Bender's all-night shenanigans with a giggling ladybot do worse than just make Fry late for work - it makes him miss his date with Leela, on her birthday, no less. She gives him another chance to make it up to her, but Professor Farnsworth's monodirectional time travel machine has other ideas. Will Fry ever make to his date with Leela? Or will he forever be "The Late Philip J. Fry", the seventh episode of the 6th season of Futurama, and, wait for it, wait for it - the best episode of the season?

Farnsworth has built a time travel machine that only moves into the future (to avoid any temporal paradoxes, like sleeping with your own grandmother). To penalize Fry for his tardiness, Farnsworth recruits him to test the machine by going forward one minute. Naturally, this goes wrong, as Farnsworth accidentally sends Fry, Bender and himself to the year 10,000, a barren, apocalyptic wasteland of death and destruction. Reasoning that the only thing they can do is keep traveling forward in time until they find a backwards-traveling time machine, the trio encounter a cybernetic revolt, an uprising of sub-human apes against their diminutive genius cousins, a future dominated by giraffes, an Earth of beautiful and buxom women who have developed backwards-time travel (but insist on a Fertility Feast before the dissemination of any information), and finally, the year 1 billion, where all life on Earth has died. Meanwhile, back in 3010, Leela angrily gives up on Fry and turns Planet Express into a successful shipping company after the Professor's apparent demise. A message from Fry reaches her across the time stream - but is it too late?

Any story featuring time travel and advancing the Fry/Leela relationship is a winner in my book, but I honestly didn't expect an episode this good. Everything works - from Bender and his ladyfriend hamboning it up, to a robot Amy disturbingly hitting on an aged Cubert. The best moments are reserved for the time travel adventure; the musical accompaniment of "In The Year 252525" (sic) is brilliant, and the discovery of Leela's message to Fry is alternatively surprising and incredibly moving. Even theoretical astrophysics plays an important plot point in the episode, without it feeling tacked on or contrived. How many Futurama viewers knew about the Big Bounce theory? Exactly.

I've racked my brains trying to come up with something I didn't like about this episode (nada), and one singular best scene, which is downright impossible. I'm going to have to settle with Fry, Bender and the Professor watching the universe die…and be reborn in a flash of color and light. Not only is it visually amazing, but it's so typical of Futurama to think big (cosmically big). Sometimes I forget I'm watching a 21-minute cartoon…but then we have Bender burying the old universe versions of himself, Fry and the Professor while Fry (not the old Fry - "he's dead now") and Leela share a sweet and touching moment on a bridge above. For that, and for so many other reasons, "The Late Philip J. Fry" arrives with a perfect 5.0/5.