Plot
When Nibbler chips his fang, he is taken to the vet, and during the time, is found out to be five years old. Nibbler has a birthday party, and Bender becomes annoyed that Nibbler is getting more attention than him. Having reluctantly made a birthday cake for Nibbler, Bender is aghast to see Nibbler gobble it all up before everybody else can praise Bender for the cake. In extreme annoyance, Bender flushes the animal down the toilet. Leela is distraught at the loss of her pet and wishes Bender could understand the emotions of others. Professor Farnsworth proposes a solution: installing an empathy chip in Bender's head that will cause him to feel other people's emotions. After forcibly installing the chip, the chip is tuned to pick up Leela's emotions, so that whatever feelings Leela experiences, Bender automatically experiences them as well.
After a night of experiencing a multitude of Leela's feelings, but mostly her sadness about Nibbler, Bender misses Nibbler so much that he cannot stand it. When Fry tells him that alligators can supposedly live after being flushed, Bender flushes parts of himself down the toilet in pursuit of Nibbler. Fry and Leela enter the sewers and quickly manage to find Bender and a crowd of mutants who live in the sewers. The mutants introduce them to their subterranean civilization. They also reveal that a monster called El Chupanibre has been terrorizing them.
Leela, thinking that Nibbler is the monster, is happy until she is informed that the only way to lure the monster out is to offer a snackrifice (a sacrifice) in the form of a virgin. Although not one herself (considering her run-in with Zapp Brannigan), Leela is the closest thing to a virgin there and is therefore chosen to be the sacrifice. At the sacrifice, Nibbler emerges from a pipe: however, the mutants point out Nibbler is not the beast they fear, but the large, reptilian monster behind him, who is the real El Chupanibre. Fry gets entangled in the trap that was meant for El Chupanibre, leaving only Bender to fight the beast; however, Leela is so scared, for herself and the others, that Bender is immobilized by her emotions. He and Fry teach Leela to stop caring about other people and care only about herself, and as a result, Bender is able to fight off the beast, whom he eventually flushes down a giant toilet into the sub-sewers.
The Professor removes Bender's empathy chip when Bender could not take it anymore. He says in amazement that the chip actually burnt out, so that Bender was actually sympathizing for Leela by himself. He then corrects himself, saying that it was actually at triple capacity ("And I still barely felt anything!" Bender claims). Bender still retains his 'in-your-face' interface and has learned nothing, while Leela learns that adopting Bender's attitude is better than being nice.
Read more about this topic: I Second That Emotion (Futurama)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There saw I how the secret felon wrought,
And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought,
And midwife Time the ripened plot to murder brought.”
—Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?–1400)
“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)