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Dammit Hermes, just jump already! Stop hogging that healthy liver!

–Professor Farnsworth

"How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back" is the 11th episode of Season 2 of Futurama. It was written by Bill Odenkirk and guest starred Nora Dunn.

Synopsis[]

Hermes Conrad is excited because the Central Bureaucracy is conducting an inspection the next day and he expects to be promoted to a Grade 35 bureaucrat. Leela hosts a poker game with her former co-workers from Applied Cryogenics at the office that night and Bender cheats via the use of X-ray glasses. Unfortunately, he accidentally gives himself away when he mentions seeing a tapeworm inside Leela's old boss, Ipji, prompting her co-workers to grab the glasses. On the run from the other players, he takes refuge in Hermes’ office, but the other players find him and the savage beating he receives trashes the office.

The mess in his office costs Hermes his promotion and the inspector, Morgan Proctor, places a suicidal Hermes on paid vacation, "the ultimate penalty", and appoints herself acting Planet Express bureaucrat. Dr. Zoidberg suggests Hermes and his wife LaBarbara take a trip to Spa 5, the sauna Planet that gives him a bucket of krill for every patient he sends there.

While performing a locker check on the crew, Morgan is disgusted by how filthy Fry's locker is before she orders Bender and Leela out to speak with Fry alone. Morgan locks the door after they leave as Fry tries to explain himself however, Morgan takes off her glasses and surprises him by kissing him many times. It turns out Morgan has a fetish for slovenly men (in her words, she is "surrounded by neat freaks all the time"), she kisses a flattered Fry again and begins a secret affair with him (a "dirty, dirty boy!"). As a result of the affair, Fry gains a new title: Executive Delivery Boy.

Meanwhile, Hermes and his wife discover that Spa 5 is actually a forced labor camp.

Afterwards, Morgan visits Fry and Bender's apartment where she tells him of her thinking about him and is aroused by the mess in his room. She kisses Fry onto his bed, while he tells her Bender is his roommate and could be back any moment. Not bothered, Morgan (while undressing) tells him she gave him orders to tend to the Professor's ear wax before she and Fry proceed to sleep together. However, Bender arrives and discovers the illicit affair. The next day, he threatens to expose them, but Morgan downloads his personality and intelligence to a disk, turning him into a mindless drone, who can only say "I am Bender, please insert girder." She also sends the disk off to the Central Bureaucracy for filing. Fry is angered and after he asked for the Disk back (Which she said he should have write a form for that 20 years ago) calls off the affair and throws his office supplies down, causing an excited Morgan throw herself at him once more, presumably having sex again in the office.

Elsewhere Hermes begins to use his natural managerial skills to reorganize the labor camp for efficiency, oblivious to the torment of his fellow workers. The rest of the Planet Express staff infiltrate the Central Bureaucracy in order to recover Bender’s mind. One of the many employees they encounter is a Beholder, a Dungeons & Dragons monster, who simply hopes not to be exposed for sleeping on the job. They discover the master in-pile, an enormous pile of pneumatic tube capsules, only one of which contains Bender’s brain.

The Planet Express Crew is daunted by the giant pile, just as Morgan arrives as she knew that The Crew would come there to retrieve Bender's Brain rather then continue following order. Fry then asked Morgan to help them find that container that holds Bender's Brain but she told them it would take a powerful sorter to find it, When Suddenly Hermes and La Barbara have returned from Spa 5. He had made the labor camp so efficient that they only needed one Australian man to perform the labor. In a musical number, Hermes sorts the master in-pile, recovering the disk with Bender’s personality. Bender says "I'm Bender baby, please insert liquor!". He is restored to his original rank, a Grade 36 bureaucrat, by the head of the Central Bureaucracy for sorting the master in-pile, but immediately demoted to Grade 38 for finishing two seconds early, something bureaucrats should never do. Since Morgan was still in charge of Planet Express, she fires Fry for exposing her affair. However, Hermes exposes a mistake Morgan made on her high school prom date papers, having stamped it only four times instead of the standard five. Number 1.0 promotes him to grade 37 for this and in turn orders his assistants to get the papers needed to have Morgan taken away. The Professor re-hires Hermes, at severely reduced pay. Fry asks if he can come back at a severely reduced pay as well. Hermes lets him and then gives severely reduced pay for everyone. Zoidberg begins his own musical number but the show immediately ends.

Ongoing Themes[]

Hermes-isms[]

  • "Sweet gorilla of Manila"
  • "Sweet cow of Moscow"
  • "Sweet somethin' of someplace"

Hermes and Zoidberg[]

As if relations between Hermes and Zoidberg weren't strained enough, Zoidberg unwittingly recommends to Hermes and La Barbara the forced-labor camp Spa 5 as a vacation getaway. However, the relationship remains complicated: it is Zoidberg who gives them a ride back to Earth from Spa 5 and Hermes happily includes Zoidberg in the performance of the Bureaucrat Song, suggesting that he holds no grudge.

Fry and Leela[]

Fry has an affair with Bureaucrat Proctor.

Character Arcs[]

Hermes steps into his role as company bureaucrat.

Doppelgängers[]

When Fry is afraid that Bureaucrat Proctor is about to harm him, he claims to be "the other Fry", the one that's spelled with a p-h.

References[]

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