planet Express in the year 10000 match the current building, not the expanded versions of the year 3030 or 3050.
 * This could be explained by saying the original building stayed in the same place, and the buildings in 3030 and 3050 are somewhere else.
 * 1 time in the time lapse to show the Flood Era, the time machine moves slightly up and to the side, changing the place where they are, and should in fact no longer be in the Planet Express building in the 2 new universes.
 * This may have been intended, since when they finally come back, they are above the original Fry, Bender and Farnsworth.
 * Before stopping the time machine, the Professor says it's just one more year, but just before that we saw scenes from "Attack of the Killer App", that is set less than a month earlier.
 * This may just mean that even if he hadn't fallen over, they'd have been late.
 * The slot that the handle slides through on the controller changes twice. From being longer and extending backwards where it should technically be backwards time travel to not having a slot available for going forward in time.
 * Despite having survived being completely flattened, paradox Bender died because he was crushed.
 * At the year five million the human race has evolved into intelligent pink creatures and Dumblock's but in the year ten million the human race is normal again.
 * Though it's fairly logical that only one group of humans evolved into the pink creatures and Dumblocks's, with a morphologically more similar to Homo sapiens sapiens surviving and later taking back the Earth
 * When the Professor gets out of the time machine to kill Hitler, the time machine doesn't move (only moves through time), so he couldn't have gotten to Germany to kill Hitler.
 * An extension of this point: The earth is moving through space (rotating around the sun) while the travelers remain constant, therefore the majority of time they should have materialized into empty space or inside the earth and not on the its surface.
 * However, the Professor could have had the machine compensate for this, so that it always remains ate the same latitude/longitude on Earth while it is traveling through time.
 * The Professor and Bender don't seem to be surprised to find that the dinosaurs were killed by a giant brain.
 * In "A Fishful of Dollars" Amy states that cows are extinct, however, in the year 10000 a cow civilization has existed at some point between 3050 and 10000.
 * Dinosaurs have been cloned at some point in the series, so it's possible a similar Jurassic Park mosquito in amber method was used to bring back cows.
 * Also, The Last Encyclopod presumably has the DNA of cows within him, so they could be regenerated from that.
 * Cubert is shown as still being twelve years old in 3010, yet he should be in his twenties by now if he was twelve in 3000.
 * Although people could simply age slower in the future due to medical advancements, like how the Professor is almost 170 years old, despite the fact the he is both mentally and physically like a 90 year old in our time.
 * Plus The Simpsons has been on for 20+ years and Bart and Lisa and Maggie haven't aged a year. The same applies for Futurama.
 * Simpsons, however, doesn't directly reference both the year and the time the length of time the series has been on. Futurama gives exact dates and remains consistent in everything except their ages.
 * However, it could also be that clones might age slower then humans.
 * It is also possible, though a far-fetched explanation, that Farnsworth himself keeps Cubert young. But with him 'killed', he is no long capable of doing so and Cubert must eventually become a grown man.
 * Older Leela is knocked to the floor by a floating birthday card.
 * often affects older women.
 * Since time progresses regardless of whether the universe ends, it can be assumed that every other episode will take place billions of years in the future

Characters

 * Adolf Hitler
 * Amy
 * Bender
 * Cubert
 * Elzar
 * Fry
 * Hedonismbot
 * Hermes
 * Hypnotoad
 * Leela
 * Linda
 * Morbo
 * Debut: Promiscuous Ladybot
 * The Professor
 * Debut: Waiter on the Green
 * Zoidberg