Roswell That Ends Well is the 1st broadcast episode in the 4th season of Futurama. This episode won the 2002 Emmy for Outstanding Animated Program (For Programming Less Than One Hour).
Episode Summary
The crew is sent back to the year 1947 when Fry puts metal in the ship's microwave while the rest of the crew is watching a supernova explosion. The resultant reaction causes the ship to vanish into a tunnel, where they pick up a number of clocks before exiting out a portal. Confused, the crew decides to head back to Earth, only to find no space traffic. Worse, there is no receiving signal, so they crashland in Roswell, New Mexico, causing a unsecured Bender to fly into pieces. While everyone else (including Bender's head) heads back to the ship, Zoidberg is left picking up the pieces. However, at night he is found by the U.S. military. The next day, the crew realizes that the famous crashed UFO that brought Roswell, Area 51, and the related conspiracy theory into popular culture was in fact them. The Professor then explains that the microwave's radiation and the gravitons and graviolois from the supernova blast them through time itself.
The U.S. military captures Dr. Zoidberg, who was gathering up pieces of Bender's body, and takes him and Bender's body to Roswell Airbase to conduct various experiments, including an alien autopsy and 'UFO reconstruction'. President Truman also arrives to interrogate Zoidberg on either if he comes in peace, staging an invasion or creating a hybrid, but Zoidberg's people skills have him vivisected. "No one is to know about this except the senior officers, scientists and a single nutcase reporter no one will believe."
While the crew looks for another microwave, which they can't find in Roswell, Fry and Bender's head infiltrate the army base. Fry then encounters his "grandfather", Enos Fry, who is stationed at the base. As Professor Hubert Farnsworth had previously warned Fry about causality and the fact that if his grandfather dies, then he will never exist, Fry becomes obsessed with protecting Enos from any possible harm but his fear and paranoia result. He is even more alarmed when Enos exhibits signs of latent homosexuality, making it look unlikely that he will actually father Fry's father. Inadvertently, Fry brings about Enos's death, by leaving him in a "safe" house on a nuclear weapon test range.
Leela notices that there is microwave dish from the Roswell Airbase but the Professor says that they can't screw up the past in anyway possible. Fry then consoles his would-be grandmother Mildred, who was at the time engaged to his grandfather. He deduces that since he is alive, the man who died in the nuclear blast could not have been his grandfather. This leads him to believe that Mildred could not be his grandmother. Mildred then seduces Fry and they end up having sexual relations. The next morning, Fry discovers, with the prompting of the Professor, that Mildred is indeed his grandmother, due to the fact that she looked and acted like an old lady. Fry actually becomes his own grandfather, and is now the father of his own father Yancy Fry, Sr., making him freak out.
Ultimately, Farnsworth gets fed up with causality and decides to steal the dish anyway. They attack the base with the ship, outclassing the 1940s tanks with their superior weapons. Fry and Leela rescue Dr. Zoidberg, with the latter beating up the vivisectors and Fry throwing Zoidberg's organs at Truman; the Professor picks up Bender's body (which was due to be sent to Area 51 to fake the Moon landing, so Truman invented NASA). But as they prepare to travel back to the future, Bender's head accidentally falls out of the Planet Express ship before the time warp, and is left behind in the year 1947. Back in the 31st century, Zoidberg has all but one non-essential organs in him. Fry laments about the loss of Bender, but then hits on a brainwave and the Planet Express crew finds him in the approximate physical location of the Roswell Airbase around the Roswell desert in the 31st century, and re-attaches him to his floating 'UFO' body.
Trivia
- This is the first episode of Futurama to feature time travel, a subject the show's creators did not want to broach too early/often due to the confusing direction that such stories can lead in.
- In a previous episode we discover that Bender is only 4 years old. Due to his head (but not his body) spending over 1,000 years buried underground, following this episode his age is around 1,060 years old (at least up until the events of Bender's Big Score).
- In a previous episode Fry was infertilised by Bender with the F-Ray. However in this episode he gets his Grandmother pregnant. In commentary it was stated that in the episode Parasites Lost the worms fix his testicles.
- Whichever interpretation of the 'changing the past' time travel paradox we use, it is genetically impossible for Fry to be his own grandfather (Fry contributes 50% of his father's genetic material, 50% of which then becomes Fry's own genetic code. This would lead to feedback loop in which, over 'repetitions' of the timeline, Fry and his father become very close to 100% related, instead of 50%). However, it is technically possible that Enus was actually the one to impregnate Fry's grandmother (before his death), thus making Fry not in fact his own grandfather.
- This is one of a few appearences of Fry being able to taste colours. e.g. Did eveything just taste purple for a second?