The season 2 episode starts with Hermes being unfairly demoted and given paid time off. After a dramatic suicide attempt, Zoidberg recommends that he go to a relaxing spa day on a sauna planet, which turns out to be a forced labor camp. (On a totally unrelated note, Hermes absolutely despises Zoidberg from this point on.) Although the camp is pure suffering at first, Hermes manages to use his bureaucratic skills to improve the camp’s efficiency, giving him the confidence he needs to defeat his replacement and return to his previous role.
It’s a full, satisfying character arc for Hermes, but it’s not the A-plot of the episode. Instead, most of the story focuses on the rest of the Planet Express crew adjusting to life without Hermes and, in Fry’s case, adjusting to an unexpected romance with the new bureaucrat Morgan Proctor (Nora Dunn). Morgan is attracted to Fry’s slobbish ways, even though she knows that such a romance is forbidden. Soon she steals Bender’s brain to protect her secret and sends it to the Central Bureaucracy building, and the rest of the Planet Express crew must journey to get it back. This is the storyline the episode mostly focuses on, although that initially wasn’t the plan. As the episode’s screenwriter Bill Odenkirk explained in the DVD audio commentary:
“Originally it was going to be what eventually became the B-story, which was Hermes goes to a health spa which turns out to be a slave labor camp. But we felt that sequestering one of our characters under a planet’s surface for the entire episode might limit us a little bit, so we focused the story on what happens at Planet Express when they lose Hermes, is essentially the origin of the episode.”
