Fry's Hands Have Futurama Fans Debating. Here's Why
It's been the better part of a decade since audiences last heard from the good folks at Planet Express, but Futurama lives on in popular culture. Considering that this is the same show that promised a world where someone would want to keep Jay Leno's head alive for centuries, maybe we shouldn't be taking it all that seriously — but for die-hard fans, next-level pedantry is the name of the game. So, it's no wonder that many devotees have become fascinated by a very specific and little-referenced detail in Futurama canon.
It all started in May of 2001, with the premiere of the third season episode "I Dated a Robot." It's a relatively straightforward story: Fry decides to do everything on his sci-fi bucket list, including destroying a planet with a demolition laser, visiting the edge of the universe, and downloading Lucy Liu's consciousness into a robot body, so he can rub his mouth on her mouth. Most presciently, he visits a park full of cloned dinosaurs and, during an ill-advised attempt to feed a T-Rex, has his hands bitten off.
This is where things get interesting.
You've got to "hand" it to Futurama
Luckily, this is the future, so after a high-spirited trip to Hand Crafters ("New Hands in About an Hour"), Fry is rocking a new set of hands, and expressing his excitement at the prospect of breaking them in.
Fast-forward to the season four finale, "The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings." It's a meaty episode with plenty of fan service. Fry plays the holophonor in a callback to "Parasites Lost." After a disastrous recital performance, he and Bender make a trip to Robot Hell, where they meet up with the Robot Devil, to make a Robot Faustian Pact. Fry swaps hands with the lord of the robot underworld via a swift, but oddly bloodless, meat cleavering.
Fry's alarmingly blood-free hand swap caught at least one fan's attention, as they posted on Reddit. While the show explains the transition simply by saying that the Robot Devil has "very good hands," user Nowaytoop argues it was all made possible thanks to Fry's previous brush with limb loss: basically, if his replacement hands from the prior episode were actually robot hands, then switching them out was a simple process thanks to the modular, intuitive robot designs of the future.
This theory would certainly go a long way towards explaining the impossibly un-juicy insides of his wrists. If nothing else, though, it's a nice callback.