After a series of incidents that reveals the lack of trust between the Planet Express team, the professor sends the Planet Express team on a corporate team building retreat to develop trust. The business consultant hired for the retreat, Dan McMasters, is apparently eaten by the shapeshifting hitchhiker that he tells the Planet Express team to pick up. Now they must work with each other to survive the monster.
Tropes
- Air-Vent Passageway: The monster hitchhiker crawls into one.
- Bottle Episode: The majority of the episode takes place inside the Planet Express Ship.
- Dwindling Party: In the end, only Fry and Bender aren't eaten by the creature.
- Fusion Dance: After Bender's gyroscope melts and Fry's space helmet breaks, Fry ends up wearing Bender's body like a space suit, enabling him to achieve equilibrium. They call themselves "Frender."
- Gone Horribly Right: After terrorizing the crew with a shapeshifting alien as a trust exercise, Dan fails to prove he isn't a man eating monster, and ends up being killed by Fry and Bender.
- Gone Horribly Wrong: While the exercise initially causes everyone to work together, once the shapeshifter starts eating crew members, they are traumatized into not trusting anyone for fear of being killed, exactly the opposite of what the exercise was supposed to do.
- Hostile Hitchhiker: Dan says that just to make a point he'll pick up a random hitchhiker to catch him on the first trust fall of the trip. He picks up a very bored-looking hitchhiker and starts to fall back...only for the hitchhiker's stomach to open up into a mouth and eat him. Subverted because the hitchhiker turns out to have been placed there as part of the team-building exercise, and no one was actually eaten.
- Impostor Forgot One Detail: Lampshaded, the creature says it's hard to keep track of every detail (namely, Bender not having human ears) before eating Amy.
- In Fry's case, the shapeshifter impersonated him so well that he briefly forgot he was the shapeshifter. For everyone else though, there was always at least one tell.
- Kiss of Death: Leela lures Fry into a closet, insists that she knows him too well to be fooled by a shapeshifter and begs him to kiss her. During the kiss she hurts him by repeatedly biting his lip."Fry": (sounding terrified) Wait a second, I know what's going on here! I'M the monster!(He eats Leela.)
- Lamprey Mouth: The shape-shifter gobbles up its victims whole with an extensible example.
- Lost Food Grievance: Hermes gets mad because he thinks Zoidberg is stealing his lunch. The hidden camera reveals that Bender had swapped the lunch for Fry's stolen kidney which Leela then mistook for Hermes' lunch.
- Monster Munch: Scruffy the Janitor's heretofore-unseen apprentice, Jackie Jr. He's fine, though, since the whole thing was staged.Farnsworth: Oh my, adrift in deepest space with a vicious alien killer aboard! Any one of us could be next. Fry, Bender, Jackie Jr., Leela—(Shapeshifter descends from the ceiling and snarfs up Jackie Jr. in one gulp.)Bender: (aside to Fry) That took longer than I expected.
- Organ Theft: Bender steals Fry's kidney to give to the Professor.
- Percussive Maintenance: Amy fixes Bender's gyroscope by whacking him with a golf club.
- Prisoner's Dilemma: Parodied at the end, where the police declare that if there are two murderers, the one who confesses to the crime gets off scot-free and a double-sized reward.
- Power of Trust: Confronted with one another as the last two "survivors," Fry and Bender each try unsuccessfully to ascertain whether the other is the shapeshifter before giving up and breaking out the final confessions, which makes them finally decide to trust each other sans hard proof. This leads McMasters to announce that they've passed his Secret Test. Unfortunately, their newfound faith in each other doesn't extend to him.
- Shout-Out: the title is a play on Murder on the Orient Express.
- The shapeshifter is similar to the one in The Thing (1982).
- Something Only They Would Say: Parodied, where Fry and Bender, as the only two crew members who haven't been eaten by a shapeshifting alien, question each other about things only they would know to determine if one of them is the shapeshifter.Fry: On your last birthday, what gift did I give you?
Bender: I don't remember.
Fry: Me neither.
Bender: Alright, I'll ask you one. What's the square root of 2,345.4?
Fry: ...That's not something I'd know.
Bender: Oh yeah. Your turn.
Fry: Um, what color is my shirt?
Bender: If I were the creature, I could just look at your shirt, dum-dum!
Fry: Good point. - Strange Minds Think Alike: Within very short succession as the teams start to gel:Fry: Fry and Bender: a winning combination!Bender: Let's call ourselves "Frender"!...Leela: Leela and Amy: a winning combination!Amy: Yay Lamy!...Zoidberg: This is a job for Hermberg!
- Suspiciously Specific Denial: Bender's reaction to being accused of using Fry's toothbrush to polish his ass.Bender: I would never do something like that to a friend, every single night, while he's sleeping!
- Too Dumb to Live: Terrorizing people into thinking they are being hunted by a deadly shapeshifting monster, then approaching them when they are cornered and staring you down over their guns, trying to talk them into lowering their guard and join them for dinner? Its a wonder he didn't get shot sooner with that sort of 'trust' exercise.
- Trust-Building Blunder: A rather epic, and deadly, example. No, tricking people into fighting for their lives against an enemy that could be literally anyone in disguise is NOT a good idea for a trust building exercise, and could very easily lead to people accidentally getting shot, including the people who set the situation up, as happens here with Dan.
- Voluntary Shapeshifting: The creature can impersonate the crew, and uses this to take them down one by one.
