How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back

Infobox Futurama episode
episode_name = How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back
episode_no = 24
prod_code = 2ACV11
airdate = April 2, 2000
country = USA
writer = Bill Odenkirk
director = Mark Ervin
opening_subtitle = As Foretold by Nostradamus
opening_cartoon = "Felix the Cat" cartoon from 1920.
guest_star = Nora Dunn as Morgan Proctor


caption = Hermes after performing "Born To Be a Bureaucrat".
season = two

“How Hermes Requisitioned His Groove Back” is episode eleven in season two of "Futurama". It originally aired in North America on April 2, 2000. The title references the 1998 film and popular novel "How Stella Got Her Groove Back". The writers decided that the A story wasn't going to work if it was at a labour camp at Spa 5. So they decided to focus what would happen if he was not there.

Plot

Hermes Conrad is excited because the Central Bureaucracy is conducting an inspection the next day, and he expects to be promoted to a Grade 35 bureaucrat. Leela hosts a poker game with her former co-workers from the cryogenics lab at the office that night, and Bender cheats via the use of X-ray glasses. On the run from the other players, he takes refuge in Hermes’ office, but the other players find him, and the savage beating he receives trashes the office.

The mess in his office loses Hermes his promotion, and the inspector, Morgan Proctor (voiced by Nora Dunn), places a suicidal Hermes (so suicidal he cannot finish his usual catchphrase, murmuring 'Sweet something of...someplace!') on paid vacation ("the ultimate penalty") and appoints herself acting Planet Express bureaucrat. Doctor Zoidberg suggests Hermes and his wife LaBarbara take a trip to Spa 5, the sauna planet which gives him a bucket of krill for every patient he sends there.

Morgan Proctor, who has a fetish for slovenly men (in her words, she is "surrounded by neat freaks all the time"), begins a secret affair with Fry (a "dirty, dirty boy!"). Fry is promoted to Executive Delivery Boy, who no longer goes on actual deliveries. After Bender discovers the illicit affair and tries to blackmail them, Morgan downloads his personality and intelligence to a disk, turning him into a mindless drone, who can only say "I am Bender, please insert girder". She then sends the disk off to the Central Bureaucracy for filing.

At Spa 5 (which is in truth a forced labour camp), Hermes begins to use his natural managerial skills to reorganize the labor camp for efficiency, oblivious to the torment of his fellow workers (a single Australian man ends up doing all the labor). The rest of the Planet Express staff infiltrate the Central Bureaucracy in order to recover Bender’s mind. One of the many employees they encounter is a Beholder, a Dungeon and Dragons monster, who simply hopes not to be exposed for sleeping on the job. They discover the master in-pile, which is an enormous pile of pneumatic tube capsules, only one of which contains Bender’s brain.

The Planet Express staff is daunted by the giant pile, but Hermes has returned from Spa 5. He had made the labor camp so efficient that they only needed one Australian man to perform the labor. In a musical number, Hermes sorts the master in-pile, recovering the disk with Bender’s personality. He is restored to his original rank (a Grade 36 bureaucrat) by the head of the Central Bureaucracy for sorting the master in-pile, but immediately demoted to Grade 38 for finishing two seconds early (something bureaucrats should never do). Since Morgan was still in charge of Planet Express, she fires Fry for exposing her affair. However, Hermes exposes a mistake Morgan made on her high school prom date papers, having stamped it only four times instead of the standard five. Number 1.0 promotes him to Grade 37 for this, and in turn, orders his assistants to get the papers needed to have Morgan taken away. The Professor re-hires Hermes, at severely reduced pay, and Fry asks if he can come back at a severely reduced pay as well. Hermes lets him and then gives severely reduced pay for everyone. Zoidberg begins his own musical number but the show immediately ends, prompting a cry of dissapointment.

Continuity

* Leela's old co-workers from "Space Pilot 3000" appear.
* The Australian Man who Hermes forced to do all the work in Spa 5 is later seen as a slave helping to build the Sphinx in the episode "A Pharaoh to Remember".
* Morgan is Grade 19 while Hermes is Grade 36; he is then demoted to 38, then promoted to 37.
* In the film "", which takes place seven years after the events of "Requisitioned," Hermes has been promoted to Grade 34.
* The "Number 9 Man" reappears in this episode waiting in line to get into the central bureaucracy.

Production notes

* When Hermes is attempting to sort the master pile, he is told that he has only four minutes. He musically completes the task in just under a minute and a half (assuming the song takes place in real-time). He is told that he has finished two seconds early (something a good bureacrat apparently "never" does).