The Sting

Act I: "Leela, let's turn back. There's absolutely no shame in wussing out."
As Fry and Bender are playing virtual golf, the Professor comes in and explains that they are not good enough for their next mission. The two boys celebrate, but Leela seems to take this personally, and demands to know why. The Professor explains that it is a task that claimed the lives of the previous Planet Express crew and the old Planet Express ship; the Professor thinks it too dangerous for the crew, as they are nowhere as good as the old crew. Though Fry and Bender have absolutely no problem with this, Leela insists that they are just as good and asks for the assignment: collecting honey from space bees, who's neurotoxic stings can kill anyone instantly (those allergic to them would also have their insides boil out of their eye sockets). Leela scoffs at this, saying that it would take more than "deadly, deadly bees" to stop them, and that she is more afraid of disappointing herself; Fry tries to weasel out, but is dragged along.

The crew reaches the space bees' hive and paints Bender's body like a bee, giving him a bee language cartridge that will allow him to communicate with the other bees to distract them while they venture deeper into the hive. Fry repeatedly tries to convince Leela to turn back, but Leela ignores him. They eventually come across the remains of the old Planet Express ship in the process, discovering on the crew's black box that they were in fact led to their doom because of the captain's arrogance, much like Leela; however, Leela's pride forces the group to keep going anyway.

The crew eventually reaches the honeycomb stockpile, where they begin collecting the honey. There, they also come across a flow of royal jelly, which the bees feed to the queen. Fry accidentally falls into the pool of jelly, but is quickly saved by Leela. Upon this moment, Leela comes across a baby queen bee. She decides to take the queen with them not only because she succumbs to her adorability, but also so that the crew can build its own hive in the future, and takes some jelly to feed her with. Suddenly, Bender's bee language cartridge appears to malfunction as he accidentally insults the bees, including the current queen, causing the enraged bees to chase them. Eventually the crew reaches the ship and escape the hive all in one piece.

Once outside, Fry mildly chastises Leela for her recklessness, saying that they only escaped through luck, and that he fears for her safety. While Leela comments on herself, saying that she can take care of herself, the baby queen turns on Leela and threatens to kill her. Fry throws himself in front of Leela in defense, challenging the queen to go through him if she is to reach Leela. The queen thrusts forward, but Fry selflessly holds his ground and is impaled in the lower abdomen with the stinger, which mildly stabs Leela as well, and he and Leela are both knocked down. Bender picks up the defensless dying queen and throws her into the air lock, ejecting her into space (where she is hit and killed by a space truck). Leela gets up with a marginal wound from the stinger and thanks Fry for trying to save her. However, there is no response; upon further examination, Leela is horrified to discover that Fry is dead.

Act II: "Pawning all the stuff in Fry's locker helped give me closure."
Fry's funeral is held at the Orbiting Meadows, where many old acquaintances come to mourn. However, none is more woeful than Leela, who believes that it was her own hubris that caused Fry's death, and is wracked with utter remorse. Towards the end of the processions, Fry's coffin is ejected to the outer reaches of space. Back in her apartment, Leela remains sorrowful as she goes through all of the belongings that Fry had given her. Having kept some of the space honey from the mission, she takes two spoonfuls to ease the pain and, after having a brief laughing fit, quickly falls into a deep sleep. She then finds herself floating in space with Fry, who is alive. Leela is not entirely certain, so Fry decides to prove he's alive by telling her that he left something for her in his locker, which only he would know. He then tells her that he wants her to wake up; it turns out that this experience was only a dream.

Leela tells the others about her dream and what she was told, explaining that if it's true, then he must still exist in some form or another. When she opens his locker, she is disappointed to find that it is completely empty. Bender then comes in, saying that he pawned most of the stuff in Fry's locker for closure, keeping only one item because it turned out to be a present for Leela: a one-eyed stress-relieving doll. Leela marks this as proof that Fry is still alive and is communicating to her in her dreams. However, a quick brain scan leads the others to conclude that Fry told her about the present before his death, and that she subconsciously blocked it out in her grief. In other words, they begin to think that Leela might be going crazy.

