The Simpsons, "Undercover Burns"
The Simpsons: "Undercover Burns." Season 32, episode 1 (27 September 2020).
IMDb summary: "Mr. Burns goes undercover at the power plant as an employee named Fred and befriends Homer and the gang, but a jealous Smithers plots to bring the old Burns back."[1]
Relevant here, Burns goes undercover as "Fred Krankpool," inside a full-body prosthetic-body suit, with a couple narrative and many just visual allusions to works on the Clockworks2 theme. These include ROBOCOP (1987), TERMINATOR 2: JUDGMENT DAY, a hint of the clock-face control device in METROPOLIS, the artificial head in TOTAL RECALL (1990), and the range of exoskeletons and body armor — inside Fred — in Starship Troopers (novel but not the film), The Forever War, ALIENS (film), and works where a humanoid robot is revealed or stressed as robot with a missing limb showing wires emitting sparks — or a robotic-prosthetic arm gets pulled off. (We invite users of the Wiki to add allusions we missed. [Like much satire going back at least to Chaucer, The Simpsons delights in "intertextuality"/allusions, and spotting them is part of the fun.])
RDE, finishing, 4Jul21