Two years after Box Network cancels Planet Express's contract, the executives are fired and Planet Express is back on the air. As the crew rejoices, Hermes Conrad is decapitated, sending his wife LaBarbara into a separation. His head ends up in a jar while his body is repaired by Lars, who performs the procedure and then flirts with Leela, much to Philip J. Fry's chagrin.
During a delivery to a nude beach planet, Leela discovers a tattoo of Bender on Fry’s buttocks. Three alien scammers—Nudar, Fleb and Schlump—glamour their way into the crew’s lives, seize control of Planet Express through an obedience virus, and set their sights on exploiting the ship’s resources. The scammers quickly realize that Fry’s tattoo hides a code that opens a portal to travel back in time. Nibbler warns them that meddling with the past is dangerous, but his cautions go unheeded.
The scheme deepens when the scammers have Bender use the code to pilfer priceless artifacts from Earth’s history, plus a doomsday device from Professor Farnsworth, and stash them in a hidden cave beneath the Planet Express building. Hermes plots to win back his wife by having Bender retrieve an earlier version of his own body, while Leela and Lars begin dating, leaving Fry feeling increasingly left behind.
Once history’s treasures are secured, the scammers set out to erase the time code by killing Fry. Fry uses the code to leap to January 1, 2000—moments after his cryogenic freezing—triggering a chase as Bender races to catch him. A unique complication unfolds when a second Bender appears, created by a bathroom visit in the past, and a third Bender from the distant future joins the chaos, opening Fry’s cryogenic tube and placing the tattoo on his butt. The original Bender accidentally triggers a self-destruct, prompting Fry to shove that version into a different tube and escape. The long hunt across twelve years culminates with the original Bender seemingly killing Fry by blowing up his apartment.
Bender reports success to the scammers, who erase the time code and the virus. The crew holds a memorial for Fry, but he miraculously reappears, revealing that he engineered a duplicate of himself that stayed in the past while the original Fry remained in stasis. After awakening a thousand years later, the present Fry freezes himself again until the current year. The Fry duplicate spends the interim working at Panucci’s Pizzeria, then at an aquarium caring for Leelu, an orphaned narwhal. Nibbler moves to remove the tattoo from Fry to prevent further abuse by the scammers. Leela and Lars plan to marry, but Hermes is decapitated once more at the ceremony. Farnsworth notes that time-paradox duplicates are doomed to die young, and Lars panics and abandons Leela.
The scammers seize Earth by manipulating President Nixon and stripping the planet of its sovereignty. Exiled to Neptune, the planet mobilizes a fleet, drawing on allies and rivals alike. Hermes has his brain wired into the ship’s battle computer, enabling a decisive strike that helps topple the scammers and restore LaBarbara’s happiness. When the scammers threaten to destroy Planet Express with the doomsday device unless the crew surrenders, Bender reveals that he had stolen the device back for his own purposes. Leela fires the doomsday device, obliterating the scammers’ fleet.
Fry arranges for Leela and Lars to reconcile at the cryogenic lab. Having survived the assault, Nudar ambushes them, but Lars outsmarts him by luring the would-be ambusher toward the Bender duplicate set to self-destruct, a ploy that ends with the explosion destroying Nudar. The blast exposes the Bender tattoo on Lars, revealing him as the Fry duplicate who survived Bender’s attack in 2012, having frozen himself to return to the future and be with Leela; Lars ultimately calls off the wedding to spare Leela the pain of a time-paradox death.
Bender removes Lars’s tattoo and travels back to 2000 to place it on Fry in the cryogenic tube, ensuring that the events “make any sense at all.” Returning, Bender explains that he coaxed all his duplicates to stay with him rather than disperse when they were logically supposed to. Nibbler urges everyone to evacuate the universe before swallowing himself. The Bender duplicates explode, tearing a hole in the fabric of space.
