Somewhere in the multiverse, there’s a version of South Park where Cartman grows up, learns empathy, and uses his powers for good. And yes: in that universe, he still argues about how many episodes of Star Trek there are.

That’s the beautiful collision at the heart of these two franchises. Star Trek is the aspirational space future where humanity levels up. South Park is the reminder that humanity… hasn’t leveled up yet and is currently screaming in a parking lot about Hot Pockets. When South Park references Star Trek, it’s rarely a cheap “hey, nerds!” wink. It’s usually a carefully chosen sci-fi trope, a fandom in-joke, or an affectionate parody with teethsometimes aimed at Trek itself, sometimes aimed at how we worship it.

Below are the best Star Trek references on South Park, ranked by how iconic, clever, and laugh-out-loud they areplus a few deep cuts for the Trekkies who can identify a warp sound effect faster than they can identify their own feelings.

Why ‘South Park’ Keeps Beaming Up ‘Star Trek’

Trey Parker and Matt Stone have never hidden that they love weaponizing pop culture. Trek is perfect ammo: it’s huge, it’s earnest, it’s loaded with recognizable rules (the Prime Directive, redshirts, mirror universes), and it has a fanbase that can get heated over the difference between “canon” and “I read it on a cereal box once.”

The show’s Trek jokes tend to fall into three categories:

• Direct homages to specific episodes and classic Trek story engines (parallel worlds, mind control, time travel).
• Fandom jokes about the people who love Trek with the intensity of a starship’s warp core.
• “Trek logic” applied to absurd small-town problems, because nothing says “Colorado” like intergalactic diplomacy.

The Best ‘Star Trek’ References on ‘South Park’ (Ranked)

1) “Fun with Veal” Cartman Demands Worf… and Gets Him

If you only know one Trek moment in South Park, it’s probably this: Cartman negotiates a hostage standoff andamong his totally reasonable demands insists that Michael Dorn show up in full Worf makeup, drive the getaway truck, and address Cartman as “Captain.”

The joke lands on multiple levels. First, it’s inherently funny that government agencies cave to a child whose leadership style is “tiny dictator with snacks.” Second, it’s a perfect Trek inversion: Worf is the no-nonsense security officer you want in a crisis, and here he is stuck in a petty, suburban nightmare chauffeuring a kid who absolutely should not be allowed to command a tricycle, let alone a starship.

The cherry on top is Dorn’s reluctant compliance. Trek fans love Worf because he’s all honor and discipline. South Park loves Worf because putting honor and discipline inside Cartman’s chaos is like putting a museum curator in charge of a monster-truck rally. The tension is the punchline.

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2) “Spookyfish” Mirror Universe Goatees, but Make It Cartman

The “evil parallel universe” trope is a sci-fi comfort food. In Star Trek, the Mirror Universe is where the Federation goes bad and Spock famously wears a goatee. In South Park, the goatee becomes the universal symbol for “this version of a character is from the wrong dimension and is probably up to something.”

What makes “Spookyfish” elite is that it doesn’t just borrow the conceptit uses it to drive character comedy. “Nice Cartman” is so suspicious that it feels like a horror movie (which, frankly, it is). Meanwhile, the episode squeezes extra laughs out of the low-tech, split-screen vibe of older TV, echoing the feel of classic genre storytelling.

Critics have even framed “Spookyfish” as the payoff to a run of Star Trek-flavored episodes in the same season, with this one being the most blatantand the funniesthomage. It’s one of those references that works if you’ve never seen Trek… and works better if you have.

3) “Roger Ebert Should Lay Off the Fatty Foods” A Full-On Original Series Homage

Sometimes South Park does a reference so committed it’s basically cosplay with dialogue. This episode is explicitly built as an homage to the classic Star Trek: The Original Series episode “Dagger of the Mind.”

The setup is Trek-perfect: a bizarre institution, unsettling “therapy,” a sense that something is very wrong behind polite smiles, and a plot that leans into the specific flavor of mid-century sci-fi paranoia. The show is clearly having fun recreating the vibethen immediately undercutting it with South Park’s signature “yes, but what if this was also disgusting?”

