Godfellas

"Godfellas" is the fifty-second episode of Futurama, the twentieth of the third production season and the eighth of the fourth broadcast season. It aired 17 March, 2002 on FOX. Bender is lost drifting in space after a space battle, Fry is determined to find him. Having played God, Bender runs into the Galactic Entity or God.

Act I: You know, pirates, but in space!
Just after the start to a new delivery, the Planet Express Ship is attacked by Space Pirates. Bender is trying to get some much-needed sleep and is disturbed by the impacting cannonballs, so he searches some peace and quiet in #3 torpedo tube. Unfortunately, Leela fires this tube to deal a fatal blow to the pirates, and Bender is hurled into deep space, carrying a bag of pirate swag taken when he was shot through the pirate ship. Leela tries to catch up with him, but the ship was traveling at top speed when Bender was launched and is unable to catch up to him. Meanwhile, Bender tries to find a way to spend all of eternity with 'barely any swag' and drifts through an asteroid field where he is bombarded and finds himself with a little asteroid embedded in his chest. This asteroid is inhabited by the Shrimpkins, a race of tiny humanoids, that recognize him as their god.

Act II: Those peewees think I'm God, huh? Hard to blame them.
Bender surveys his new worshipers, a race of humble farmers for the most part, and chooses one of the Shrimpkins, Malachi, to be his prophet. He lays down his commandments, or rather his commandment: GOD NEEDS BOOZE. Meanwhile, the Planet Express crew has returned to New New York and stages a search for Bender by means of the Smell-O-Scope. Unfortunately, Bender's odor is not strong enough to picked up over this distance, especially since local sources overshadow it. In the mean time, the Shrimpkins have constructed a distillery to obey their god's wish. This created several problems: many Shrimpkins were maimed in the building of the brewery, the fumes from the distillery processes has accounted for many deaths, and the liquor industry attracted organized crime. Bender is moved by his worshipers plight and sheds a tear, which causes a giant tidal wave. Malachi Jr. is engulfed in it, and Bender saves him. This causes everyone to pray for their own miracles, and Bender causes more and more problems as he is trying to fulfill their wishes: a village is crushed by a quarter (they wanted riches), a field is burned down by intense sunlight (the farmers prayed for sun), and in an attempt to extinguish the field by blowing on it, many Shrimpkins are swept into space. On Earth, Fry is desperately looking for a way to find Bender in deep space, and he finally manages to find the Monks of the Shubah who search for God in the depths of space by means of a giant radio telescope in the Himalaya. In deep space, the Shrimpkin society is growing, and infidels are rising up because from their position on Bender's back he cannot hear their prayers. Malachi begs Bender to do something about the infidels, as they plan war against the faithful, but Bender refuses because every time he interferes, he only makes things worse. Fry and Leela mount an expedition to the monastery of the Shubah monks, while on Bender's body, things seem to go well with him not interfering in the dealings of the Shrimpkins. This ended quickly when the unbelievers and the faithful exterminate each other in a holy nuclear war, powered by the Bender's nuclear pile.

