TVSquad

(S10E13)

Atheist in the future: Dawkins knew that logic and reason were the way of the future, but it wasn't until he met his beautiful wife that he learned using logic and reason isn't enough. You have to be a dick to everyone who doesn't think like you.

First of all, I don't watch a ton of science fiction, so who can tell me what the opening sequence was spoofing? It looked vaguely familiar, but my sci-fi exposure is rather limited. Help a brotha out, won't you?

If I had to tie this two-parter into a neat little package, I would conclude that Matt and Trey wanted to show that what stands in the way of human progress is the human race itself. Our quest to find the Truth will always be thwarted by our own egos. Even in a future age where logic and science rule, wars are still waged over the Great Question. Of course, we find out in the end that the "Great Question" is "what should atheists call themselves?" This seems to prove, ultimately, that even the most intelligent among us can be really, really stupid.

Someone who doesn't believe in a higher power may scoff at all the wars fought over religion, but this episode seemed to say that absolute adherence to any belief will result in conflict, because even those who are science-minded have differing ideas. The one subject that comes to mind is global warming, a phenomenon whose severity and impact still arouses debate in the scientific community. In the future, however, evolved otters feel it is they who are on the right path, because they eat food off their tummies, rather than needlessly chopping down trees to make tables. Death to the table eaters!

Stepping away from the deeper meaning of the episode, I thought it had a lot of great moments. I loved how quickly Cartman adjusted to the future, and how, despite the war and bloodshed happening around him, he never lost sight of his quest to play Nintendo Wii. The time phone gag was funny, too, especially when Cartman tries to plead with Kyle and promises to suck his balls if he helps him get back to the present. Suck them dry.

I did feel the ending, in which Cartman's inadvertent tampering with the space-time continuum results in him skipping to a point in time when the atheist sects now get along and have the technology to send him home, was helped out a little by the deus ex machina, but I suppose one could argue it was also a way to mock the convention of time travel movies.

Sometimes satire can work by taking one side (The Daily Show, Borat), but what South Park often does, and they certainly did it in this episode, is to step outside of the frame and satirize the larger picture as a way to remind us not to take ourselves so seriously all the time. It seems that as long as people keep acting like people, Matt and Trey will never run out of ideas.