[1] It premiered on Comedy Central in the United States on September 4, 2013, along with Futurama Live, a special preshow and aftershow for the occasion.
The plot involves Professor Farnsworth inventing a device that allows the user to travel backwards in time by ten seconds.
[2] After Leela is ejected into space and nearly killed due to a ride malfunction during a package delivery run to Luna Park, Fry becomes worried that he may lose her again and decides to propose to her.
After presenting the ring to Leela, he invites her to meet him atop the Vampire State Building at 6:30 pm if she agrees to marry him.
Heartbroken, he jumps off the roof in a suicide attempt, but sees her approaching and notes that the building's clock reads 6:25; his watch has continued to run normally throughout all his uses of the button.
He also warns that anyone leaving the shelter could be destroyed if the device is subsequently reused less than 10 seconds later, because the anti-chronitons would not know where to send that person back.
He has been trying to find the button for decades and, since Fry has kept the pieces, is able to rebuild it with one key modification – the next press will restore the entire universe to the instant before the Professor conceived of the device and erase everyone's memory of all events since then.
[5] Sean Gardert, writing for Paste, was relatively more critical and summarized that, "Not to say that 'Meanwhile' was a bad episode, as it was truly great, an epic 22 minutes that stood up to anything the show's done before.
I was disappointed, to say the least, but I still look forward to catching this episode as a rerun, and have already written fanfiction in my head as to what would happen were Fry and Leela allowed to return to the past with all of their memories still intact.