Given the general irreverence of Futurama, one might expect that a movie based on the animated television series would not take anything seriously--and indeed, Bender's Big Score, the direct to video feature-length cartoon based on the series makes comedic reference to The Matrix (the means of altering the past involves reciting a line of computer code), Terminator (when the robot is sent to kill someone in the past, he dons a pair of sunglasses, asserting that it is "bright" in the past), Al Gore (seen in 2000 talking about the technological advances he will bring when he is President), and a not-subtle swipe at the television network that cancelled the program. Yet there are serious temporal elements in the film worth discussion, and a broad fanbase that might be interested in whether the story "works" under any theory of time.
Before there is any time travel, we are introduced to aliens called Scammers who have the ability to find information that can be used for identity theft, who manage to steal Earth and everything on it. Then they discover the secret of time travel, tattooed in a somewhat inconvenient location of main character Fry's anatomy. This gives them the opportunity to rob history of its treasures. However, the code is unidirectional: the traveler can go to the past, but cannot return to the future.
Their solution is to send Bender the robot on various missions to rob the past, and for him to hide with the stolen merchandise in the caves which conveniently happen to be unexplored beneath the office, until the logical moment for his return. Over objections that this might bring the end of everything, the alien scammers send the robot back repeatedly, gathering such treasures as the Mona Lisa and the Colonel's Secret Recipe.
Once the scammers are satisfied that history, too, has been fully pillaged, they determine to eliminate the code by erasing it from Bender's memory and killing Fry; but Fry has learned how to read and use the code, and so escapes to the past, to moments after he fell into the cryogenic tube which brought him Buck Rogers style to the future originally. Bender is sent to terminate him; but Fry incidentally uses the code again so that there are two of him before Bender arrives. There ensues a merry chase in which Fry and Bender each temporally duplicates himself.
In a significant sub-plot, administrator Hermes loses his head--quite literally having it severed from his body in a serious accident. It is preserved in a jar for re-attachment to his body, but the interference of the Scammers delays the procedure. Afraid that he will lose his gorgeous wife to a gorgeous superstar, he has Bender steal his own body from his past self so that it can be reattached in the present.
The scammers are ultimately defeated (without the use of time travel), and earth reclaimed, and in the end Bender travels from the end of the story to the beginning, to tattoo the code on a place on Fry's body where it will remain unnoticed until a trip to the nude bathing planet. That, then, is where the time travel story begins: the last trip might be the first trip. We will begin there--next time.
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