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A mysterious alien ship broadcasts four musical tones, which eventually becomes dangerous. Only Fry vaguely recognizes the melody, and Professor Farnsworth discovers the memory of the melody stems from December 31, 1999, so now Fry must get transported to a dream of his memories of that day.
Tropes
- Actor Allusion: At one point, the usually-normal dog Seymour sits upright holding a martini, asking Fry if he's lost weight. Seth MacFarlane voiced Seymour, referencing his role as anthromorphic dog Brian Griffin in Family Guy.
- Depth Deception: The alien ship in the opening. Initially appearing gigantic, it turns out to be a Nibblonian ship, and thus half the size of a person.
- Dude, Where's Our Car?: This turns out to be the basis for the events of the entire episode. Having successfully completed their mission to get Fry into his cryogenic tube in 1999, Digby and Nibbler go off to celebrate by drinking on New Year's Eve. They get drunk and drop the keys to their spaceship down a storm drain, forcing them to take a taxi back to Vergon 6. Digby then spent the next thousand or so years traveling from planet to planet with a spare set of keys, trying to track down the lost spaceship by emitting the same tones as the lost key fob.
- False Teeth Tomfoolery: A throwaway line implies that Michelle uses dentures.
- Feed It a Bomb: Yancy Sr. freaks out at the sight of Bender, thinking he's the beginning of the waffle iron uprising. He tries killing him by placing a grenade inside his chest cavity. Bender just burps out the explosion.
- Flashback with the Other Darrin: Michelle's lines in the part of the episode recreating the opening to "Space Pilot 3000" are the same as they were then, but now voiced by Sarah Silverman instead of Kath Soucie.
- Get Out!: Yancy Sr. calls Nixon the greatest president, until he learns that Nixon needs Fry (who Nixon thinks is a hippie) to go on a musical quest, at which point Yancy Sr. responds with this and calls him a commie.
- Hidden Depths: This episode has Fry realize that he convinced himself that his old life was more horrible than it really was because he knew he couldn't go back.
- Hypocritical Heartwarming: Leela's reaction to Michelle dumping Fry.
- Hypocritical Humor: Hermes tells off Zoidberg, Amy, and Bender for getting distracted by the Fry family's dinner, only to get distracted himself when he sees they have manwiches.
- Journey to the Center of the Mind: Fry, and the rest of the Planet Express crew journey to Fry's dream of December 31, 1999, in order to find out what the alien melody is.
- Lotus-Eater Machine: An unintentional example; Fry wants to stay in the dream memory because of how much he misses his old life. The others (and Nixon's head) have to enter the dream as well to move him along.
- Memory-Restoring Melody: A destructive four-note tune ravages Earth. Fry vaguely recognizes the tune from his past, specifically from the day he got frozen, so the crew sends him inside his own memories from that day so he can try and identify the source of the sound. He only hears the tune right before he falls inside the cryogenic tube, accompanied by two new notes, which he replicates back in the present to contact the ship. It turns out to be Nibbler's friend Digby using the key fob to lock his spaceship, which he left on Earth; he's been using the alarm to locate the ship ever since.
- Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: Digby, for some reason, doesn't notice that the tone he's broadcasting is destroying the Earth, and already has destroyed several other worlds. As a bonus, the tone in question either originates from or is an amplified version of the one produced by the key fob for the lost spaceship.
- Ragnarök Proofing: After being abandoned on the rooftop of the Applied Cryogenics building for 1000+ years, the only things wrong with Nibbler's original spaceship are a smashed windscreen, a stolen stereo and a dead battery, allowing Bender to easily jumpstart it so Digby can fly it back home. Justified by the fact that Nibblonians are extremely long-lived and 1000 years to their technology is probably equivalent to about a month or 2 at most to currently existing technology.
- Sequel Episode: To "The Why of Fry"
- Shout-Out:
- The design of Digby's ship and the tones it makes are a massive one to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, including the scene at the end where the ship lands next to a giant mesa and a bank of lights and musical tones is used to communicate.
- The plot of an alien ship causing massive destruction via attempts to communicate, and the protagonists needing to save Earth by discovering how to answer said communication attempts, which requires them to travel back in time to the 20th century, is taken near-directly from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
- Digby, Nibbler’s aide, might be a very obscure (to a US audience, at least) reference to Dan Dare, where the hero’s batman was called...Digby. He even looks similar.
- Something Else Also Rises: Inverted; the destructive tones of the ship causes the Eiffel Tower to droop over from damage, making a Frenchman nervously reassure his frustrated girlfriend that this never happens.
- White Void Room: Whenever Fry tries to enter a room he was never in (as the current environment is just based on his memory, he obviously can't 'remember' a location he never actually visited).
- Year Inside, Hour Outside: Inverted. When Fry wakes up from his dream after what seems to be a few minutes, he's told he's been asleep for thirteen and a half days.
