The Sting (Futurama)

This article is about the "Futurama" episode. For the 1973 film, see The Sting.

"The Sting"
Futurama episode
File:Futurama ep66.jpg Fry and Leela paint Bender like a bee.
Episode no.	Season four
Directed by	Brian Sheesley
Written by	Patric M. Verrone
Original air dates	June 1, 2003
Episode features
Opening cartoon	Unknown

"The Sting" is episode twelve in season four of Futurama. It originally aired in North America on June 1, 2003.

Plot

Professor Farnsworth tells his crew that they are unable to go on their next mission because they are not good enough. Fry and Bender celebrate, while Leela takes this remark a bit personally and demands to know why. The Professor explains that the mission—collecting giant space bee honey—was what killed his last crew, since a single sting from one of these bees is toxic enough to kill anyone instantly. Leela scoffs at this and convinces the Professor to send them anyway.

At the hive, Leela paints Bender like a bee to distract the other bees while she and Fry manage to collect the honey safely. In the hive, they find the remains of the last crew and their ship: the ship's black box recorder indicates that they all died because the previous captain refused to retreat, seeking to prove themself better than the Professor's expectation—despite this, Leela refuses to go back. In the interim, Leela decides to bring home a baby queen bee to create a new hive from which to collect honey in the future, taking some of the queen's royal jelly as well. As the crew is leaving, Bender accidentally insults the hive's Queen, causing the entire hive to chase the Planet Express crew back to their ship. During the escape, the baby bee awakens and attacks Leela, though Fry leaps in front of her and causes the stinger to go completely through his body and also hit Leela, knocking them both over. Bender grabs the bee and throws it inside the airlock before ejecting it, where it is immediately hit by a passing space-truck. Leela awakens with a minor wound on her body, but Fry appears to have been killed.

At Fry's funeral, a remorseful Leela blames herself for Fry's death. In her apartment at night, she takes some space honey to relieve herself of crying, but which causes her to fall asleep. In her dream, Fry turns out to be alive and tells Leela to prove it to the others by showing them a gift he planted in her locker right before he died. He then tells her to "wake up", at which point Leela suddenly wakes up from her dream.

In the morning, Leela opens her locker to the others to find that there isn't a gift like Fry said. However, Bender arrives and reveals that he cleared out Fry's locker but kept the gift he found for Leela, which he gives to her (the gift is a small one-eyed squeaky stress-toy). Leela thinks that Fry is alive and is reaching her in her dreams, but the others don't believe her, so Professor Farnsworth decides to perform a brain-scan on Leela by first trying to remove it with a guillotine, but then using a simple magnetic-device which reveals that Fry is actually dead. When Leela tries to prove him wrong by saying that only she could have known the gift was in her locker if Fry told her after he died, Hermes tells her this was because Fry must have told her before he died and the grief she was experiencing blocked the memory out of her brain. At this point, Leela questions whether she may be going crazy.

At night, she dreams about dancing through a luxurious garden and riding through an ice planet with Dream-Fry, who gives her his jacket before telling her to "wake up" again. She awakens wearing Fry's red jacket which he put on her in the dream, which makes her sure that he is alive, but it disappears the next morning and it turns out it was her normal green jacket. When she begins to think she's going insane after seeing Amy somehow talk with the Professor's voice and Bender talk with Amy's voice, she decides to have some more space honey. The others become horrified at this comment and reveal that space honey has certain properties: one spoonful will calm a person down and two spoonfuls will help someone sleep but three spoonfuls will make someone fall asleep forever.(A.K.A death.)

When Leela again takes more two more spoonfuls but decides to have another for she couldn't fall asleep, she accidentally knocks the jar of royal jelly off the table and onto the couch, from which Fry mysteriously regenerates. After a body scan, Professor Farnsworth tells the others that when Fry touched the royal jelly in the hive he left an imprint of his DNA and brainwaves: so when the jelly spilled onto the couch, it combined with trace amounts of Fry's hair, skin and blood and made him regenerate. As the others go out to celebrate and Leela embraces Fry, Fry again tells her she has to "wake up". Leela suddenly awakens on the couch, revealing that she was dreaming again. Later on, everyone gathers at the meeting desk and Leela tells the others that she is cracking up: in her dreams she's happy because Fry is alive, but when she's awake her mind plays tricks on her. At this point, the others all start singing and dancing to Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry, Be Happy", where they're all stung by an oversized bee and explode. When they stop, Leela asks them if they were all just singing but Bender replies that they were just telling her not to worry.

