Bend Her

Did You Know?

• The episode title "Bend Her" is a reference to the 1959 film Ben-Hur, as well as to Bender's name and the act of gender bending.
• The opening scene at the Olympics was changed following the September 11 attacks, removing brief shots of country representatives related to the terrorist attacks.

Plot

In the fourth season of Futurama, the episode "Bend Her" follows Bender as he attends the Earth 3004 Olympic Games with the crew to watch Hermes compete in limbo. Feeling inadequate next to the large male bending robots, Bender decides to disguise himself as a female robot named Coilette to enter the competition. As Coilette, he easily wins five gold medals against the female competitors. Before the awards ceremony, all medalists are subjected to gender testing.

In a panic, Bender has Professor Farnsworth perform sex reassignment surgery, making him a genuine fembot. Coilette then appears on a late night talk show, where the robot actor Calculon immediately falls for her. They begin dating, and Coilette admits to the crew that she is only interested in the fame and expensive gifts Calculon gives her. When Calculon proposes, Coilette accepts, planning to divorce him for half his money.

However, she is moved by Calculon's sincere declarations of love and finds herself unwilling to hurt him, even crying openly about it. Professor Farnsworth explains that her new female hormones are causing this emotional shift. Leela agrees to help Coilette on the condition that she reverse the sex change. Leela suggests that a soap opera-style fake death will cause the least pain.

At the wedding, Coilette, Leela, Zoidberg, and Fry stage an elaborate scene faking Coilette's death. Bender then returns to his male form, claiming the experience changed nothing, though he quietly says an emotional goodbye to Calculon. The episode originally aired on Fox on July 20, 2003. The opening Olympic scene was altered after the September 11 attacks to remove shots of countries linked to the attacks, to avoid any reference to them.

The episode was easier to animate due to fewer spaceship scenes. The title references both the film Ben-Hur and the concept of gender bending, with producer David X. Cohen calling it a triple joke.

Reception

In a review from 2015, Zack Handlen from The A.V. Club stated "I don't like the idea of trying to reduce art, no matter how vulgar or clumsy, to something we have to set against a checklist of appropriate viewpoints", also going on to criticize the episode for "gags that all seem to be based on tediously dated notions", for "basic assumptions about how men and women behave that are neither interesting nor particularly insightful", and for "no unexpected spin that throws everything into question". Handlen cited the last bit of the episode as "one of the only times the episode feels legitimately clever and funny".