The Route of All Evil

The Route of All Evil
Season	05
Episode	03
Episode Information
Production Code	3ACV12
Air date	December 8, 2002
Opening subtitle	Disclaimer: Any resemblance to actual robots would be really cool
Opening cartoon	Heep Hep Injuns
Credits
Written By	Dan Vebber
Directed By	Brian Sheesley
Episode Guide
Preceded by	"A Taste Of Freedom"
Followed by	"Jurassic Bark"

Plot

Act I: "My manwich!"

While searching for the right beer to drink, Fry, Leela and Bender decide to moonshine within Bender. Back at Planet Express, Cubert Farnsworth and Dwight Conrad were suspended from boarding school for salting Brett Blob for shoving their lunches into a miniature black hole they made. They amuse themselves by using Hermes' power stamper, forcing him to stamp "VOID" on everything it stamped and then use the Professor's voice changer to send the crew off on a bogus pizza delivery to Dogdoo 8 at the edge of the universe. But the universe ends at Dogdoo 7 which they realize a week later. Leela breaks their video game and their fathers order them to get jobs. Dwight and Cubert formed a newspaper delivery service called Awesome Express. Their fathers jest at their efforts and beat up their sign.

Act II: "The edge of the universe is at Dogdoo 7!"

The Awesome Express logo

The duo order an easy-to-construct ship that moves via pedaling. They soon make so much money off their deliveries that they make more money than Planet Express. But their fathers refuse to say anything. Depressed, they decide to get back at them through plan Dwight Lightning; they offer the crew a better deal of pay and soon find that the Professor declared himself dead three years ago as a tax dodge when he took a nap in the park. In technicality, Cubert inherits the company and renames it Awesome Express; they also fire Hermes and the Professor.

Act III: "Can we leave this mess behind us?"

Bender soon give "birth" to his beer, named BenderBrau. At that moment, calls start coming in that people haven't gotten their paper delivered in a long time as Dwight and Cubert dumped all of them in a crater on the moon. Panicking, they go to their fathers, who were staying at Hermes', disappointed as they wanted a few more years of being better than their sons. They see another chance but help their sons deliver all the papers with the Planet Express ship. The last house was Bret's, as they broke his window during their business. The fathers had them go to apologize but Brett's father refuses their apology and the fathers get into a fight in which the humans are severely injured. Later, in a hospital, Brett's father comes to apologize. They drink BenderBrau together.

Trivia

• Lobrau is a reference to Lowenbrau beer and a pun on the word "lowbrow".
• One of the bottles is actually a Klein bottle
• Pabst Blue Robot is a reference to Pabst Blue Ribbon beer.
• The title is taken from the phrase "the love of money is the root of all evil", derived from the Latin "radix malorum est cupiditas", the creed of the Pardoner in his prologue and tale from The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer. This itself is taken from 1 Timothy 6:10 (King James Version): "The love of money is the root of all evil...etc." - and "radix enim omnium malorum est cupiditas" in the Vulgate of Saint Jerome.
• Cubert and Dwight deliver papers to the asteroid inhabited by the Little Prince character from the children's book by the French aviator and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry . When his paper is thrown, the Prince catches it, but later, when the delivery mode is speeded up by Hermes shooting the papers from a gun, he gets hit, and flies off his asteroid into space, crying "Au revoir!", despite the reference that the French is a dead language by the year 3000 in the Futurama timeline.
• Cubert is shown playing with a device similar to a Game Boy.
• Bender considers naming the beer brewing inside him Botweiser, a reference to Budweiser beer.
• The dog chasing Dwight and Cubert as they fly through an asteroid field is eaten by a giant tube worm extending from a crater, a parody of a scene in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, in which the Millenium Falcon flies out from inside a similar beast as it tries in vain to re-eat the ship.
• Professor Farnsworth denies it, but Cubert says Farnsworth declared himself dead "as a tax dodge".  This is very similar to Hotblack Desiato, of the rock band Disaster Area, having himself declared dead as a tax dodge, in Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the second book in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams.
• Bender is shown reading a Victoria's Circuit catalog; this is a parody of the clothing maker Victoria's Secret, known for their lingerie catalogs.
• A beer mentioned in the episode is given the name of St. Pauli Exclusion Principle Girl. This is a portmanteau and reference to both St. Pauli Girl beer and the Pauli Exclusion Principle.
• As he stamps paperwork in his office, Hermes is singing a parody of Get Up Stand Up by Bob Marley and the Wailers, with his lyrics, "Stamp it / File it / Oh yeah / Send it overnight".
• Taco Bellevue Hospital is a portmanteau and reference to both Taco Bell and Bellevue Hospital, it is also seen in the episode Bender Gets Made.
• When the dog gets eaten from the space slug the space sul is from star wars TESB.

Goofs

• The periodic table on the lunchbox has only 107 elements. 109 elements had been named when this episode aired, and even more were known to exist but were as of yet unnamed.

Debut Appearances

• Brett Blob