It’s also a reminder that the writers aren’t just grabbing surface-level fandom. They’re referencing specific Trek story DNA: controlled environments, institutional horror, and the uneasy boundary between “science” and “abuse.”

4) “City on the Edge of Forever (Flashbacks)” Title Flex + Redshirt Logic

Trek fans clock the title instantly: it’s playing off “The City on the Edge of Forever,” one of the most famous Star Trek episodes ever. That’s already a deep-cut nod. But the episode also slides in a classic Trek meta-joke: the doomed “redshirt,” the expendable crew member who exists mainly to demonstrate that the situation is dangerous.

South Park translates that into its own language: a red-shirted kid gets eliminated in a way that signals “yup, we’re doing the thing.” It’s the kind of reference that doesn’t stop the plot to wave at the audience. It just quietly rewards anyone who grew up watching unnamed officers bravely walk into trouble like they were paid per scream.

5) “Fourth Grade” The Star Trek Geeks, Time Travel, and the Borg on a T-Shirt

If “Fun with Veal” is the biggest Trek cameo, “Fourth Grade” is the most accurate Trek fandom snapshot. The boys recruit two college-age “Star Trek geeks” to build a time machine out of Timmy’s wheelchair, and these guys are so Trek-brained that they derail the mission by fighting overwhat else?the number of Trek episodes.

The episode also bakes in one of the most recognizable Trek phrases into costuming: “Resistance is futile,” the Borg’s iconic line, appears as a shirt gag. That detail matters because it’s exactly how fandom leaks into real lifelogos, quotes, and identity signals worn like uniforms.

This is South Park Star Trek parody at its most affectionate: it’s laughing at Trekkies, but it’s laughing like a fellow traveler who knows why the argument matters. (Because it’s never just the number of episodes. It’s the principle. The canon. The sacred spreadsheet.)

6) “Starvin’ Marvin in Space” Wormholes, Bridges, and Trek-Style Space Storytelling

“Starvin’ Marvin in Space” has a lot going on (including broad media satire), but its space sections lean into familiar Trek textures: a wormhole vibe reminiscent of Deep Space Nine storytelling and a spaceship bridge design that echoes the USS Enterprise style.

What makes this a great Trek reference isn’t a single quoteit’s the structural mimicry. Trek is often about moral arguments staged through space travel. This episode uses sci-fi transport, first contact energy, and “we’re in space now, so let’s debate humanity” framing… and then slams that framing into South Park’s tendency to show how messy humans get when they’re convinced they’re being noble.

In other words: it doesn’t just reference Trek. It borrows Trek’s narrative engine, then runs it through a town where adults can’t handle basic problems without lighting something on fire.

7) “Pinewood Derby” The Most ‘Star Trek’ a Car Race Has Ever Felt

Here’s a sentence that should not make sense, but does: a children’s pinewood derby race triggers an interstellar incident. The episode escalates into alien contact and the idea of Earth being judged by a larger “intergalactic community,” a premise that feels spiritually adjacent to Trek’s repeated obsession with how humanity behaves when the galaxy is watching.

Trek loves “first contact” as a moral mirrorhow we introduce ourselves says who we are. South Park loves “first contact” as a chaos grenadehow we introduce ourselves says we are absolutely not ready to be introduced to anyone.

It’s a great example of a Trek-adjacent reference that’s more about concept than costume. No one needs to shout “engage” for the vibe to be unmistakable.

8) Deep Cut: “Conjoined Fetus Lady” A ‘First Contact’ Echo via Moby-Dick Energy

Not every Trek reference comes with a starship. Sometimes it’s a blink-and-you-miss-it lift of dramatic flavor. “Conjoined Fetus Lady” includes a Moby-Dick/Ahab-style beat that has been tied (by episode reference notes) to the way Star Trek: First Contact frames obsession and pursuit.

This one is for the fans who enjoy recognizing not just plots, but tones: the Trek tendency to treat fixation like a captain’s log entry on the edge of becoming a warning label. It’s subtle compared to Worf driving a truck, but it’s the kind of nerdy seasoning that shows how deeply the writers pull from the sci-fi pantry.

