"Roswell That Ends Well" scored a Nielsen rating of 3.1 during its original broadcast, and it received acclaim from television critics, with many hailing it as one of the best episodes of Futurama.
Since GPS technology does not yet exist in this time period, the crew have no way to navigate the ship accurately and crash-land in Roswell, New Mexico.
Refusing to wear a seat belt like the rest of the crew, Bender is flung through the windshield on impact and smashed to pieces.
A microwave antenna from the army base would work as a viable alternative, but Professor Farnsworth warns that stealing it could change history.
However, Farnsworth's advice has the opposite effect; Fry becomes determined to seek out Enos and encourage him to pursue a sexual relationship with his fiancée Mildred.
With time running out, Farnsworth decides that secrecy is no longer important and the crew storm Roswell Air Base by force to get the microwave dish, throwing the entire complex into disarray.
As the ship leaves Earth's atmosphere and triggers the microwave dish for the time jump, Bender's head falls out and has to be left behind in 1947.
[3] The writers did not want to create a situation that would leave fans wondering why the Planet Express crew could not simply travel through time on a regular basis.
In this episode, director Rich Moore used screen position and character movement to mimic the time travel aspects of the plot.
In the planning stages it was decided that actions that played to screen left would represent events from the past or a setback to the plot.
[4] TV critic Rob Owen perceived the episode to have touched upon many of the plot devices and themes commonly seen in time travel stories, most notably the Back to the Future and Terminator movies.