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| “ | Game's over, losers! I have all the money. Compare your lives to mine and then kill yourselves. | ” |
–Bender | ||
A Head in the Polls is the seventh episode of Futurama Season Two. It was written by J. Stewart Burns, and directed by Bret Haaland.
Plot
The election race for President of Earth is in full swing, with two clones as candidates and the Planet Express crew registers to vote. Meanwhile, a mining disaster on Titan sends the price of titanium through the roof, and Bender seizes the opportunity to make a quick buck by pawning his 40% titanium body.
As a head with a pile of cash, Bender begins enjoying his new lifestyle. During a trip to the Hall of Presidents in the New New York Head Museum, Richard Nixon's head ruins Bender's illusions about the glamor of a life without a body. He feels further guilty when he dreams of ones and zeroes (and a two). He concludes that it means that he shouldn't have sold his body. The next day Bender heads off to the pawn shop to retrieve his body, but it has been sold. The pawnshop owner offers Bender fifty dollars for Fry, but Fry says that his clothes are worth fifty bucks, and the owner says deal. Later at Planet Express, Bender, Leela & Fry, who is stripped from his clothing, even his underwear, watch TV, only to discover that Nixon's head announces its candidacy for President of Earth, using Bender's body to escape a constitutional provision that "nobody can be elected more than twice".
"No body can be elected more than twice."
Fry, Leela, and Bender take off to Washington, D.C. to stop Nixon and recover Bender's body. Directly confronting Nixon fails to recover Bender's body, so the crew infiltrates Nixon's room at the Watergate Hotel, where anyone gets a discount if they been there before. Leela successfully separates the sleeping head from the robot body, but Fry accidentally wakes Nixon when he accidentally activates a thought-sensitive massage bed. Confronting the intruders, Nixon begins ranting about his future plans for Earth. However, Bender records the conversation and knowing that the tape would ruin his election chances if released, Nixon trades the body for the tape.
On election day, Nixon wins by a single vote after Leela and Fry forget to vote against him. The episode ends with Nixon -- who now has the body of an enormous war robot -- inexplicably rampaging through Washington, D.C., as Secret Service agents escort him into the White House.