Futurama’s Most Emotional Moments

Jurassic Bark contains possibly the saddest moment in all of Futurama as a whole. When Fry was frozen in 1999, he left behind Seymour, a stray dog he’d grown close to. When Fry wakes up 1,000 years later, he actually finds the fossilized remains of his canine buddy and decides to clone him so they can be together in the future as well.

However, Fry later learns that Seymour lived another 12 years after he was frozen, and he decides not to clone Seymour, assuming that he lived a fulfilled life after Fry disappeared. The heartbreaking moment reveals that Seymour actually spent the rest of his life waiting for Fry to return, even though he never did. 

This episode is the result of Futurama’s experiment with more character-driven narratives, and it revolves around Fry holding a grudge against his long-dead brother, Yancy. The two were rather competitive as children, and Fry always assumed his brother disliked him, at the very least.

He becomes furious when he finds that his brother assumed his identity, became the first man on Mars, married a supermodel, and had an incredibly happy life. However, the plot twist reveals that Yancy actually missed his Fry terribly after his disappearance, and he even named his son, who had a very happy life after his missing brother.

During a mission to deliver popcorn to Cineplex 14, Leela abandons the delivery and meets another cyclops, the sole survivor of the destruction of the planet Cyclopia. He shows Leela around and tells her that, right before their planet’s destruction by a large missile, Cyclopian scientists sent away a baby, who Leela concludes must be her.

However, the surviving cyclops turns out to be an abusive shape-shifting alien, and the team actually leaves the planet with Leela believing that she was abandoned by her parents on Earth.

Leela’s Homeworld actually reveals how Leela came to Earth and why her parents abandoned her—one of Futurama’s mysteries in the earlier seasons of the show.

During a trip into the sewers where the mutants live, Leela encounters two mysterious figures and connects them to her parent’s murder, only to learn that they actually are her parent. This reveals Leela as a mutated human instead of a Cyclops alien, and her parents left her in an orphanage so she wouldn’t have to live in the sewers with them.

Following a tragic accident, Leela believes Fry has died until she starts seeing him everywhere. He continues telling her to wake up, and the whole crew begins to think that she lost her mind after she shared her experience.

However, the episode’s plot twist reveals that Leela was actually the one in a coma following the accident, and it was Fry who had been sitting at her bedside pleading with her to wake up. This episode’s montage is of Fry and Leela’s moments together, which are among the most emotional things in the whole Futurama.

Futurama has plenty of episodes that dive into the “other side of mind” stuff, and Game of Tones is one such episode. Fry gets to revisit his last day before being frozen, and he’s overjoyed to see his family once again. In the closing moments of the episode, Fry thinks he’s having a dream about his mother, and he feels rejected.

However, Nibbler appears and tells him that he’s actually in his mother’s dream; Fry is able to finally connect with his mother, and the two share a moment after the whole series, implying that the two didn’t have the closest relationship with one another up to that point.

In the Futurama series finale, the Professor comes up with another insane invention. Fry steals it and proposes to Leela, and everything goes horribly wrong, and the two of them are trapped in a world that’s frozen in time.

Of course, they have their fun, grow old, and get to see Farnsworth return via a time loophole that returns everything to the original state. But Fry and Leela decide to re-live their lives together once again, providing us with an emotional ending to the series.