Later that night, Leela has another dream in which Fry is still alive. She is convinced, however, that Fry must still be alive, since he treats her very romantically, and that she couldn't be treated any more so by her own imagination. When Fry takes her sleigh-riding on the ice fields of Hyperion, he gives her his jacket before telling her to wake up once again. Leela is reluctant to accept that this is just another dream, but wakes up anyway. Her hopes are once again dashed until she discovers that, although she is very much awake, she is still wearing Fry's jacket. Since Fry was buried in this jacket, she is once again convinced that Fry is truly alive.

Act III: "Why am I sticky and naked? Did I miss something fun?"
Leela comes to the headquarters the next day to show the others the jacket, but it turns out she has her own jacket. Leela admits that she may be freaking out (especially after hearing Amy speaking with the Professor's voice, and Bender with Amy's), and decides to take some more space honey. After hearing this, however, the others warn her that she must not take too many spoonfulls; one helps a person calm down, two help a person get to sleep, but three can place a person into a sleep from which they can never awaken.

As Leela cautiously takes a couple of spoonfulls of space honey, she becomes drowsy and accidentally knocks over the jar of royal jelly (which she also kept from the mission) onto the couch. All of a sudden, the jelly begins to take some sort of solid form, eventually transforming into Fry, who is completely naked and covered in jelly, but apparently very much alive. Leela presents Fry to the others; after examining him, the Professor concludes that Fry's DNA was imprinted into the jelly when he fell into it, and that a new body was formed when the imprint merged with his DNA in the couch. Leela is relieved that everything can return to normal and that she no longer has to carry the burden of guilt for his death, until Fry tells her to wake up again; it turns out that Leela merely fell asleep again after eating the second spoonfull.

Leela realizes that she is comfortable in her dreams while her mind plays tricks on her when she's awake. This is evidenced when Leela hallucinates the crew into performing a musical number, which each member exploding after being stung by a bee. Afterwards, Leela decides to go out into space to find Fry's coffin and keep it in her room to remind herself that he's really dead, which means dealing with her guilt again. When she finds it, however, she finds herself in her room once again, with the others' faces on the walls and floor, chanting the accusation that she killed Fry. After tearing the faces down, Leela finally believes that she is now insane.

She decides that she will take enough space honey to put her in the eternal sleep so that she can be in her dreams with Fry forever, as that is when she does not feel guilty. Just as she is about to take the final spoon, Fry's picture on her bedside table comes to life and tells her to fight her impulses, but Leela is so confused as to what to do that she breaks into tears. Fry continues to bolster her, saying that she's stronger than this. As Leela attempts to overcome her irresolution, a small space bee starts flying around the room. Leela throws the jar of space honey at it, causing it to turn into an entire swarm of smaller bees. With Leela hopelessly scared and confused, Fry admits his love for Leela and begs for her to wake up once more--and when she does, she finds herself lying in a hospital bed, with Fry sitting beside her.

It turns out that the sting of the baby queen went right through Fry's body and Leela caught all the poison in her seemingly mild wound, putting her into a coma that lasted for two weeks; it is clear now that Fry was not killed by the sting (though his spleen required a transplant). Fry never left her side while she was unconscious and kept talking to her in the hope that a familiar voice would guide her back, which came to her in her dreams. The final shot shows Leela and Fry hugging each other...he probably deserved it.

