Möbius Dick (Futurama)

"Möbius Dick"
Futurama episode
The crew hunts a four-dimensional space whale
Episode no.	Season six Episode 103
Directed by	Dwayne Carey-Hill
Written by	Dan Vebber
Production code	6ACV15
Original air date	August 4, 2011
Opening caption	"Featuring Sparky, The invisible elf"
Season six episodes
June 24, 2010 – September 8, 2011 "Rebirth" "In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela" "Attack of the Killer App" "Proposition Infinity" "The Duh-Vinci Code" "Lethal Inspection" "The Late Philip J. Fry" "That Darn Katz!" "A Clockwork Origin" "The Prisoner of Benda" "Lrrreconcilable Ndndifferences" "The Mutants Are Revolting" "The Futurama Holiday Spectacular" "The Silence of the Clamps" "Möbius Dick" "Law and Oracle" "Benderama" "The Tip of the Zoidberg" "Ghost in the Machines" "Neutopia" "Yo Leela Leela" "Fry Am the Egg Man" "All the Presidents' Heads" "Cold Warriors" "Overclockwise" "Reincarnation"
List of all Futurama episodes

"Möbius Dick", is the fifteenth episode of the sixth season of the animated sitcom Futurama. It aired on Comedy Central in the United States on August 4, 2011.^[1]

Plot

Professor Farnsworth sends the Planet Express crew to collect a monumental statue of his first crew for a memorial marking the fiftieth anniversary of their disappearance. To save time on the return to Earth after forcing the statue to be recarved to fix a grammar error, Leela travels through the Bermuda Tetrahedron where they find a graveyard of lost spaceships, including the first crew's Planet Express ship. While the crew investigates the ship, a four-dimensional space whale appears and devours the old ship and statue; Zoidberg, the only member of the first crew who returned to Earth, identifies the whale as the one responsible for the first crew's disappearance.

Leela becomes obsessed with killing the whale to take revenge for eating the statue and delaying their return to Earth in time for the memorial, and grows increasingly insane with each failed effort. The whale eventually devours the Planet Express ship and swallows the crew alive (with the exception of Zoidberg, who again returns to Earth in an escape pod). Inside the whale, Leela encounters the captain of the first crew, Lando Tucker, fused to the inside of the whale's belly. Lando explains that the whale feeds on obsession, luring obsessive space captains into the Tetrahedron to feed itself. Leela is fused to the whale's belly like Lando, but her overwhelming obsession with completing her delivery grants her control over the whale, allowing her to bring it to the Planet Express building in time for the memorial. She forces the whale to release everyone and everything it has swallowed, including the statue and the first crew. Despite acknowledging that the space whale is not a monster, as it merely follows its instinct, everyone (except Zoidberg and original crew member Candy, who end up making out with each other) proceeds to kill the whale out of revenge for swallowing them.

Cultural references

The episode's title is derived from a combination of the Möbius strip and Herman Melville's novel, Moby-Dick. Perhaps citing the latter, repeated comparisons are made between Leela and Captain Ahab of Moby Dick.

Tom Baker's Fourth Doctor from Doctor Who appears at the end of the episode. The plot is also similar to an unmade Doctor Who serial known as "The Song of the Space Whale" which involved a group of people living in the belly of a whale in space who are rescued by the Doctor. The Space Whale also shows some physical similarities to a Doctor Who creature that appeared in the Eleventh Doctor episode, "The Beast Below".

The story has elements from the X-Men storyline that introduced the Brood and the Acanti, a race of space whales, one of which Storm is bonded to in a very similar fashion to that of Lando Tucker.

Fry intermixes the Biblical story of Jonah and the whale with Pinocchio.

Leela calls Amy "Sailor Moon".

The spaceship graveyard contains many spaceships from popular culture:

• The Boston spaceship that appears on the cover of each of the band's albums.
• The Electric Light Orchestra spaceship: The spaceship appears on the album art for the 1977 album Out of the Blue.
• The Jupiter II from Lost in Space.
• Discovery One and Space Station V from 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Monolith (with a part chewed off from it) from 2010: The Year We Make Contact.
• The tail section of Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 from the TV series Lost. Oceanic Airlines is also commonly across various media.
• The spaceship from Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space.
• An Apollo lunar module with the ascent and decent stages still joined.
• An Apollo command/service module, labelled "Apollo 100"
• Skylab
• Saturn V stage 1
• A green-coloured ship otherwise very similar to Vulture from Salvage 1.
• The Event Horizon from the film of the same name

The references to the ships the Garmin and the TomTom are named for popular GPS device brands.

The space whale produces fractals when it breaches. It is also said to have a "Möbius colon" which endlessly recycles time and space, much like the mathematical object.

The multi-coloured tunnel of light in the fourth dimension is another reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The final scene where Leela arrives back at Planet Express inside the whale is a reference to the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

References

1. ^ "Interview: David X Cohen". June 24, 2010. http://www.avclub.com/articles/david-x-cohen,42482/. Retrieved August 28, 2010. 

External links

• "Möbius Dick" at the Infosphere, the Futurama Wiki.