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"2-D Blacktop" is the fifteenth episode of the seventh Season of Futurama.

Synopsis[]

The Professor decides to turbo-charge the ship to make it even faster than before. Leela is not too thrilled with the idea and gets the ship towed for being unsafe. The Professor manages to save the ship and join a street race gang while Leela gets a new ship that's completely safe.

Plot[]

When Professor Farnsworth turbocharges the Planet Express Ship and names it Bessy, something goes horribly wrong and the crew crash lands in the launch bay after a stall out.  When the crew has the ship towed to the salvage yard, Hubert breaks in and upgrades the ship with parts from the scrap heap.

On leaving the yard, Farnsworth is accosted by two cars of street-racing hoodlums and challenges them to a race around Central Park, the loser of which is to make the winner's Medicare Co-payments for a year. The racers are pursued by peace officers Smitty and URL (after they are forced to set Pimparoo free). The Professor manages to win the race and evade the police by engaging his "dimensional drift". Later, meeting up with the hoodlums, he is invited to join their crew. They are apparently led by Benny, who is romantically attached to Minx, an attractive young female gang member who keeps alluding to "unspoken verbal abuse" by her father. A blonde haired member of the gang (voiced by Billy West) and the orange haired member of the gang (voiced by John DiMaggio) do not have their names used in this episode.)

Meanwhile at Planet Express, Leela has obtained a new safer, almost featureless delivery vehicle. They break in  the vehicle with a delivery to Glorianimus 3, a planet orbiting a fabulous rainbow giant star which unfortunately can't be seen during the delivery due to the fact that the new ship has no windshield. In fact, the new ship seems to take all the adventure out of the deliveries and the crew is surprised to find themselves back in the launch bay with the ship having made the delivery automatically. The crew becomes listless, waiting in the ready room, so Hermes sends them on a grocery run and has Leela drop Fry and Bender off at their Karate class.

Returning from her boring errands, Leela collides with a stop sign and finds herself accosted by the Professor and his new crew in much the way the Professor met the new crew. She challenges him to a drag race, which is to take place on a Moebiüs Drag Strip. ("Once around both same sides of the half twist, and back to the start and finish line.") After a race sequence where the professor again engages the dimensional drift, both vehicles suffer a head-on collision in which Fry is caught between the two vehicles. Again, Hermes has to call the tow truck.

Meanwhile, Fry, Hubert, Leela, and Bender (who was taking a nap in Leela's ship) find themselves in a two-dimensional realm called "Flatbush". Here they are taken to a feast in their honor by the king of Flatbush, but they discover that they can't eat because their two-ended digestive system would divide a 2 dimensional being into separate pieces. When Farnsworth determines that they need to return to the 3rd dimension or starve to death, the creatures of Flatbush become offended and the Planet Express crew has to escape. They make it to the original Planet Express ship and theorize that if the dimensional drift feature let them go through the 4th dimension when the ship was 3D, engaging it as a 2D ship might return them to the third dimension. During their attempt, Hubert notes that the number of dimensions they occupy is growing continuously ("two point one dimensions... two point two... two point pi") and the ship is seen surrounded by fractals.

Meanwhile, at the scrap heap, the remaining Planet Express employees and the street racing crew watch as the flattened remains of the two ships are about to be incinerated. As the blast furnace engages, the disk of scrap metal begins to bubble out and the Planet Express Ship rematerializes in the third dimension.

Finally, as everyone is celebrating, Minx receives a call from her father and gives everyone a thumbs up.

Trivia[]

  • The Professor and the street racers meet by a bridge that features one of Bender's tile art mosiac vandalisms from "Proposition Infinity".
  • Albert and Sally are classmates of Fry and Bender at "Big Boy Karate".
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