“South Park” has parodied just about everything you can imagine in the three decades it’s been on the air, but there’s one franchise the hit animated series keeps coming back to: “Star Trek.” The first reference to “Star Trek” came in the tenth episode when Stan gives Jesus a pep talk by saying “Don’t try to be a great man, just be a man.” The line comes from “Star Trek: First Contact,” a film that co-creator Matt Stone lovingly called “such a stupid movie” in the episode’s DVD commentary.
“There’s definitely lots of ‘Star Trek’ in ‘South Park,'” Trey Parker added. “I completely grew up on ‘Star Trek.’ That was my religion in a lot of ways. That was the mythology that I followed.”
In the many years since that first “Star Trek” reference, there have been tons of jokes and homages to the series, enough that the exhaustive “Trek” fan-wiki Memory Alpha has an entire list with dozens of examples. Some of these references are quick jokes; others are load-bearing parts of the episode, cleverly riffing on the beloved franchise and the many “Star Trek” tropes that shaped the sci-fi genre. Here are the five best times the Comedy Central series made “Star Trek” jokes.
City on the Edge of Forever
The name of this Season 2 episode is a direct copy of the title of the penultimate episode of “Star Trek: The Original Series” Season 1. (Or almost a direct copy; the “TOS” episode begins with “The.”) “City on the Edge of Forever” is mostly a clip show, with Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny remembering some of their past adventures while stuck in a school bus that’s hanging dangerously off a cliff. That’s quite a different plot than the “TOS” episode, which is widely considered one of the best episodes of “Star Trek,” though both do involve revisiting the past, as some of the Enterprise crew go back in time.
The most overt “Trek” reference, other than the episode’s name, comes when a child wearing a red shirt — complete with a Starfleet logo — exits the school bus only to instantly be attacked and killed by a giant scary monster lurking outside. The unfortunate student was, quite literally, a redshirt, a fan term for the disposable members of the advance team that would typically accompany Kirk and other Enterprise officers to strange, dangerous new worlds. Usually, they died horribly.
Clearly, Matt Stone and Trey Parker knew their “Star Trek” tropes. However, it’s worth noting that they subverted this one all the time. While it was always the redshirts, not the main characters on “Star Trek” who died, “South Park” killed off Kenny in nearly every episode until Season 5, one of TV’s best running gags. He’s even killed in this episode by the same monster who killed the redshirt.
Spookyfish
Another Season 2 episode, “Spookyfish” riffs on a different iconic “Star Trek” trope. When Cartman shows up at the bus stop, Stan, Kyle, and Kenny notice two things are different about him. The first is that he has a goatee. The second is that he’s acting really nice and polite, which is not at all like how Cartman normally behaves. Eventually, they discover that this isn’t the Cartman they’re used to. He’s from an evil parallel universe where morality is flipped.
Because the normal Cartman is such a jerk, an opposite “evil” version of him would instead have to be a really nice guy. By the end of the episode, the alternate versions of Stan and Kyle (who are actually evil) arrive to bring their Cartman back. The boys want to send the real, mean Cartman to the parallel universe instead because they like the new, nice guy a lot better, but Cartman tricks them into sending away his goateed alter-ego.
The whole thing is a riff on the Mirror Universe, which first appeared in the “TOS” episode “Mirror, Mirror” and returned in “Deep Space Nine” and “Enterprise” before becoming a major part of the plot of “Discovery.” There are some examples of Mirror Universe versions of characters in “Trek” being nicer than their Prime Universe counterparts, like Brunt in “DS9,” but nothing as explicit as the nice version of Cartman in “Spookyfish.”
4th Grade
In its fourth season, Matt Stone and Trey Parker decided to somewhat arbitrarily graduate the kids from 3rd to 4th grade, complete with a swanky new intro that comically made the change out to be a much bigger deal than it was. The boys are not happy with their new teacher, however, and they get the idea to create a time machine so they can return to those halcyon 3rd grade days. In “4th Grade,” they consult two geeky young men known as the Star Trek Nerds to build one.
Thanks to the Star Trek Nerds, this is perhaps the “South Park” episode that’s the most explicit with its many references to “Star Trek.” The two characters reference many “Trek” episodes and debate which theory of time travel depicted in “Star Trek” is true. There’s the “Mr. Spock Theory” (time travel via slingshotting around the sun, as seen in the “TOS” episode “Tomorrow is Yesterday”) or the “Lieutenant Commander Data Theory” (time travel via magnetic vibration, as seen in “The Next Generation” episode “Time’s Arrow”).
The two nerds also argue among themselves over how many episodes of “TOS” there are, with one claiming there were 72 and another adamant there were 73. Both are wrong, it turns out. There are 79 episodes of “TOS,” something Trekkies Stone and Parker almost certainly would’ve known. Did they get the numbers wrong on purpose to troll other nerds who were watching “South Park?” It wouldn’t be out of character for the duo.
Fun with Veal
In the Season 6 episode “Fun with Veal,” which follows the boys as they attempt to save a bunch of baby cows from a slaughterhouse, Cartman convinces a hostage negotiator to send a truck that they and the calves can escape in. He also demands that “the guy who plays Worf” drive the car, and, indeed, an animated Michael Dorn shows up in his Worf makeup.
Exasperated by Cartman’s demands, Dorn begrudgingly agrees to call Cartman “Captain” but draws the line when Cartman demands that he kill people. (“Some godd**n Klingon you are!” complains Cartman.) Since “South Park” rarely features guest stars (George Clooney’s voice cameo being a notable exception), Matt Stone voiced Dorn in the episode.
However, had Stone and Trey Parker asked, they probably could’ve gotten the real “Next Generation” and “Deep Space Nine” actor to play himself. In a 2015 Reddit AMA, Dorn said he was “a HUGE fan of South Park” and while he was excited, he was also “a bit p***ed off” because they didn’t reach out. “I would’ve done it for nothing,” Dorn said.
Pre-School
Part of this Season 8 episode is a riff on Martin Scorsese’s movie “Cape Fear,” as the boys are dealing with a recently released convict who is seeking revenge on them for something they did in the past. In “Pre-School,” Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny are the targets of Trent Boyett upon his release from juvenile hall because they blamed him for a fire that horribly burned their preschool teacher Miss Claridge when they were 5 years old.
“It was an obvious jump to the ‘Star Trek’ episode ‘The Menagerie,'” Matt Stone and Trey Parker said in the Season 8 DVD commentary. Like Christopher Pike in that classic “TOS” episode, Miss Claridge is fully encased in a black wheelchair with only her grimacing, badly scarred head exposed. She and Pike can only communicate through beeps, with one beep meaning “yes” and two beeps meaning “no.”
In typical “South Park” fashion, this dark parody is even darker than the source material. While Pike ends “The Menagerie” happily, living an illusory life on the planet Talos IV, Miss Claridge’s wheelchair goes nuts when it’s accidentally hit by a taser. It crashes into a propane store, setting her on fire, before then crashing into a pet store so some cats can attack her for good measure. Pike had it easy.
