Plot
Professor Farnsworth shows the new Planet Express crew (Fry, Leela, and Bender) his latest commercial for his company, which features a large, prehistoric bird. He tells them it will air during the Super Bowl–but on a different channel. Fry asks if the bird is real, but Farnsworth says that it was created with special effects. When Farnsworth goes to the kitchen to make eggs for breakfast, a baby prehistoric bird hatches from its egg and clamps down on Farnsworth's head with his beak.
Settling into their new jobs, Fry, Leela, and Bender are introduced to the other Planet Express employees: Doctor John A. Zoidberg, intern Amy Wong, and bureaucrat Hermes Conrad. It becomes apparent that the ship needs a captain, and Leela is chosen.
On their first mission, a delivery to the Moon, Fry undergoes severe culture shock. No longer a daring voyage of exploration, lunar travel has become a day trip to an amusement park called Luna Park. By the 31st century, the actual details of Project Apollo are lost and have been replaced by musicals about whalers on the moon and goofy gophers. This upsets Fry, who wants to see the real moon.
In spite of Leela's orders to the contrary, Fry hijacks a car from the lunar rover ride and forces it off its track, taking Leela with him. They fall into a crater, forcing Leela to use up most of their oxygen to save them. Meanwhile, Amy loses the keys to the ship and has to recover them from a video arcade claw game. Bender attempts to help her, but he is caught reaching through the prize slot and ejected from the park, leaving him stranded on the Moon's surface.
Running low on oxygen, Fry and Leela take refuge on a hydroponic farm. Bender arrives and seduces one of the farmer's robot daughters and he, Fry, and Leela end up on the run, trying to out-distance both the farmer's shotgun and the lunar terminator. Leela berates Fry for refusing to accept that, apart from the amusement park, the moon is nothing but a wasteland. As night falls on the Moon, Fry and Leela find the Apollo 11 lander and take shelter inside it.
Fry apologizes to Leela for hijacking the car from the ride and explains his childhood dream of being an astronaut. Leela sympathizes, and they watch an Earthrise together. Eventually, Amy manages to rescue all three with her newly-developed crane operation skills, just before the farmer can kill them.
Read more about this topic: The Series Has Landed
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)