"We want an Earthling, not a dirty space thing!"
Made from 100% recycled pixels
Richard Nixon runs for re-re-election against a competent politician, who is also accused of being an alien when his Earth birth certificate cannot be found...
Tropes
- Alternate Timeline: The timeline where Nixon won the 3012 election.
- Bad Future: The future Travers discusses, where the world becomes even more crapsack than usual after Nixon's re-election.
- Borrowed Catchphrase: Bender is the one who says "Good news, everyone!", causing the Professor to sputter confusedly.
- He also joins Nixon in an "AROOOO!" while the pair plot against Travers.
- Call-Back: A few to Bender's Big Score:
- Chris is able to travel back in time by using a photocopy of the time code.
- Immediately after Chris leaves, Future Bender breaks into the room, wielding the same gun and sunglasses he used when he was ordered to kill Fry.
- Chris' ultimate fate is a consequence of the time code's self correction of paradoxes.
- Cheek Copy: One last copy of the time code from Bender's Big Score survived on a photocopied image, allowing Chris to return to the past.
- Didn't Think This Through: Nobody who voted for Nixon stopped to think how important the jobs the illegal alien immigrants were taking. Of course, this is a reflection of actual anti-immigrant policies.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: The plot: an esteemed politician running for president is accused of not being a "true" citizen because of an allegedly missing birth certificate. Who might it possibly be referring to...
- Double Subversion: The title sequence. The Planet Express ship usually crashes into a giant screen, but manages to avoid it this time... until Bender notices that the screen is advertising free beer, and brings the ship around, crashing it into the screen anyway.
- Evil Gloating: With a touch of Badass Boast in there for good measure, by (who else?) Nixon.Nixon always WINS!!! AROOOOOOOOO!!!
- Future Badass: Bender loves hearing about his future self, who became the leader of the robot uprising after they were forced to do menial labor.
- His Name Really Is "Barkeep": When Travers' baby self is born, he is named on his birth certificate "Senator Chris Zaxxar Travers".
- Human Resources: In the future, Nixon turned the silent majority into the soylent majority.
- I Told You So: Bender to Leela when the timeline corrected itself.
- Improbable Infant Survival: Despite the time travel used being the same one as Bender's Big Score, the infant Chris survives the episode, possibly because the paradox was corrected by the adult Chris being erased from the timeline.
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: Everyone after the politician, Chris, was erased from the timeline.
- Ret-Gone: The politician Chris after the timeline paradox was fixed.Bender: You see, since Nixon wasn't elected, the robot uprising didn't happen and Travers never got sent back from the future. It's Politics 101!
- "Shaggy Dog" Story: "Wow, it really doesn't matter who you vote for!"
- Shout-Out: The time travel plot is one to The Terminator.
- Status Quo Is God: Nixon continues to be president of Earth.
- Take That!: This episode satirizes the Obama "birthers", who claimed that Barack Obama couldn't be President of the US because of his allegedly missing birth certificate and/or not being a native-born American.
- Time Travel: The politician came from the Alternate Timeline future, where Richard Nixon won the 3012 election. Unfortunately, Chris was erased from the timeline and Nixon ended up President again, which can only mean two things: that everyone is now in a third timeline where Nixon wins but the robot apocalypse won't happen (since President Chris would still be there in some fashion) or the Bad Future will still happen.
- Timey-Wimey Ball: By this point Futurama has stepped all over the rules of time travel (mostly due to Bender's Big Score) but if one must nit-pick, this episode's ending contradicts The Why of Fry (because disrupting the past results in a paradox that erases the causality of the event that originally enabled the time travel, something that did not happen in that episode. Possibly justified as the Brain Spawn explain the nature of Fry being able to go back in time was a rare occurrence so it's possible this method of time travel has its own rules).
