10 Best TV Episodes Set In Just One Room

In this fantastically witty Season 10 episode set entirely aboard the Planet Express ship, the crew find themselves on a corporate team-building retreat after a series of comic misunderstandings drive them to distrust each other. With smarmy business consultant Dan McMasters set to lead the team-building, Fry and co. reluctantly steel themselves for a day of tedious presentations and trust exercises.

Things go awry, however, when McMasters decides to pick up a hitchhiker from a barren asteroid in an effort to prove that anyone can be trusted. But irony strikes and McMasters is swallowed whole by the hitchhiker, who was apparently a hideous alien shapeshifter all along. With the team-building activities mercifully brought to an early end, what follows is a riotous riff on The Thing with the creature devouring and assimilating people left and right as the crew desperately hunt it down. Shenanigans ensue as it becomes increasingly impossible to pin down whom the monster is disguised as.

Best of all is the brilliant ending, where McMasters reveals that the shapeshifter was a colleague of his, and that the entire thing was an elaborate team-building exercise. Fry and Bender don't buy this for a second and, believing McMasters to be the monster, shoot him repeatedly until he's nothing more than a pile of ash... only for their friends to appear unharmed, revealing that he was telling the truth.

Packed with great gags and surprising twists, this episode is absolutely ship-shape.