Where No Fan Has Gone Before

"Where No Fan Has Gone Before"
Futurama episode
File:Futurama ep65.jpg
Episode no.	Season four
Directed by	Pat Schinagawa
Written by	David A Goodman
Original air date	April 21 2002
Episode features
Opening cartoon	unknown

Where No Fan Has Gone Before is the eleventh episode of the fourth season of the animated series Futurama.

Plot summary

Template:Spoiler Bender, Leela and Fry, along with the entire cast of Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS), are put under courtmartial by Zapp Brannigan, who has the group account the events that lead to the courtmartial. It started days earlier when the crew tried to rent tapes from the local video store, where Fry uttered the forbidden words "Star Trek". Fry is told that, after a series of mishaps regarding the religious cult of Star Trek fans, Star Trek became forbidden. All the episodes, films and "the blooper reel where the door doesn't close all the way" are jettisoned to a forbidden planet.

Later, at the Hall of Heads, Fry meets Leonard Nimoy's head, who recounts the rest of the cast leaving Earth on a ship. Fry, Leela, Bender and Nimoy journey to the forbidden planet in the Planet Express ship. They crash on the planet, and there they find several original sets from TOS as well as the entire cast, complete with their bodies. Suddenly, a large energy/gas cloud named Melllvar reveals himself as the owner of the tapes and the giver of the casts' bodies. Melllvar then gives Nimoy a body, and orders the actors and the Planet Express crew to participate in a Star Trek convention. While Melllvar forces the cast to perform his fan script, Bender, Leela and Fry escape in the Planet Express ship. Fry then convinces the crew to go back for the actors, only to have Melllvar destroy the ship's engine as it crashes back on the planet.

After seeing the crew's cunning attempt to escape, Melllvar starts to wonder if the Planet Express crew, a group of "genuine space heroes" for trying to rescue them, are more worthy of his adoration; he decides to settle the question with a battle to the death. After fighting for several minutes, Melllvar is called by his mother (with whom he still lives, despite being 34). While he is gone, the two groups combine the engine of the cast's rocket with the life support of the Planet Express ship. In order to lose enough weight to lift off, the cast (reluctantly) jettisons their bodies, before learning that Fry had brought the tapes of the Star Trek episodes aboard. Melllvar soon follows the crew into space, with his own spaceship (angrily crying that they made him take it out of its package). The Planet Express ship is then boarded by Brannigan, who starts the courtmartial. At this point, Leela points out that during the course of the courtmartial, Melllvar is continuing to chase them.

Everyone hurries back to the control room, where they still try to escape from Melllvar. Fry convinces Melllvar that he can't devote his entire life to Star Trek, and Melllvar eventually agrees to end the chase. The crew returns, with the tapes in hand, to Earth.

Trivia

• In the DVD commentary, Matt Groening claims to have never seen an entire episode of the original Star Trek.
• All of the original cast from Star Trek: TOS appears, except for James Doohan (Scotty), who said "No way". Writer Goodman joked that the title of the episode should be 'We Got Everybody But Scotty'. Additionally DeForest Kelley (Dr McCoy) is also missing, as he died in 1999. (Consequently his character has no speaking part.)
• An original concept was a Godzilla-esque battle between a giant William Shatner and a giant Leonard Nimoy, but changed to stay more toward the Star Trek theme.
• When Welshy is introduced, he rattles off a sentence in (poorly-pronounced to the point of being almost incomprehensible) Welsh - According to the DVD commentary, he is allegedly saying "Dwi wedi meddwi'n llwyr!" ("I am very, very drunk!")
• The mountainous Vasquez Rocks, where the episodes "Shore Leave", "Friday's Child", and most notably "Arena" were filmed, are shown on several occasions throughout the episode. They are also the rock formation where Bill and Ted are thrown to their deaths in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey (ironically taking place after the two watch "Arena" on television).
• In one line, Nichols refers to kissing Shatner in a Star Trek episode as something "dangerous" she had done. While this was meant to be comedic, this actually was mildly dangerous, as it was the first interracial kiss on TV.
• Nimoy also appeared in "Space Pilot 3000," the first episode of Futurama. He also twice guest-starred on The Simpsons, also created by Matt Groening.

References

• The ship that jettisons the last Star Trek videotapes to the forbidden planet is an Eagle Transporter from Space: 1999.
• Shatner performs a spoken-word version of "The Real Slim Shady", a reference to his much-maligned album The Transformed Man, in which he performed spoken words of contemporary songs such as "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds".
• Zapp Brannigan was partially inspired by both Kirk and Shatner.
• "Where No Fan Has Gone Before" was the name of a Star Trek fan club in the 1970s founded by Joseph Ames Jr, then a grammar school student in Maple Grove, MN (now living near Philadelpha, PA). The name was taken from a defunct fanzine of the same name listed in a 1974 edition of the "Star Trek Welcommittee Directory".

