This episode is a commentary on Internet attachment, addiction and withdrawal.
Randy's keyboard is reversed, with the number pad on the left side. This has happened before on other keyboards in the show.
Shelley has an e-boyfriend with an Arabic name who lives in Montana. Plenty of online relationships begin and end without the parties seeing each other, but actual meetings can be pretty awkward when you know everything about your partner before you meet.
Stan is now using Safari as his default browser.
Starbuck's is back in South Park after being run out of there by Harbuck's back in season 3.
You've gotta suspend disbelief here: you can still place a call if you want someone who's lost his Internet connection to know if the Internet is still up somewhere.
Grapes of Wrath - The Marshes drive to California. The scenes are shot in black and white as films from the 1930s would be, and the music is banjo. This evokes the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl, when money and goods dried up and California saw a big population spike as a result. The mention of Silicon Valley evokes the burst of the Internet bubble in 2001, which raised fears about another Great Depression. Also, Henry Fonda as Tom Joad, our Man 6:
"40 seconds of Internet per day." - Theoretically, that's 90 families per hour, 2160 families per day. But the Internet is taken down at night and restored in the morning. If that's 8 hours downtime, only 1440 families can use it daily.
The Internet is a colossal Linksys router, which behaves like any other router.
The link I embedded in the transcript leads to the onlive version of the episode hosted at South Park Studios, heh. :) So meta...
Some of the transients the Marshes met at the transient camp beat them to the Internet refugee camp. :D
Transient Man 6 is the only transient with a change of clothes. But then, Randy didn't change clothes either, heh.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind - The scientist trying to communicate with the Internet via music keyboard. In the online version, the scientist plays all the notes, the last note changing from F to F#.
What you don't see is Randy reconnecting the computer. There's no reason to think the volunteers hooked up the computer inside the room only to lock the room up so nobody can use it.
"The flashing yellow light is green now!" - earlier it was a flashing orange light.
The scientists are viewing the Internet on Safari browsers. One of them gets the Drudge Report, with a Hillary picture on the right side of the page.
On Deadly Ground - The end speech by Randy is inspired by the one Steven Seagal delivered at the end. Seagal wears a similar shirt in that film. Here's Seagal's speech:
| "I’d like to start out by saying, thank you to all the brothers and sisters that have come here today representing this cause. I have been asked by Mr. Itok and the tribal council to speak to you and the members of the Press about the injustice that has been brought against us by some Government Officials and Big Business. How many of you out there have heard of alternative engines? Engines that can run on anything from alcohol to garbage or water. Or carburetors that can get hundreds of miles to the gallon. Or electric or magnetic engines, that can practically run forever. You don’t know about them because if they were to come into use, they’d put the oil companies out of business. The concept of the internal combustion engine has been obsolete for over fifty years. But because of the Oil Cartels and corrupt government regulation, we and the rest of the world have been forced to use gasoline for over a hundred years. Big Business is primarily responsible for destroying the water we drink, the air we breathe and the food we eat. They have no care for the world they destroy, only for the money they make in the process. How many oil spills can we endure? Millions and millions of gallons of oil are now destroying the ocean and the many forms of life it supports. Among these is plankton, which supplies sixty to ninety percent of the Earth’s oxygen. This supports the entire marine ecosystem which forms the basis of our planet’s food supply. But the plankton is dying. I thought, well, let’s go to remote state or country, anywhere on Earth. But in doing a little research I realized that these people broker toxic waste all over the world. They basically control the legislation, and, in fact, they control the Law. The Law says, "no company can be fined over $25,000 a day." For companies making $10,000,000 dollars a day by dumping lethal toxic wastes into the ocean, it’s only good business to continue doing this. They influence the media so that they can control our minds. They have made it a crime to speak out for ourselves, and if we do so we’re called "conspiracy nuts" and we’re laughed at. We’re angry because we’re all being chemically and genetically damaged, and we don’t even realize it. Unfortunately, this will effect our children. We go to work each day and right under our noses we see our car and the car in front of us spewing noxious poisonous gasses that are all accumulative poisons. These poisons kill us slowly, even when we see no effect. How many of us would have believed if we were told twenty years ago that on a certain day we wouldn’t be able to see fifty feet in front of us. That we wouldn’t be able to take a deep breath because the air would be a mass of poisonous gas. That we wouldn’t be able to drink out of our faucets, that we’d have to buy water out of bottles. Our most common and God-given rights have been taken away from us. Unfortunately, the reality of our lives is so grim that nobody wants to hear it. Now, I’ve been asked what we can do? I think we need a responsible body of people that can actually represent us rather than Big Business. This body of people must not allow the introduction of anything into our environment that is not absolutely biodegradable or able to be chemically neutralized upon production. And finally, as long as there is profit to be made from polluting the Earth, companies and individuals will continue to do what they want. We have to force these companies to operate safely and responsibly, and with all our best interests in mind. So that when they don’t, we can take back our resources and our hearts and our minds and do what’s right." |
The line not in either version of the episode, but which appears in the end credits for the online version is "It's gone. Our reserve Internet is gone!" It would have explained why the Internet was gone by the time the volunteers got into the shed.