Not Long Enough

Until recently, it was thought that Matt Groening had completely recovered from whatever was making him act so strangely during the Dead Bart incident and that it had affected his normal life afterward. Recent claims from the employee who found the Dead Bart video, however, indicate that Matt Groening went through another, similar, incident ten years ago. It was the summer of 1999 and Futurama had recently premiered. Matt was working on two shows now and had started showing signs of stress...when he announced that he was working on another episode that would be 100% of his own writing. This terrified some of the staff who worked on both shows, but they were hesitant to bring up Dead Bart and the Futurama crew saw no reason to reject Matt's idea. An early version of it was made and the employee who found Dead Bart managed to make a digital copy of this as well. The episode was called "Not Long Enough." The episode started with Fry, Leela, and Bender making a delivery for Planet Express. They never revealed exactly what they were delivering or where they were going, and everyone seemed to be upset about an unexplained event that had happened recently. Leela and Bender were angry at Fry, who kept apologizing but was coldly rejected by his friends. They eventually reached a planet that seemed to have only one house surrounded by empty, desolate fields on all sides. They knocked the door and a grotesque alien that seemed to be very old answered. They took the box without a word. He opened it, took a knife out of it, and stabbed himself. The Planet Express crew didn't seem to find this odd or surprising; they simply left the body on the ground and walked back to their ship in silence. The next scene was of the Planet Express ship flying through space. A dissonant piece of music made of extremely loud instruments playing a very slow tune played in the background while the ship flew through an empty, black space. They finally reached Earth and landed in a deserted New New York. Fry started apologizing again as they walked through the empty streets (there was no sign of the Planet Express building), but Leela and bender glared at him in silence. Fry gave up and separated from his friends. He walked for quite a while, never encountering a single person. He reached the cryogenics building where he had been frozen, looked inside, and began to cry. The crying went on for a few minutes before he entered the building. Fry went to one of the tubes, set the timer on it to a huge number with more zeroes than I could count, and locked himself in. The screen faded out and when it came back in the view was entirely on Fry. The machine must have partially stopped working, as parts of Fry were decaying; bone was poking through his skin in several places. Fry mumbled, "It's what I deserve," and climbed out of the freezing device. He was in a surreal, indescribable place. There were a huge variety of shapes and colors, but it wasn't bright or fanciful. It was closer to the faint colors you see if you close your eyes too hard. Fry started walking, the surreal void he was in seeming to go on and on. He kept walking for a few minutes. The colors kept making shapes you could kind of make out, but none of them were pleasant. After his long walk, Fry found a picture on the ground. It was completely out of place in his new environment; it looked like something drawn in the normal Futurama style. It was a photo of himself, Leela, and Bender. Fry looked at it for a few seconds before beginning to cry again. The picture soon turn to dust and Fry continued walking. The view zoomed out until Fry couldn't be seen until the colors all blended together and turned to solid black. The view continued to zoom out and we see that the black was a tiny fragment of the pupil in Fry's eye. His frozen body had fallen out of the freezing unit and was lying in an abandoned room. He was drawn in the same hyper-realistic style as Bart's corpse (from the Simpsons episode, "Dead Bart"). Bender and Leela walked into the room. They saw what Fry had done to himself and Leela said, "He got what he deserved." She checked her watch and said, "Looks like we need to leave for our next delivery." She took a knife out of her pocket, put it in a plain cardboard box, and headed to the ship. (This story is credited to a person called KI Simpson.)