Star Trek references

• The name of the episode is a play on the Star Trek saying, "... where no man has gone before".
• The opening sequence begins with a flyby of the Planet Express ship fitted with nacelles like the Enterprise, and a Shatner's Log, a play on captain's log.
• In this log, the line "The impossible has happened" is the same line given in the opening log in the episode Where No Man Has Gone Before.
• Zapp Brannigan says, "Bring in the accused," a line taken from the end of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
• Leela enters the courtroom in a robotic wheelchair that emits beeps for communication identical to the one used by Christopher Pike in the episode The Menagerie.
• "He's dead, Jim!", one of Leonard McCoy's famous lines, is repeated during a scene when Trekkies are thrown into a volcano.
• A sign in front of the Church of Star Trek: "Ceiling of the Christine Chapel Closed for Renovation".
• Star Trek "priest": "And Scotty beamed them to the Klingon ship, where there would be no tribble at all", referring to the events of The Trouble With Tribbles. The crowd chants, "All power to the engines!"
• Two people in this crowd have the appearance of the black-and-white aliens from Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.
• The Church's influence caused Germany to be renamed "Nazi Planet Episode Land" (refering to the episode Patterns of Force).
• All the tapes of Star Trek are fired out of a ship on a torpedo, and land on a nearby planet, just as Spock's body was at the end of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
• Fry talks to Leonard Nimoy, asking him if he remembered the episode where he "got high on spores and smacked Kirk around" (This Side of Paradise).
• Nimoy to Shatner: "Bill, you are, and always shall be ... my friend," a reference to one of Spock's lines to Kirk in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
• Omega III being off limits may came from the episodeThe Menagerie, where the planet Talos IV is also off limits and any attempts by Starflet officers to approach the world resulting in death, Starfleet "General Order 4".
• Various sets from the series can be seen on Omega III, such as those featured in the episodes A Piece of the Action (Bender gets a Tommy gun from this set), The City on the Edge of Forever (The Guardian of Forever), Spectre of the Gun (incomplete Wild West buildings), Bread and Circuses (TV backdrop of the Colosseum), and Who Mourns for Adonais? (Greek ruins).
• Fry asks Walter Koenig to repeat something with his Russian accent, and then to say "Nuclear Wessels," a line from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
• Melllvar, the entity on Omega III, resembles the Companion from Metamorphosis and the vampire cloud from Obsession in appearance and various other energy beings from ST:TOS in its powers, and speaks lines reminiscent of the "God" on Sha Ka Ree from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. It also borrows many lines such as "It is I," "You doubt me?" (paraphrased as "You doubt my power?").
• The entity zaps Scotty's replacement (named Welshy), who happens to be wearing a red shirt. This is a play on Apollo zapping Scotty in the episode Who Mourns for Adonais?, as well as the recurring theme of redshirt security guards being killed off.
• During Ambassador Sarek's Trivia Challenge, one of the questions asks who Kirk left on Ceti Alpha V (as seen in the episode Space Seed). Shatner stands up and screams "KHAAAAAAAAAN!!!", as he did in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
• During the trivia contest, the prize money's unit of currency are Quatloos (The Gamesters of Triskelion).
• Bender works inside a Jefferies tube on the Planet Express ship.
• The starship fires down on Melllvar, as the Enterprise did on Apollo's temple in Who Mourns for Adonais? and Vaal in The Apple. As in the original series, the beams are shown leaving the ship in diverging directions, but somewhere in between they converge so that both strike the target at the same time, in the same spot. The music from this scene is a remix of the incidental music from The Doomsday Machine.
• The consoles on the star ship explode at critical moments, as happens throughout the series and movies.
• The Planet Express ship is pulled by a ray that resembles a giant green hand, much like the giant green hand that grabbed the Enterprise in Who Mourns For Adonais?.
• Melllvar forces the Planet Express crew to battle the Star Trek cast to see who is better. This is very similar plot-wise to The Savage Curtain.
• The music during the fight scene resembles that during Kirk and Spock's fight in Amok Time (and reused later in the series).
• Shatner rips his shirt, as he did in nearly every Kirk fight scene in the original series.
• Nichelle Nichols distracts Fry, Leela, and Bender with her famous fan dance as seen in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier.
• Nimoy attempts to use the Vulcan nerve pinch on Bender.
• The line, "There's no right way to hit a woman," is from the episode Charlie X.
• Fry makes the observation that Melllvar is "just a child," the same as Spock said of V'Ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, or Kirk said of Trelane, in the episode The Squire of Gothos. Melllvar being chastened by his energy-being mother is a parody of the climactic scene of the latter.
• Shatner makes out with Leela; James Kirk is known for his many relationships with women.
• A starship that resembles the Romulan Bird of Prey from Balance of Terror combined with a Klingon battlecruiser decloaks and fires on the Planet Express ship.
• George Takei quotes the final code in the Enterprise self-destruct sequence "Destruct sequence 1A-2B-3..." as seen on Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and in the episode Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.
• Fry's speech to Melllvar regarding moving out of his mother's basement is a reference to William Shatner's appearance on a Saturday Night Live skit where he tells obsessive fans to "Get a Life" and move out of their parents' basements.
• The line, "In a different reality, I could have called you friend," is from the episode Balance of Terror, which, as Melllvar corrects Fry, was episode nine of the series (in recording order).
• The last line in the episode (spoken by Shatner) is, "Let's get the Hell out of here." This same line was used by Kirk at the end of The City on the Edge of Forever.
• The ending credits feature the Star Trek Fanfare, and plays back images from the episode; the last image is Kif in a parody of the famous "Balok puppet" from the episode The Corbomite Maneuver, and whose image was the last seen in the ending credits for the entire second season of the Original Series.
• Bender comments that Star Trek is "another great science fiction show cancelled before its time", a reference to Fox's decision to cancel Futurama.