mathom

There's a lot more to the Futurama story behind RK's last post than just Seymour waiting 12 years for Fry. 🐕⏳ And some of the details are pretty interesting... It all starts in Bender's Big Score, when Fry discovers a mysterious code that allows him to travel through time. Fry uses the code to travel back to January 1, 2000, shortly after his original self was accidentally frozen for 1,000 years. Back in his own time, Fry wants to enjoy some pizza from Panucci's Pizza. But there's a problem... The pizza he finds is cold. So Fry decides to use the time travel code again, traveling back another hour just to get some fresh pizza. But this creates an unexpected situation... The Fry who originally traveled back to 2000 is still there. And now another Fry has arrived an hour earlier. He ends up meeting another version of himself! At one point, there are actually THREE versions of Fry in the year 2000: - The original Fry, frozen in the cryogenic laboratory. - A future Fry who traveled back to 2000. - Another Fry who traveled back an additional hour. Eventually, one Fry gets frozen again, while the other stays behind and lives a completely different life. And this is where the 12 years become important. From 2000 to 2012, Fry's duplicate lives in the past, works at Panucci's Pizza, and spends time with Seymour. Meanwhile, Bender has also traveled back in time with orders to kill Fry. He spends 12 years searching for him. In 2012, Bender finally finds Fry and causes an explosion. But that explosion changes everything... Fry survives, but loses his hair and suffers damage to his vocal cords, permanently changing his voice. He eventually becomes Lars Fillmore. A man with a different appearance, voice, and identity. Lars later freezes himself and returns to the future, where he meets Leela and even falls in love with her. The crazy part? The original Fry is jealous of Lars, without realizing he's actually another version of himself. And there's another twist... In Jurassic Bark, Fry discovers Seymour's fossilized remains 1,000 years in the future. It turns out that the same explosion that transformed Fry into Lars also fossilized Seymour. So an event in Bender's Big Score explains something we originally saw years earlier in Jurassic Bark. But the story goes even deeper. Fry has a mysterious tattoo of Bender on his backside, containing a binary code that allows time travel. When Lars dies, the others discover that he has the exact same tattoo. Bender then takes the tattoo from Lars and travels back to place it on the original frozen Fry. This creates a time paradox. Fry has the code because Bender placed it there in the past. But Bender only had the code because he recovered it from Lars in the future. So where did the code originally come from? It's a bootstrap paradox. Information trapped in a time loop, with no clear beginning. And here's what makes the whole story so interesting... When we first meet Lars, we have no idea he's Fry. He exists alongside the original Fry, has a different identity, and his true identity isn't revealed until the end. Two versions of the same person. 12 years in the past. A different face and voice. A hidden identity. A return to the future. And a time loop that connects everything. Now go back and watch RK's final Futurama post again. At first, it's simply a heartbreaking scene of Seymour waiting for Fry. But knowing the full story from Bender's Big Score completely changes how you see it. Fry did return. Just not in the way anyone expected.