Futurama: "Insane in the Mainframe"

"Insane in the Mainframe." Futurama, Fox-TV,.First aired 8/9 April 01. Episode number 42 by through-count [www.tvTome.com], 3.11 by the season.number method [kcpq.com/entertainment/fox/futurama/espisodes]. Peter Avanzino, Bill Odenkirk, script.

The robot Bender's robot friend Roberto involves Bender and Fry in a bank robbery. Bender is sentenced to the asylum for criminally insane robots, and, since the human facility is full, Fry also is sentenced by Judge Whitey to "the robot loonie bin." Fry is given an automated physical and then a psychological examination by "Dr. Perceptron, Doctor of Freudian Circuit Analysis," a robot with a head that is a head-shop device: a transparent hollow sphere, where streams of electricity move out to the peripheries making pretty patterns. Fry defines "human" as a "squishy and flabby" entity that complains a lot. The shrink's logic is that Fry was admitted to a robot facility and, therefore, must be a robot. Fry is put under the supervision of Nurse Ratchet (see One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest under Fiction and Drama)—with visual and aural puns on "ratchet." The episode moves on to the standard «tour of the institution», with the variation that the patients are robots and robotic devices. Fry eventually becomes convinced he's a robot. Fry does not make a good robot, and Lella tries to "remind Fry of his humanity as only a woman can," and kisses him, to romantic nondiagetic music but no effect. When Roberto takes Fry's colleagues hostage, Fry thinks he's discovered his primary function: a "battle-droid, sworn to protect the weak from crazy robots." Fry wins but is wounded, and his bleeding convinces him he's human. Leela kisses Fry, with some effect. Bender compliments Fry by telling him that "inside" he's "got the heart of a robot," while Bender has the heart of a human: a literal heart, unattached to anything.