Leela

Turanga Leela is a fictional character from the animated television series Futurama. Leela is spaceship captain, pilot, and head of all aviation services on board the Planet Express Ship. Throughout the series, she has an on-again, off-again relationship with Philip J. Fry, the central character in the series. The character, voiced by Katey Sagal, is named after the Turangalîla-Symphonie by Olivier Messiaen. She is one of the few characters in the cast to routinely display competence and the ability to command, and routinely saves the rest of the cast from disaster. However, she suffers extreme self-doubt because she has only one eye and grew up as a bullied orphan. She first believes herself an alien, but later finds out she is the least-mutated sewer mutant in the history of 31st-century Earth. Her family (particularly her parents' accent and "outcast" status) parodies aspects of pollution and undesirability associated with industrial New Jersey when compared with New York City. Fictional character biography Turanga Leela was born to Morris and Munda, two mutants who live in the sewer deep under New New York City. The mutant doctor who delivered Leela remarked that she was "the least mutated mutant ever born". When Leela was still an infant, her parents gave her up to the Cookieville Minimum Security Orphanarium with a note written in mysterious symbols to suggest that Leela was an alien, so that she would have a better life than a typical mutant. For the first three seasons of the series, Leela hopes to meet another member of her race of one-eyed aliens. In the episode "A Bicyclops Built for Two", Leela meets Alcazar, a cyclops who convinces her that he and she are the last two members of their extinct race, only to discover that he is a shapeshifting impostor who just wanted to marry her so she would be his maid. Leela's parents' plan for concealing her origins works well until an industrial accident caused by environmentally irresponsible Bender brings Leela and her friends into the New New York City's sewer system where for the first time Leela meets her parents and discovers that she is not a cyclopean alien, but is actually a sewer mutant. In the episode "The Problem with Popplers", Leela's family name, Turanga, was used for the first time. The episode "Less Than Hero" establishes that among Leela and her parents, their family name is placed before the given name.