South Park: "The End of Serialization as We Know It"

South Park: "The End of Serialization as We Know It", Season 20 #10 (7 December 2016), 277th episode. Trey Parker, dir., script.

Finale of the 2016 season, pausing in the South Park take on the 2016 US presidential election just prior to the inauguration. The premise of the main plot is correctly summarized in the Wikipedia entry, "At the Pentagon," with Mr./President Garrison's Donald Trump character starting to control his panic and take charge, "the US government realizes the only way to stop" the Danish program "Troll Trace is to overload the Internet with trolling to the point where it shuts down and resets itself. They coordinate with the trolling team in Denmark as well as Kyle and Ike to overload the system, but their effort cannot beat the now-active Troll Trace without a massive source of power: the Mars power source at SpaceX." Note here the satiric take on images of a US military "war room" and cf. and contrast more serious visions, e.g., that in WARGAMES. Note well Eric Cartman's return to his misogynist self with a vision of a human colony on Mars as a eutopia for women, dystopia for men. Entering what looks like a mine shaft for a shallow descent, Cartman discovers the secret of the colony: the men are held captive in a shallow underworld of machines and computers, supply the only things women need men for: "our semen and our jokes." The men are naked except for jock straps that help hold in place milking machines on their penises; they stand at laptop computers typing, presumably jokes, with the stations numbered and their ears tagged. For the semen milking, cf. and contrast A BOY AND HIS DOG; for the ear tags, cf. THX 1138. The scene ends with Cartman stripped of his Mars "space suit," trapped at one of the work stations, ear tagged, supplying semen and typing jokes.

RDE 08Dec16; RDE, Title, 21Aug19