The Sting

This episode is amazing! It does pretty much everything right, it gives an excellent balance of humour and emotion, and nevertheless has some nice twists and turns. Obviously, because there were more episodes of the series, you will guess something must be resolved, but how will still make you wonder without any spoilers. Without a doubt my favourite episode of the series!

The story begins with Farnsworth annoucing to the crew that they are not good enough to go on their next mission, claiming it to have killed their last crew. Leela nevertheless forces them to do it, and its to collect space honey from killer bees. To get the honey, Bender is costumed to be a bee and therefore are able to collect the space honey. Leela finds a baby queen and takes it so that they can make more at home. Bender insults the queen and the bees chase them. When they have escaped, the baby queen awakes and attempts to sting Leela, but Fry sacrifices himself to protect her, and is killed in the process. At the funeral, Leela is left with guilt, and during the night has a dream in which Fry is seemingly alive. Everyone thinks she is going crazy, and as time goes by she starts missing him more and more. She wakes up with Fry's coat on her, but when she shows it to the others, its her own instead. Leela gets depressed and starts to eat space honey to ease the pain, but she knocks the honey on the floor and Fry is seemingly regenerated back to his original form. However, this is short lived, as he tells her to "wake up". The next morning, for no apparent reason, the crew sings "Don't Worry, Be Happy" but Leela is assumed to have imagined it. To prove she is not crazy, Leela attempts to find Fry's body in space and keep it with her to proof he's really dead. When she gets to the coffin and open it, she is transported into another room with everyone claiming she killed Fry. Leela ends up in her room, not being able to cope with the loss of Fry anymore. She takes space honey and it takes 3 to sleep forever. Just as she almost takes the 3rd dose, a picture of Fry next to her talks to her, and in an emotional way Leela just doesn't know what to do anymore, and Fry simply tells her to "just wake up" and begins to cry. The next scene reveals to everyone that Leela was in a coma and Fry wasn't actually hurt, saying that she got all the poison. They hug each other and say they both need a shower.

Nevertheless, it's by far my all-time favourite Futurama episode. Don't listen to the bad reviews here, it is a weird episode, but done brilliantly. Both the characters of Fry and Leela in this episode are amazingly written, and even after you know what happens, you still want to go back to it and watch it over and over again. The "Don't Worry, Bee Happy" song had me almost crying in laughter! Fantastic! A perfect 10/10 for this masterpiece!

If someone put a gun to my head and asked me of my favorite Futurama episode, I'd say The Sting. This episode is so magnificently emotional and beautiful, a true masterpiece, and it still manages to be incredibly funny. The only flaw I can think of would be the "Bee Happy" song Leela dreams of, it just goes on a little too long and I feel that there could have been something else there to show her growing madness.

The music, the actors, everything, exceptional. Both Katey Segal (Leela) and Billy West (Fry) manages their respective parts so perfectly, and showcase how they can make these characters show real emotions, especially Segal as she trips through mourning, desperation, madness and anger.

Except for making an excellent episode, we are also allowed into Leela's secluded mind that we so seldom get to view, and both she and we realises that deep within she loves Fry, and we just know they will end up together.

This is one of the few episodes that have ended me in tears, along with other fantastic ones like Jurassic Bark and Devil's Hands. If you don't love this story, you have no heart.

I'm in a minority that doesn't think this is Futurama's best episode ever. Hell, it's not even in my top 20. The plot is very touching and interesting, but the ending is just... I can't award high praise to anything that ends with "then they woke up and it was all a dream", no matter how good a job they make of it. All the same, it's very touching, features a lot of subtle writing and some lovely animation and music. However, some of it just feels like forced representations of madness and the Bee Happy musical number just comes out of nowhere, drags, isn't funny and feels completely out of place. It doesn't get the concept of Leela's madness over as I suspect it was intended.

This is also an episode that gives humour the back seat to plot, but I don't feel as if the plot is good enough to justify that, really.

All the same, it IS a good episode -I just feel that it's quite over-rated.