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Futurama episode
"Leela's Homeworld"
Episode no.	56
Prod. code	4ACV02
Airdate	February 17, 2002
Writer(s)	Kristin Gore
Director	Mark Ervin
Opening subtitle	IT'S LIKE "HEE HAW" WITH LASERS
Opening cartoon	In a Cartoon Studio, Van Beuren Studio, 1931
Guest star(s)	None
Season 4 January 2002 – August 2003
Kif Gets Knocked Up a Notch Leela's Homeworld Love and Rocket Less Than Hero A Taste of Freedom Bender Should Not Be Allowed on TV Jurassic Bark Crimes of the Hot Teenage Mutant Leela's Hurdles The Why of Fry Where No Fan Has Gone Before The Sting Bend Her Obsoletely Fabulous The Farnsworth Parabox Three Hundred Big Boys Spanish Fry The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings
List of all Futurama episodes...

"Leela's Homeworld" is the second episode of Futurama's fourth season. It first aired on February 17, 2002.

Contents 1 Plot 2 Trivia 3 The montage 4 Cultural references 5 Continuity 6 Music

The Professor announces that Leela's old orphanarium has named her Orphan of the Year. In another announcement, he shows off a machine that makes glow-in-the-dark noses. Unfortunately, the machine produces enormous amounts of toxic waste. The Professor hires Bender to dispose of the waste, and he does so by dumping it into the sewer.

At the orphanarium's award ceremony, the headmaster presents us with a flashback of Leela's arrival. We see that she was left with a note written in Alienese, and a bracelet (translated, the note reads, "Your parents love you very much"). Back at the Planet Express building, Leela is in tears over not having parents. Fry takes her for a walk, and she looks up to the stars, wondering which alien world her parents were from. The camera pans back down, and we see two one-eyed sewer mutants looking up from a drain.

Meanwhile, Bender has expanded his one-time dumping into a full waste management service. The mutants grow angry with Bender's disposal technique, and make a rare surface trip, capturing Bender, Fry, and Leela. The mutants sentence the crew to be lowered into a lake of chemicals, which will turn them into mutants as well.

Two hooded mutants call out to Leela, then swing the crane around, dropping the crew on the far side of the mutagenic lake. The mutant mob, immune to the effects of the lake, dive in and swim across. Fry, Leela, and Bender take refuge in a mutant home, where they find a shrine to Leela's life. The mob captures them, but after a whispered word from the hooded mutants, the crew's sentence is commuted to exile. They ride a hot-air balloon to a surface access ladder hanging over the lake. Fry and Bender emerge on the surface, but Leela, determined to find out what the hooded mutants know, dives into the chemical lake.

She swims to shore, and finds she is unaffected by the chemicals. Fry heads to the orphanarium to try to get some clues as to what's going on, and the headmaster gives him the note that was left with Leela. Fry takes the note back to the Professor for analysis. As they read the analysis output, we learn the truth: Leela is actually a mutant, but was born "the least mutated mutant ever". Her parents, realizing she could pass as an alien, decided to leave her at the orphanarium with an Alienese note (her mother somehow has a PhD in exolinguistics), and agreed that they would rather die than ever let her find out the "shameful" truth.

Meanwhile, an armed and irrational Leela has pursued the hooded mutants through the sewers, back to the home with the shrine to herself. Leela comes to the irrational conclusion that the mutants killed her parents, leaving her an orphan. She plans to kill her parents, and both are willing to let her rather than reveal the truth. Fry falls through the ceiling at the last second and reveals the truth. A tearful reunion ensues, and the episode closes with a montage of scenes of Leela's parents watching over their daughter during her life.

• During normal days on Adult Swim, this episode is rated TV-PG, but on Sundays, it is rated TV-14 DV but however in the UK this is the first and only episode to be rated U(all ages rating).

• Baby Leela is crawling in a hallway and is about to fall down the stairs when a hand reaches out and turns her around.
• Child Leela is writing when tentacles emerge from the toilet and place a tin of cookies next to her and open the lid. Leela is suspicious but doesn't care and eats a cookie.
• Teenage Leela now has braces and a birthday hat and is walking down the street. Suddenly a pair of tentacles place a wrapped gift in her path. Leela picks it up, looks around and reads the label "Happy Birthday Leela."
• Adult (current) Leela is in her apartment asleep. A hand emerges from a nearby vent and pulls her blanket further up and pats her on the head.

• Among the parts of parade balloons used in creating the hot air balloon that returns to the surface is made from Underdog, Bart Simpson, Bullwinkle and Garfield's owner Jon Arbuckle.
• Professor Farnsworth says that deciphering the alien language on Leela's note could take an hour or a hundred million years. This is a reference to the halting problem in computability theory.
• Among the buildings Leela passes while running through the sewers is a Starbucks.
• Leela makes a reference to The Truman Show.
• The wall upon which Leela's parents have chronicled her life is a reference to Being John Malkovich.
• The computer on the Warden's desk appears similar to the personal computers used in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

• This episode reveals Leela's origins, something she had been searching for all through the series. The title is perhaps deliberately misleading; Leela had always assumed she was an alien, and was therefore looking for her homeworld, but her homeworld is actually Earth. This was previously foreshadowed when Leela's parents appeared in a crowd of mutants in "I Second That Emotion". Also, in "Fear of a Bot Planet" Leela is convicted of being a human despite her protests that she is an alien, and in "The Birdbot of Ice-Catraz" Bender's rebooting systems identify Leela as human.
• In this episode, Leela's orphanarium bears its original name "Cookieville", even though it was renamed the "Bender B. Rodriguez Orphanarium" in "The Cyber House Rules".
• When Leela confronts her parents and asks if they killed her birth parents, Morris's mouth, (which is normally vertical), opens horizontally when he talks.

• The song played during the ending montage is "Baby Love Child" by Pizzicato Five.