Trivia

 * This episode was nominated for an Emmy in 2004 for Outstanding Animated Program (For Programming Less Than One Hour).
 * In Space Pilot 3000, the Professor produces career chips from his previous crew from an envelope labeled "Contents of space wasp's stomach," rather than the space bees depicted in this episode. While the writer admits in the commentary their research found no relationship between bees and wasps, some wasps do invade bee hives to host their larvae.
 * In this episode Fry is stung by a giant bee. Billy West, the actor who voices Fry, is also known as the voice of the Honey Nut Cheerios spokesbee, Buzz.
 * This episode is similar in some ways to the episode "Goodbye" in Katey Sagal's other show 8 Simple Rules. The episodes aired only five months apart.
 * In the funeral scene, many characters from past episodes appear. These include the still-fossilized Seymour, Terry from Applied Cryogenics, Chester A. Arthur (head-in-jar), Leo and Inez Wong, a few of Santa Claus's Neptunian aides, Guenter, a few Trisolians and the women (and the radiator) that Fry has slept with.
 * This is the only time we see the old Planet Express Ship.
 * On the funeral, many characters are wearing special mourning clothes. For example, the Professor is wearing a black lab coat, Bender has a veil around his eyes, Leela uses dark-purple lipstick and so on.
 * Among the many wreaths at the funeral, Bender's is easily the most obvious: "R.I.P. Meatbag", and still shows his typical focus on himself, as his name is larger than that of Fry.
 * Leela's box with "Memories of Fry" contains: the flower he gave her in The Why of Fry, a can of Slurm, a coronation spoon with him as Emperor of Trisol on it, a can of π-in-1 oil last seen in Insane in the Mainframe, the conversation heart from Love and Rocket ("U leave me breathless"), a fake moustache (possibly from The Cryonic Woman) and a refrigerator magnet from Luna Park (The Series Has Landed).
 * Leela uses only half a tissue to wipe away her tears, but not because she has only one eye: it is an inside reference to David X. Cohen who had a bad cold at the time the episode was written and was fearing to run out of tissues, so he halved each one to make them last longer.
 * This episode was named #24 on IGN's list of Top 25 Futurama episodes.

Allusions

 * Scruffy is wearing a complete Scottish oufit and plays the bagpipes - a spoof of Star Trek II - The Wrath of Khan (Spock's funeral), complete with Scruffy playing the bagpipes like Scotty did. Fry's funeral song is an arrangement of "Walking on Sunshine", which was established as Fry's favorite in Jurassic Bark. He also sings/hums it briefly in War is the H-Word and The 30% Iron Chef.
 * The scene where Leela looks into Fry's coffin in space and sees a colourful tunnel of light (to the music Also sprach Zarathustra) is a parody of the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey, where Dave Bowman encounters the Monolith and it opens into the same Stargate sequence as in the end of 2001.
 * The song "Bee Happy" is a spoof of the early 90's hit "Don't worry be happy".
 * Multiple references are made to Honeycombs Cereal, such as the Honeycomb Hideout.
 * The scene where the queen bee wriggles its stinger in the Planet Express Ship's cargo bay could be a reference to Aliens.
 * When Hermes sees that Leela is awake, he exclaims, "Sweet Three-toed Sloth of Ice Planet Hoth! She's awake!", referring to the ice planet of Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.

Characters
(In alphabetical order)
 * Amy
 * Bender
 * Fry
 * Hermes
 * Leela
 * Professor Farnsworth
 * Zoidberg
 * Morgan Proctor
 * Terry
 * Seymour Asses
 * Leo and Inez Wong
 * Cubert
 * Guenter
 * LaBarbara Conrad
 * Father Changstein el Gamahl
 * Dwight
 * Sal
 * Scruffy
 * Michelle
 * Petunia
 * Thog
 * 21st Century girl

Episode Credits

 * Writer
 * Patric M. Verrone
 * Director
 * Brian Sheesley
 * Voice Actors
 * Billy West
 * Katey Sagal
 * John DiMaggio
 * Maurice LaMarche
 * Tress MacNeille
 * Lauren Tom
 * Dave Herman
 * DVD Commentary
 * Matt Groening
 * David X. Cohen
 * Rich Moore
 * Patric M. Verrone
 * Brian Sheesley
 * John DiMaggio
 * Billy West
 * Maurice LaMarche