The 25 Best Episodes of 'Futurama,' According to IMDb

In the concluding episode of this four-part special, our favorite interstellar delivery team has to team up with the rest of planet Earth to overthrow a trio of Scammers trying to take over the world.

In an episode inspired by the 1894 adventure novel “The Prisoner of Zenda,” Fry and the team engage in a hilarious body swapping experiment. David X. Cohen explained that the solution to the multiple body switches was solved in the writing process by writer Ken Keeler, who has a PhD in mathematics.

The planet of the Globetrotters has come to challenge Planet Express to a game of basketball! In order to secure their victory, Professor Farnsworth creates a team of mutant supermen to combat the alien athletes, but his experiments come at a dangerous cost.

In this Season One episode inspired by Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” Fry wins a free tour alongside the rest of the Planet Express crew to visit the famous Slurm factory, which makes his favorite drink. But not everything is as exciting as it seems inside the factory.

As the crew get trapped aboard the Planet Express, they are killed one by one by an intergalactic monster until only Fry and Bender remain. This mysterious thriller is a doubly-inspired episode, with notes from “Murder on the Orient Express” and John Carpenter’s “The Thing.”

In an emotional gut-punch of an episode, the Planet Express crew journeys through Fry’s dreams to pull off a mission all the way back in the year 1999. The episode ends with a tear-jerking scene between Fry and his mother, who he hasn’t seen in over a thousand years.

Futurama can’t get enough of evil brains. One season after the war against brain-balls in “War is the H-Word,” Fry once again stands against a swarm of enemy brains, this time invading Earth. His stupidity is the only thing the flying brains cannot intercept, so it’s up to him to save the world from total destruction.

In a scam to get discount benefits, Fry and Bender join the military – but when a war breaks out and the two are enlisted to fight on the front lines against sentient brain-balls, they see the error of their ways in this darkly hilarious episode.

In this heartwarming episode, Bender discovers that he has no backup capabilities and therefore has only one life to live, so he and Hermes set out to Mexico to meet his maker and confront him for the production error. Bender never finds him, but it is revealed that Hermes made Bender years ago, and saved him from being destroyed as an infant robot.

Gore warning! Kind of. This episode deals with a delectable food source called Popplers that Planet Express finds on an alien planet. They look and taste like popcorn chicken, but Leela discovers that the popular snacks are actually infant aliens. The adult aliens menace Earth, and Leela and the team must stop the invasion before it’s too late.

Four brief stories are told in this episode following the creation of the Professor’s “What If?” machine, which reveals to the crew what their lives might be like under different circumstances.

While duking it out with the mutants of the underground, who’ve been spewing toxic waste, Leela learns that she is not the last cyclops from a forgotten world. Rather, she is the child of two mutants, sent aboveground to live a better life than they could give her.

After landing on a planet of massive Amazonian women, Fry, Zapp Brannigan, and first mate Kif are taken prisoner. They proceed to engage in an unending cycle of “Snoo-Snoo,” which begins to lose its luster before long.

In this, the pilot episode of “Futurama,” Philip J. Fry is an unhappy, unsuccessful pizza delivery boy who accidentally falls into a cryogenic freeze-chamber on New Year’s Eve, 1999. He wakes up in the year 3,000, and meets the Planet Express crew, run by his 30-times great-nephew Hubert J. Farnsworth.

Fry learns the unthinkable: He was frozen back in 1999 on purpose! Traveling through time, Fry has the opportunity to go back and prevent himself from being frozen, and returning to his old life. But doing so might spell the end of the world 1,000 years later.

After Professor Farnsworth creates a box with a parallel universe inside it, Leela is sent in, only to discover another Planet Express, creating a box of its own. The clashing delivery crews collide, and ultimately give one another their boxes, protecting their own universes.

In one of the series’ more philosophical episodes, Bender gets lost in space and becomes the god of a colony of tiny living beings who settle on his metallic body. When they ultimately destroy themselves, Bender is left feeling hopeless and alone until he comes across a mass of space dust and twinkling lights claiming to know everything about him.

After Fry eats a roadside egg-salad sandwich, he is infested with worms that make him inexplicably smarter and stronger. As Leela falls for the new and improved Fry, the rest of the crew travel through his body to dispel the worms from his system, and Leela must decide which Fry she cares more about.

Traveling back in time to Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, Fry and the gang are involved in a series of historical hijinks, including Dr. Zoidberg being researched by scientists, Bender being mistaken for a UFO, and Fry accidentally killing his grandfather and becoming his own grandfather after falling for his grandmother.

After going on a mission which causes the deaths of the previous Planet Express crew, Fry is stabbed through the chest by a giant bee, and seemingly dies. As Leela mourns him, she dreams of him night after night and feels like she is going crazy. It’s revealed in a sweet-as-honey twist at the end of the episode that Leela is the one who got stung, and has been in a coma all this time, while Fry has been at her bedside day-in and day-out.

In an attempt to impress Leela, Fry makes a deal with the Robot Devil to swap hands, making him a master musician. After he writes an opera for Leela, the Robot Devil enacts his own plans, deafening Leela and giving her robotic ears to hear Fry’s creation, then double-crossing Fry by marrying her. The only way for Fry to get her back is to give up the devil’s hands – but will Fry be willing to give up his newfound skill?

Fry and Leela finally have a date! But before he can make it, Fry, Bender, and the Professor experiment with the Professor’s new time-travel machine, which will let them move one minute into the future. When it all goes wrong, however, Fry must watch the universe begin and end continuously, waiting for the moment when he might see Leela again.

In the (so far) last episode of “Futurama,” Professor Farnsworth creates a button that can send a person ten seconds backward in time. When Leela and Fry use it, they are stuck in an endless time loop, losing everything and everyone they love. When they find the Professor, he gives them a solution: go back in time, all the way o the very first episode, and start over again. Fry and Leela hold hands, and walk through the time portal together.

Fry takes Leela and Bender on a secret mission to retrieve his lucky seven-leaf clover from his famous late brother Yancy’s grave. Fry believes that his brother stole everything from him growing up, including his first name. By the end of the episode, however, we learn that Yancy missed Fry and named his son after him.

Quite possibly the most famous and heart-rending episode of the series, “Jurassic Bark” tells the tale of Fry and his dog Seymour, who were inseparable until New Year’s Eve, 1999, when Fry was frozen. As Fry finds Seymour’s mummified remains in the future, he must decide what life he wants for his pup, ultimately letting him stay dead. We learn, in an emotionally devastating final scene, that after Fry’s disappearance, Seymour waited for him outside his pizza place every day until he died.