Plot
The episode opens with an advertisement for Slurm, announcing a contest: whoever finds a golden bottlecap inside a marked can of Slurm wins a free trip to the Slurm plant on Wormulon, a tour of the Slurm Factory, as well as a party with the popular Slurm mascot, "the Original Party Worm" Slurms McKenzie. Fry resolves to find the bottlecap by drinking massive quantities of Slurm.
Bender is sick with a high fever (900°F); Professor Farnsworth uses this as an excuse to test his experimental "F-ray", a flashlight-like device that enables the user to look through anything, even metal. The Professor is able to find out what is causing Bender's high fever; he reveals a watch that belongs to Amy Wong caught in one of Bender's cogs. After repairing Bender, the Professor leaves the F-ray in the custody of Fry and Bender. Fry realizes that they could use the F-ray to scan Slurm cans for the golden bottlecap. After checking "90,000" cans, they give up on finding the winning can. Fry settles in to relax with a Slurm and chokes on the winning bottle cap. He faints, but regains consciousness later.
The Planet Express crew arrives at the Slurm plant on Wormulon. After meeting Slurms McKenzie, who is required by contract to party all night, every night, the crew takes a tour down a river of Slurm through the factory, and see the Grunka-Lunkas manufacture Slurm step by step. Fry tries to drink the Slurm from the river due to his thirst, but he falls off the boat and remembers he does not know how to swim. Leela dives in to save him, and Bender joins them because "Everybody else was doing it." The three are sucked into a whirlpool and deposited in a cave under the factory.
They discover that the factory they toured was a fake. Making their way through the tunnels, they enter the real factory and discover Slurm's true nature: it is a secretion from a giant worm, the Slurm Queen. They are discovered and captured by the worms. Bender is placed into a machine designed to turn him into 174 metal Slurm cans. Leela is lowered by crane into a vat of royal Slurm, which will turn her into a Slurm Queen. Fry is fed ultra-addictive "super-slurm", so that he cannot resist "eating until he explodes". Fortunately, Fry manages to drag the tub of super-slurm to the crane controls, so he can save Leela while continuing to drink the super-slurm. A freed Leela saves Bender slightly too late, leaving Bender with a hole through the side of his waist. Leela then saves Fry by dumping the super-slurm down a drainage grate. They manage to escape, but are pursued by the Slurm Queen. Slurms McKenzie, exhausted from his years of partying, arrives and sacrifices himself to save Fry, Leela, his two super models, and Bender.
When they escape, the Slurm Queen yells that the company is ruined for the discovery of the secret. Professor Farnsworth contacts a government agent to reveal the secret of Slurm. However, Fry is so addicted to Slurm that he tells the government agent that "grampa's making up crazy stories again," so that it can continue to be produced. In the end, the entire Planet Express crew holds a toast to Slurms McKenzie and Slurm itself.
Read more about this topic: Fry And The Slurm Factory
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“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)
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
They carry nothing dutiable; they wont
Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
—Philip Larkin (19221986)