To save time on the return to Earth after forcing the statue to be recarved to fix a grammar error, Leela travels through the Bermuda Tetrahedron where they find a graveyard of lost spaceships, including the first crew's Planet Express ship.
Leela becomes obsessed with killing the whale to take revenge for eating the statue and delaying their return to Earth in time for the memorial, and grows increasingly insane with each failed effort.
The whale eventually devours the Planet Express ship and swallows the crew alive (with the exception of Zoidberg, who again returns to Earth in an escape pod).
[citation needed] The planet where the crew goes to pick up the memorial statue, Xenotaph 3, is a pun on the word cenotaph and the prefix xeno-.
The spaceship graveyard in the Bermuda Tetrahedron contains many spaceships from popular culture, including Discovery One from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 from the television series Lost,[5] the Satellite of Love from the comic science fiction television series Mystery Science Theater 3000,[6] the Jupiter II from the science fiction television series Lost in Space,[7] the spaceship from the animated television series Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space,[5] the spaceship commonly seen on albums by Electric Light Orchestra, Journey and Boston, an Apollo Lunar Module with the ascent and descent stages still attached, an Apollo Command/Service Module labeled "Apollo 100", and Skylab.
In the scene where the Planet Express crew are, in Hermes' words, 'in the belly of the beast', Fry uses a reference of two characters from different books; Jonah, from the Old Testament/Tanakh; and Pinocchio, when he is swallowed by The Terrible Shark.
During the chase for the whale, Leela tells Amy "Negative, Sailor Moon", an obvious reference to the anime series of the same name.
This is a reference to The Joy Luck Club, a novel by Amy Tan about the mother-daughter relationships in a group of Chinese American Immigrant families.
Right before the episode ends, while the Planet Express crew and others, who have emerged from the space whale, are off screen, apparently killing it, Zoidberg is approached by Candy, who seductively hints at a past relationship; Zoidberg runs a comb through his hair and styles it the same way as The Fonz, and ends the episode with his famous catchphrase, "Aaaay!"
Robert Canning of IGN praised the episode, calling it a "rollicking tale of adventure and laughs" and enjoying a return to plots involving deliveries, which he felt had been lacking in the new season.
Giving the episode a rating of 8.5/10, he wrote: "It delivered a fun space adventure while keeping the laughs coming from every direction.
It wasn't an episode that made me think or left me moved, but "Mobius Dick" provided the biggest belly laughs I've had all season."
Of the overall episode, he wrote: "The ep[isode] had some structural problems, but there were solid gags throughout, and the plot's basis in character helped hold the weaker jokes together.