With an inspection from the Central Bureaucracy due the next day Hermes is in his element; having filed everything away he declines an invitation to Leela's poker evening with the crew and her old workmates. This was a mistake because when Bender gets caught cheating he runs and hide's in Hermes' office; in the ensuing fight it is well and truly demolished. When Hermes gets to work it is too late to clean up before Inspector Morgan Proctor arrives; any chance of promotion is dashed so he considers suicide... until informed that that would lead to a posthumous demotion! To help him recover Zoidberg sends him away to a spa planet... which turns out to be a forced labour camp! While he is away Proctor takes over and makes some changes; the most surprising of which is promoting Fry; she does this because while she might be a neat freak she also has a kinky fetish for slobs like Fry! They are soon engaged in an affair but that ends when Bender catches them in the act; to protect her job she downloads Bender's brain onto a floppy disc and sends it to the Central Bureaucracy where they will need a master bureaucrat if they wish to find it again... it is a good job Hermes has returned!
It was nice to have an episode where B-character Hermes got a chance to take centre stage for once; it also gave his voice actor, Phil LaMarr chance to show he can sing! Guest character Morgan Proctor proved entertaining; who would have guessed that such a prim woman had a kinky side to her! More laughs were provided by the poor Australian guy who ended up doing all the work in the Spa-5 Labour camp. Fans of Terry Gilliam's Brazil will no doubt enjoy the similarity between the bureaucracy there and the Central Bureaucracy here... although thankfully there doesn't appear to be a department of 'Information Retrieval' here!
It was nice to have an episode where B-character Hermes got a chance to take centre stage for once; it also gave his voice actor, Phil LaMarr chance to show he can sing! Guest character Morgan Proctor proved entertaining; who would have guessed that such a prim woman had a kinky side to her! More laughs were provided by the poor Australian guy who ended up doing all the work in the Spa-5 Labour camp. Fans of Terry Gilliam's Brazil will no doubt enjoy the similarity between the bureaucracy there and the Central Bureaucracy here... although thankfully there doesn't appear to be a department of 'Information Retrieval' here!