Leela uses the rocket to fly into space, intending to find Fry's coffin, get his corpse and keep it under her mattress to remind herself that he's really dead and that she's not insane. When she finds the coffin and opens it, all she sees is a deep vortex of swirling colours. As the camera focuses on her eye turning different colours, she suddenly wakes up in her apartment with no recollection of ever going back. All over the walls and floor are the faces of her colleagues claiming that she killed Fry, which she rips off. She also vacuums a face of Bender on the ground. Her guilt becomes so intense that she is insane but still sane enough to know it. The only time when she is really happy is when she's in her dreams with Fry, so she decides to take enough of the space honey to make her sleep forever. As she is about to eat the third spoonful, the picture of Fry on her bedside table comes alive and tells her that she needs to fight the urge, as the Leela he knows would never give up like that, and that he loves her. As she prepares to stop, a large bee in the room flies around her. Leela hurls the space honey at the bee, which breaks into a swarm of bees which start attacking her, causing her to withdraw in fear and confusion. Dream-Fry admits to Leela that he loves her as Leela cries that she doesn't know what to. Dream-Fry tells her she needs to wake up one last time.

The scene then cuts to a disheveled and weeping Fry begging Leela, who is lying unconscious in a bed and wearing Fry's red jacket, to wake up. Leela wakes up, surprised that Fry is alive and Fry is equally overjoyed that Leela is awake. Fry reveals that Leela is in the hospital because she was the one who was affected by the space bee's poison (making everything that happened between the time Fry got stung to the sequence in Leela's bedroom a coma fantasy); Fry was merely impaled by the stinger (and got a new spleen from a man who loved to ride motorcycles). The rest of the Planet Express crew visits Leela in the hospital, happy that she's finally out of the coma. According to Amy, Zoidberg, and Fry, Leela was in a coma for two weeks, which the doctors thought would be permanent. Fry spent the past two weeks staying at Leela's side and talking to her, so she would know that someone was at her side, whether or not the messages actually came through. The episode ends with Fry and Leela embracing each other tightly and Leela reassures Fry that the messages did get through, before each comments over the credits that the other could use a shower.

Continuity

• This episode ties back to events in the episode "Space Pilot 3000", where the Professor produces career chips from his previous crew from an envelope labeled "Contents of space wasp's stomach." This episode is somewhat contradictory to this information as the crew is shown to have been killed by space bees rather than a space wasp. In the episode commentary Patric Verrone admits that they were aware of this inconsistency at the time and that he did research to find a plausible explanation for it. As his search was unsuccessful he states that "we made liars out of the pilot". Notably, some species of Wasp - including the Cuckoo Wasp - parasitically make their home in Beehives.
• In the apartment scene immediately after the funeral, a grief-stricken Leela decides to try out the space bee honey to help her sleep and takes out a commemorative spoon depicting Fry as Emperor of Trisol, an event from the episode "My Three Suns", from a box containing significant memories of Fry. Other "memories" include a souvenir magnet purchased by Fry on the Moon ("The Series Has Landed"), Fry's first moustache ("The Cryonic Woman"), a can of π-in-1 oil ("Insane in the Mainframe"), a candy heart reading "U Leave Me Breathless" ("Love and Rocket"), a flower given to her by Fry in "The Why of Fry", and the (presumably) winning slurm can from "Fry and the Slurm Factory".
• At the funeral service held at Orbiting Meadows (which the crew previously visited in "The Luck of the Fryrish") many characters from past episodes appear. Father Changstein-El-Gamal of the "First Amalgamated Church" presides over the funeral and Terry from Applied Cryogenics cries out "Farewell from the World of Tomorrow!", a callback to his welcome to Fry in the first episode. Scruffy also appears playing the bagpipe, referencing the Scottish character Montgomery Scott from Star Trek.
• Many of the women that Fry had previously been romantically linked with attend the funeral and sit in a group together. In attendance are Kug from "Amazon Women in the Mood", Petunia ("Put Your Head on My Shoulders"), Morgan Proctor ("How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back"), his ex-girlfriend Michelle ("Space Pilot 3000" and "The Cryonic Woman"), the unnamed 21st century woman ("Love's Labors Lost in Space") and the "radiator woman from the radiator planet" ("Lesser of Two Evils"), who is actually just a normal radiator.
• Other recognizable characters also in attendance are Leo and Inez Wong, the monkey Guenter who was Fry's roommate in "Mars University", two Trisolians ("My Three Suns"), two Neptunian elves ("A Tale of Two Santas"), Sal, two Cygnoids ("A Leela of Her Own"), Chester A. Arthur's head ("The Day the Earth Stood Stupid") and the still-fossilized Seymour ("Jurassic Bark").
• In Mars University, Guenter the monkey's hat was crushed, making him have moderate intelligence while wearing it, and he keeps it that way. When Guenter is shown at the funeral, his hat isn't crushed anymore.