Act III: Who would have known playing God could have such terrible consequences?
The Shrimpkins and their world are destroyed, and Bender laments their extinction. As he drifts through space weeping, he notices a galaxy signaling in binary code, and he signals back. The Galaxy picks up contact with him, and it turns out that it is some kind of huge galactic computer, which may possibly be God. Meanwhile, Fry and Leela are reach the monastery. They try to persuade the monks to let them use the telescope, which they learn acts as a strong transmitter, to search for Bender. The monks refuse, but as they are at a strict non-violence policy, Leela locks them in the laundry room and they use the telescope anyway. Bender and the Galaxy have a deep exchange about being God, and the Galaxy teaches Bender that being God is not easy at all, as he could plainly see during his time with the Shrimpkins. If you do too much, people depend on you, and if you do nothing, they lose hope explains the Galaxy. The right approach is a light touch, so that people won't even know you have done anything at all. Bender asks to be sent back to Earth, but the Galaxy cannot do this as he does not know where Earth is. Bender is equally helpless in finding Earth, so he settles into the realization that he will be spending eternity with the Galaxy. After 3 straight days of searching, Fry decides to give up. In his last futile turn of the telescope, it points toward the Galaxy and transmits Fry's last words as he walks away 'I wish I had Bender back'. The Galaxy receives this transmission, straps a parachute onto Bender's back and flings him in the direction of the message. Bender lands just in front of Fry and Leela, who are leaving the monastery, which Leela says is the 'least likely thing that has ever happened.' Just then, they realize that they left the monks locked in the laundry room, and Fry wonders if they have to let them out. After all, their God might let them out...or atleast give them more shoes to eat. Bender tells them that you can't count on God for anything, and that they will have to do it themselves if they want it done. The Galaxy chuckles and says to itself 'When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.'

Trivia

 * Fry and Leela visit the "Monastery of Teshuvah". Teshuvah is the Hebrew word for repentance.
 * All of the nebulas are based on Hubble Space Telescope photos.
 * Series creator Matt Groening cites it as one of the best episodes of the series and was quoted as saying he planned to explore the idea of the "God" figure in a DVD movie, 19 months before Bender's Big Score was released.
 * Deleted Scenes:
 * The animatic contains a scene with a prince on an asteroid shooting at Bender
 * An early draft of this episode featured a story that had Bender land on Omicron Persei 8 and solve Lrrr and Ndnd's marriage problems. This story was later used in the fourth season episode, "Spanish Fry".
 * There was a scene removed from this episode and "The Honking" with Bender having a dream about being a rock star, which he selects from a drop down menu.
 * Coolio, who guest starred in the early third season episode "A Tale of Two Santas", appears on the 2995 quarter. This was seen as a tribute to Coolio for being a great guest star.
 * Malachi is reading The Bible, by BENDER with Malachi.
 * The Shrimpkin porno theatre is named Ezekiel's Nasty House.
 * In this episode, Bender says (possibly sarcastically) that he only knows enough binary to ask where the bathroom is, even though it was established in "I, Roommate" that Bender doesn't know what a bathroom is and in "Fear of a Bot Planet", Leela tells Fry that robots don't have bathrooms. Given that those were early episodes in Season 1, it is conceivable that by Season 3 Fry explained to Bender what a bathroom is...but it still doesn't explain why he'd want or need to use one (It should be noted that, despite these lapses in continuity, Bender does use a bathroom in Bender's Big Score). Throughout the series, Bender reads and speaks binary with ease, such as in the episode "Hell Is Other Robots".
 * The book "Toons That Teach", a text used by youth groups to teach teenagers about spirituality, recommends this episode in a lesson teaching about "Faith, God's Will, [and] Image of God".
 * In 2008, Empire placed Futurama 25th on their list of "The 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time" and cited "Godfellas" as the show's best episode.

Quotes

 * Fry: You mean we can never catch up with him? Not even if we rub the engine with cheetah blood?!
 * Leela: Fry! If I drop dead from exhaustion, make sure my body freezes in a dignified position! None of that "huddled over for warmth" crap.
 * Galactic Entity: You were doing well, until everybody died.
 * Leela: This is by a wide margin the least likely thing that has ever happened!
 * Fry: You can't give up hope just because it's hopeless!
 * Galactic Entity: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
 * Bender: Are you kidding? You can't count on God for jack. He practically told me so himself.
 * Bender: If even a pea-sized pebble were to whiz through my skull it could (rock goes through his head) Ow! Hurt slightly...
 * Galactic Entity: Possible. I am user-friendly, my good chum.
 * Monk: You see, the telescope is also a powerful transmitter. Leela: Sort of like a giant karaoke machine? Monk: Not really. Do you want to see our giant karaoke machine? Leela: Not really.
 * Leela: Your order may be famous for its martial arts, but I have never met a holy man I couldn't clobber.
 * Malachi: Smite someone who deserves it for once!
 * Bender: Uh, when you're writin' the Bible, you might wanna omit that last miracle.

