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 By the 31st century, the actual details of Project Apollo are lost and have been replaced by musicals about whalers on the moon and goofy gophers.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:
“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)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“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)