What These References Tell Us About ‘South Park’ (and Us)

The funniest Trek jokes on South Park aren’t random. They’re precise. They pick moments where Trek’s seriousness can be flipped, where fandom devotion can be lovingly roasted, and where sci-fi logic can be used to expose real human weirdness.

And that’s why they last. Trek references aren’t just Easter eggs herethey’re a toolkit. Mirror universes become a way to talk about identity. Borg quotes become shorthand for obsessive groupthink. Worf becomes the straight man trapped in absurdity. Even the redshirt gag becomes a tiny lesson in storytelling: sometimes you introduce a character purely to demonstrate danger, and sometimes that character is a kid in a red shirt who never stood a chance.

Conclusion

If you came here looking for the best Star Trek references on South Park, the short version is: start with “Fun with Veal” for the Worf absurdity, hit “Spookyfish” for Mirror Universe comedy, and don’t skip “Roger Ebert Should Lay Off the Fatty Foods” if you want a true Original Series-style homage.

The longer version is what makes it fun: South Park doesn’t just reference Trek because it’s famous. It references Trek because Trek is a giant library of storytelling machinesand South Park loves stealing the machine, duct-taping it to a shopping cart, and launching it down a hill just to see what breaks.

Field Notes: The “Trek Fan Experience” of Watching ‘South Park’ (Extra)

Watching South Park as a Trek fan is a special kind of emotional cardio: part delight, part whiplash, and part “waitwas that a Deep Space Nine thing?” while your non-Trek friend stares at you like you’ve started speaking in a secret language (which, to be fair, you have).

The first experience you’ll notice is the two-speed laughter. The base joke hits immediatelyCartman is being Cartman, an adult is being wildly irresponsible, the town is spiraling but the Trek layer arrives half a second later. That delay is the reward. It’s the same little dopamine pop you get when a starship door sound sneaks into a random TV show, or when a character casually drops a phrase like “resistance is futile” and you can practically hear a Borg cube humming in the background of your brain.

Then comes the “spot-the-trope” game. Mirror universes, redshirt logic, first-contact ethicsthese are Trek’s comfort ingredients, and South Park cooks with them like a chef who keeps tasting the sauce and going, “This needs more chaos.” You’ll catch yourself predicting the Trek-shaped structure before the episode confirms it. “Okay, so if this is a mirror universe riff, the goatee means… yep. There it is.” Or: “If this is a first-contact setup, humanity is about to embarrass itself… yep. There it goes.”

Another classic Trek-fan experience is the fandom recognition sting. “Fourth Grade” doesn’t just make fun of Trek; it makes fun of how Trek fans behaveand the joke sometimes lands with the accuracy of a phaser set to “emotionally uncomfortable.” The arguments over episode counts and canon feel like they were observed in the wild and reported back with anthropological precision. You laugh, but you also think, “I have been within ten feet of this conversation.” Maybe you were even holding the clipboard.

And, honestly, there’s a weird kind of comfort in that. Trek fans love their universe because it’s big enough to live in. South Park recognizes that and treats Trek references as more than nerd confetti. They’re shortcuts to meaning. A Worf cameo instantly communicates “serious sci-fi authority figure.” A Borg quote instantly communicates “unstoppable collective confidence.” A mirror-universe goatee instantly communicates “this version is not safe.” These are cultural passwordsand South Park is fluent.

The final experience is the one that sneaks up on you: you start appreciating how Trek-ish the best jokes actually are. Trek, at its best, is about moral tests under pressure. South Park is also about moral tests under pressureit just replaces “diplomatic incident at the neutral zone” with “everyone in town is doing something insane because they watched one news segment.” When a South Park episode borrows Trek logic, it’s basically saying: “What if we ran a Federation-grade thought experiment… using the worst possible representatives of humanity?”

So yes: it’s fun to catch the references. But the real joythe Trek fan experienceis realizing that the show isn’t only laughing at Trek. It’s using Trek’s storytelling tools to build bigger jokes. And if that isn’t the nerdiest compliment imaginable, nothing is.

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