Continuity

 * God Space Entity appears again.
 * God Space Entity appears again.

Allusions

 * An observatory located in a monastery is also a reference to The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke.
 * The zoom through the universe at the end of the episode is like that at the the end of the movie Men in Black.
 * This episode is similar to a segment of the Simpsons episode Treehouse of Horror VII in which Lisa become god of a tiny race.
 * The show's opening tagline says to "Turn off tricorders", tricorders are from Star Trek
 * Billy West states on the audio commentary that the voice of "God" was based off the opening announcer from The Outer Limits.
 * The astronomically long distance backwards pan as the Space "God" Entity becomes aware of Fry's plea to have Bender back is similar to one in the movie Contact and the short 1968 film Cosmic Zoom by Eva Szasz.
 * When Bender says "Ask not for whom the bone bones, it bones for thee," he is referencing John Donne: "never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee,"
 * This episode explores themes similar to "The Seventh Sally" by Stanislaw Lem.
 * Malachi is the name of a real Biblical prophet, and the name means "God's helper".
 * An asteroid collides with Bender, and immediately afterward, the Shrimpkin civilization appears on his metal casing. This references the theory, known as Panspermia, that life can spread across vast distances of space by "hitching a ride" on space debris.
 * The sherpa's name is Namgyal, the given name of Tenzing Norgay, one of the first people to climb Mount Everest.
 * Bender is floating in space to Richard Strauss' Also sprach Zarathustra and Johann Strauss II' The Blue Danube. This a reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The theme to the movie is also used in this episode.
 * Bender attemps to play Polonaise in C sharp minor on his piano.
 * Much of the plot is similar to Theodore Sturgeon's 1940 short story Microcosmic God and The Twilight Zone episode The Little People.
 * The tiny creatures in Alan Dean Foster's short story, Gift of a Useless Man, depend on the main character in a way similar to the Shrimpkins building their civilization on Bender.
 * The God Entity appears almost identical to the God Entity portrayed in Stanislaw Lem's "Voyages of Professor Tarantoga" screenplay.
 * God thinking in binary and the remains of a computerised space probe that collided with God references the first Star Trek movie, in which a massive and powerful, albeit emotionally immature alien intelligence, was found to be human technology that had been found, modified with extremely advanced technology, and sent back. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier has the concept of a being godlike in power that is nonetheless not God as humans conceive of it, i.e. not the creator of the universe, nor in fact good.
 * The symbols that Bender carves into himself are similar to those on the Pioneer plaque, except with Bender shown threatening the Human figures. He then remarks, "There! Now when I'm found in a million years people will know what the score was."
 * The beer brewed by the Shrimpkins for their god Bender is Lordweiser, a reference to Budweiser and to the Metal Lord, a.k.a. Bender.

Characters

 * Amy
 * Bender
 * Debut: Father Changstein El-Gamal
 * Professor Farnsworth
 * Fry
 * Debut: God
 * Gypsy
 * Debut: Helper
 * Hermes
 * Leela
 * Lrrr (voice only)
 * Debut: Malachi
 * Debut: Mrs. Malachi
 * Debut: Malachi Jr.
 * Debut: Monks of the Shubah
 * Debut: Namgyal (sherpa)
 * Debut: Space Pirates

Episode Credits

 * Writer
 * Ken Keeler
 * Director
 * Susan Dietter
 * Voice Actors
 * Billy West
 * Katey Sagal
 * John DiMaggio
 * Tress MacNeille
 * Maurice LaMarche
 * Phil LaMarr
 * Lauren Tom
 * David Herman
 * DVD Commentary
 * Matt Groening
 * David X. Cohen
 * Ken Keeler
 * Susan Dietter
 * John DiMaggio
 * Billy West