Production

The idea from the episode was originally inspired by an idea to kill off one of the characters and the story came together in a matter of hours after that. At one point in the episode, Leela is crying and takes a tissue to dry her eye. However, when she does this, she tears the tissue in half. The audio commentary notes that many people believed this was because Leela has only one eye. However, the joke was originally an inside joke referring to when the writers were all sick in the writer's room and saved tissues by tearing them in half.

Broadcast and reception

This episode was nominated for an Emmy in 2003 for Outstanding Animated Program (For Programming Less Than One Hour). Writer Patric Verrone was also nominated for an Annie Award for "Writing in an Animated Television Production". In 2006 this episode was named by IGN as number 24 in their list of the 25 best episodes of Futurama, the episode was included in the list because of its advancement of the relationship between Fry and Leela. This episode is one of four featured in the Monster Robot Maniac Fun Collection, indicating it is one of Matt Groening's four favorite episodes. Fans consider this episode to be one of the more emotional of the series.

In its initial airing, the episode received a Nielsen rating of 2.4/5, placing it 81st among primetime shows for the week of May 26 - June 1, 2003.

Cultural references

• The ejection of Fry's casket into space, accompanied by Scruffy playing the bagpipe mirrors the funeral scene of Spock in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, in which Scotty played the bagpipe. Fry's funeral song is an arrangement of "Walking on Sunshine", which was established as Fry's favorite in "Jurassic Bark". He also sings/hums it briefly in "War Is the H-Word", and "The 30% Iron Chef". Amy even tries to comfort Leela by saying: "He's walking on sunshine now."
• In the scene where Leela approaches Fry's coffin in space, Also Sprach Zarathustra, the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey, is heard. When Leela looks into the casket, she sees a colourful tunnel of light, which is a reference to the Stargate sequence in 2001 when Dave Bowman enters the Monolith.
• The song "Don't Worry, Bee Happy" is a parody of and/or homage to the 1988 hit song "Don't Worry, Be Happy" by Bobby McFerrin.
• Multiple references are made to Honeycombs Cereal (for which Billy West has done some commercials.), such as the Honeycomb Hideout, and when Hermes, in reply to a comment made by Fry, Hermes says "Honeycomb's big, yeah, yeah, yeah." to which Bender replies "It's not small?" where Hermes says "No, No, No."
• The scene where Bender ejects the baby queen bee out of an airlock is a reference to the film Alien.
• As Leela and Fry escape the Bee Hive a bee hits a wall, then explodes; the ensuing scene is similar to Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi when the Millennium Falcon escapes from the second Death Star.
• This episode is similar in some ways to the episode "Goodbye" in Katey Sagal's other show, 8 Simple Rules. The episodes aired only 5 months apart.
• This episode bears similarities to the motion picture Solaris, which featured an astronaut haunted by persistent and contradictory visions of his dead wife. The source novel was written in 1961 by Stanislaw Lem, and the original Russian film by Andrei Tarkovsky was released in 1972.
• This episode bears similarities to Philip K. Dick's novel Ubik, in which after an explosion and narrow escape, the leading characters see evidence that they might be dead, while characters who are believed dead or in irreversible coma ("half-life" in Ubik) nonetheless participate unexpectedly.
• This episode also bears similarities to the Star Trek episode "The Tholian Web", in which Kirk is mistakenly presumed dead. Uhura sees him calling for help and thinks she is losing her mind.
• Bender's comment, "You were in the best coma I've ever seen!" may be a reference to his inability to act out being in a coma in "Bender Should Not Be Allowed on TV".
• The scene in which Fry regenerates from royal jelly that was spilled on the couch is reminiscent of Frank's regeneration in the movie Hellraiser.
• Leela pulling Fry's jacket out of her dream is a reference to Nancy Thompson pulling Freddy's hat out of a dream in A Nightmare on Elm Street.
• Hermes proclaims that he is from Jamaica - The Show-Me Island, which is a reference to Missouri's state motto, "The Show-Me State."
• When Leela picks up the baby queen bee, it seems to be a reference to Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, when Ender finds a young bug queen.
• Fry's remark, "I thought that maybe if you heard a familiar voice, it might help keep your mind together. But who knows if it really got through" is an allusion to Nan Adams, a character who appeared in "The Hitch-Hiker", an episode of the black-and-white sci-fi series The Twilight Zone.
• Atomic Raygun Attack made an album entitled 'The Sting' in which they wrote 6 tracks taking moments from the episode.
• Hermes states "Sweet ice planet Hoth," a reference to Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.

External links

• The Sting at The Infosphere.