"The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz" is the fifth episode in the third production season of Futurama

Futurama

Futurama is an American animated science fiction sitcom created by Matt Groening and developed by Groening and David X. Cohen for the Fox Broadcasting Company. The series follows the adventures of a late 20th-century New York City pizza delivery boy, Philip J...

. It originally aired in North America

North America

North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...

 on March 4, 2001 as the ninth episode of the third season. The episode was written by Dan Vebber

Dan Vebber

Dan Vebber is a writer best known for his television work on animated shows such as Futurama, Daria, and American Dad!. He was also a writer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer....

 and directed by James Purdum

James Purdum

James Purdum is an American animation director. Purdum is most notably known for directing several episodes of the animated series Family Guy....

. Phil Hendrie

Phil Hendrie

Philip Stephen Hendrie is an American radio personality. He is best known as the host of The Phil Hendrie Show, a comedy talk radio program that is syndicated throughout North America on Talk Radio Network...

 guest stars in the episode as Free Waterfall Sr.

Plot

This episode opens with Fry eating special cookies (oreos one constructs, but only to twist and lick) and Bender using an aerosol but Leela feels they produce too much trash. Professor Farnsworth

Professor Hubert Farnsworth

Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth, or simply The Professor, is a fictional character in the American animated television series Futurama. He is voiced by Billy West using a combination of impressions of Burgess Meredith and Frank Morgan. Farnsworth is the proprietor of the Planet Express delivery...

 gives the crew an extremely controversial mission: towing a dark matter

Dark matter

In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is matter that neither emits nor scatters light or other electromagnetic radiation, and so cannot be directly detected via optical or radio astronomy...

 tanker through the solar system, and dangerously near the penguin

Penguin

Penguins are a group of aquatic, flightless birds living almost exclusively in the southern hemisphere, especially in Antarctica. Highly adapted for life in the water, penguins have countershaded dark and white plumage, and their wings have become flippers...

 preserve on Pluto

Pluto

Pluto, formal designation 134340 Pluto, is the second-most-massive known dwarf planet in the Solar System and the tenth-most-massive body observed directly orbiting the Sun...

 in order to avoid a tollbooth. Leela refuses to take part, and the Professor makes Bender the new captain. Leela joins the protesters from Penguins Unlimited.

After initially failing to stop the tanker, Leela and the protesters race ahead to intercept the tanker at Pluto. Meanwhile aboard the Planet Express ship, Bender lets his new power go to his head. Fry

Philip J. Fry

Philip J. Fry, known simply as Fry, is a fictional character, the main protagonist of the animated science fiction sitcom Futurama. He is voiced by Billy West using a version of his own voice as he sounded when he was 25.-Character overview:...

 gets fed up with Bender's captaining, and rejects both his leadership, and his friendship. A distraught Bender goes on a sobriety binge, and takes the tanker on an erratic course over Pluto. The tanker collides with an iceberg

Iceberg

An iceberg is a large piece of ice from freshwater that has broken off from a snow-formed glacier or ice shelf and is floating in open water. It may subsequently become frozen into pack ice...

, and spills dark matter across the landscape.

For his part in the disaster, Bender is sentenced to community service, cleaning up the spill alongside the Penguins Unlimited environmentalists. However, when the police officers supervising his work are distracted by a round of friendly hugging, Bender dons a tuxedo and blends into the colony of penguins.

Leela sets off to search Pluto for Bender, while Fry inexplicably decides to take the Planet Express ship and search for Bender in space. That night, Bender is mauled by an orca

Orca

The killer whale , commonly referred to as the orca, and less commonly as the blackfish, is a toothed whale belonging to the oceanic dolphin family. Killer whales are found in all oceans, from the frigid Arctic and Antarctic regions to tropical seas...

, and the damage causes him to shut down. When he reboots, his boot loader

Booting

In computing, booting is a process that begins when a user turns on a computer system and prepares the computer to perform its normal operations. On modern computers, this typically involves loading and starting an operating system. The boot sequence is the initial set of operations that the...

 reinitializes him with penguin-like behaviors.

Back at the Penguins Unlimited facility, it is announced that the dark matter has increased the penguins' reproductive speed by tens of thousands of times. Whereas one penguin usually lays one egg a year, the penguins (both males and females) are now laying eggs at a rate of six eggs every fifteen minutes, which go on to hatch in 12 hours. In order to save the penguins from mass starvation, penguin hunting season

Animal euthanasia

Animal euthanasia is the act of putting to death painlessly or allowing to die, as by withholding extreme medical measures, an animal suffering from an incurable, especially a painful, disease or condition. Euthanasia methods are designed to cause minimal pain and distress...

 is declared. A reluctant Leela agrees to take part; but her first shot hits Bender in the head, causing him to reboot into his normal personality.

When the hunters arrive, Bender leads a large force of penguins in an assault (while delivering a speech reminiscent of Winston Churchill's famous "We shall fight on the beaches..." speech). After the penguins succeed in driving off the hunters, Bender takes off his tuxedo. Unfortunately, since he had taught the penguins to hate anything that was not a penguin ("If it ain't black and white, peck, scratch and bite"), he and Leela come under attack. The penguins corner them on a floating slab of ice, but Fry arrives in the ship to save them. When it lands on the ice, it tips the block, sending the penguins sliding into the gaping mouth of a hungry orca. Leela and Bender board the ship, and everyone returns to Earth

Earth

Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...

. Leela reasons that nature will set things right, and the episode ends with two penguins picking up guns left behind by the hunters and cocking them in a threatening manner.

Continuity

When Bender first reboots he is initialized as "Penguin" because his display sees a penguin. When Bender reboots later after being shot by Leela, he is initialized as "Human" because he sees Leela. This is another clue that Leela is human (mutant) and not an alien (as revealed in Leela's Homeworld in Season 4).

Cultural references

The title of this episode is a reference to Robert Stroud; who was known as the Birdman of Alcatraz.

Broadcast and reception

In its original airing this episode was number 75 for the week and received a 4.9 rating/8 share. In 2006 the episode was ranked by IGN.com as number 22 in their list of the Top 25 Futurama episodes noting Free Waterfall Sr. and the penguin overpopulation in particular as the funniest part of the episode.

External links

• The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz at The Infosphere.