Plot
As the crew watches a supernova from point-blank range, Fry puts a non-microwaveable metal "Iffy Pop" container into the ship's microwave, apparently thinking that he can make it microwaveable by only removing the warning label. This causes a reaction between the microwave radiation and the "gravitons and graviolis" from the supernova that sends the ship to 1947. On their return to Earth, the crew finds a complete lack of a Global Positioning System, causing them to crash-land in Roswell, New Mexico. Refusing to wear a seatbelt like the rest of the crew, Bender is catapulted out of the front of the ship upon crash-landing and smashed to pieces. The crew and Bender's disembodied head go to seek out a way to return, leaving Zoidberg behind to pick up the pieces. However Zoidberg is captured by the U.S. military and taken to Roswell Air Base for experimentation. Assuming the pieces are the remnants of a flying saucer, the military "reconstructs" Bender's body as such.
Meanwhile, the microwave needed to return to the future has been destroyed and replacements have not been invented yet. A microwave antenna from the army base would work, but Professor Farnsworth warns against using it; they must preserve causality or risk changing history and doing damage to the future. While disguised as a soldier, Fry visits his grandfather, Enos, who is stationed at the base and engaged to Fry's grandmother. Near-accidents cause Fry to become obsessed with protecting Enos from possible harm as the grandfather paradox means that Fry will cease to exist if Enos is killed. His own efforts to help Enos actually cause more danger to him. Desperate to keep Enos safe from possible harm, Fry instead brings about his death by leaving him in a house located in the middle of a nuclear weapon testing range.
Despite Enos being killed, Fry still exists. He encounters and consoles his would-be grandmother Mildred. She propositions him, who deduces that since he is alive, Mildred must not have been his grandmother, and the two end up having sex. When the rest of the group finds him, Farnsworth insists that Mildred is indeed Fry's grandmother. Fry realizes that he is now his own grandfather and panics. Farnsworth gives up on noninterference as they are running out of time to get back to the future; Fry has already severely changed history, so what they do cannot matter.
The crew storms Roswell Air Base and steals the microwave dish. Fry and Leela rescue Zoidberg from an alien autopsy while the Professor grabs Bender's body. As the crew leaves Earth's atmosphere, Bender's head accidentally falls off the ship and they are forced to leave it behind in 1947. Back in the 31st century, Fry laments the loss of Bender, until he realizes that his head must still be where it landed in New Mexico. The crew returns to Roswell's ruins with a metal detector where they find Bender's head, none the worse for wear and saying he had been enjoying the centuries, and reattach it to his still-mangled, hovering, "UFO" body.
Read more about this topic: Roswell That Ends Well
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot! The plot! What kind of plot could a poet possibly provide that is not surpassed by the thinking, feeling reader? Form alone is divine.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
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—Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)