The episode begins at Madison Cube Garden where the crew watches the New New York Yankees play blernsball. As Fry (Billy West) tries to make sense of the nonsensical rules, Bender (John DiMaggio) bitches that humans will not let robots compete in the game. Leela (Katey Sagal) points out that that robots in the old Robot League were specialized machines, and it wouldn’t be fair or interesting for the humans.
Hermes (Phil LaMarr) pages the Professor (Billy West)—almost killing him from the device’s strength. He tells the crew to report back to the office for a delivery mission. The delivery is to Chapek 9—a world where humans are killed on sight. Radical robot separatists colonized the planet centuries ago, so the Professor has Bender deliver the package.
However, Bender’s still pouting about blernsball, so he refuses to deliver it; claiming that it’s a robot holiday called Robanukah. However, Hermes only respects his religious freedom as far as the law allows. Since Bender already used up all his time off, he insists Bender go.
Once they arrive, Leela lowers a grumbling Bender to the surface. While he’s out, Fry and Leela decide to throw a Robanukah party for Bender to show their appreciation, but a frantic message from Bender interrupts them.
He says the robot separatists found out he worked for humans, and they captured him. Leela takes the 2 to 3 minute commercial break to think of a plan. She and Fry disguise themselves as robots and infiltrate the robot society.
Fry and Leela discover Bender is not only alive, but playing the robots’ prejudice to his own benefit by telling them he’s killed a million billion humans on Earth. At abandoned robot porn shop, Fry and Leela find Bender, but he refuses to let them rescue him. Before Fry and Leela can leave, the other robots arrive, and have Bender arrest them.
The two are placed on trial for being human where the judge immediately finds them guilty. It sentences them to a life of tedious robot-type labor. A trapdoor opens and they fall into a room where they meet the five Robot Elders. The Elders reveal that the trial was merely a show for the masses, and they give Bender the honor of killing Fry and Leela. Bender refuses, stating that the pair are his friends, and that humans pose no threat to robots because they are too stupid.
The Robot Elders reveal that they are already aware of this fact. However, humans provide them with a useful scapegoat to distract the population from their actual problems: lug nut shortages and an incompetent government of corrupt Robot Elders.
The Robot Elders now must kill the three of them for knowing too much. However, when Fry threatens to breathe fire on the Robot Elders, they become confused as they can not remember if that’s true or a lie they made about humans.
The crew takes this opportunity to flee, and a horde of robots quickly takes chase. As the crew escapes into the air on the winch, the robots stack on top of each other—keeping pace with the winch. Bender remembers that he never actually delivered the package, and tosses it into the hands of the robot on top.
This causes the robot tower to become unbalanced and fall to the ground. The package bursts open, and showers the robots in much-needed lug nuts. The robots then renounce their human-hating ways for saving them.
As the crew heads safely back to Earth, they celebrate Robanukah with Bender who then confesses he made the holiday up to get out of work. Fry and Leela knew that already.
Season 1 – Original Air Date: April 20, 1999