Pinewood Derby

Pinewood Derby is the sixth episode of the thirteenth season of the Comedy Central show, South Park. It originally aired on Comedy Central in the United States and Canada on April 15, 2009 and aired in the United Kingdom on April 17, 2009.

Synopsis
Randy Marsh is determined that his son, Stan Marsh, wins the Pinewood Derby.

Plot
Randy Marsh is determined to make sure that Stan wins the annual state pinewood derby. He slips a device into the rear end of the car in order to give it an advantage. Stan learns from a news report, much to his disgust, that the device is a superconducting magnet, stolen from the Large Hadron Collider by Randy, disguised as Princess Leia.

At the finals Stan reluctantly lies to the scout leaders with Randy's help. Randy then speaks to their main rivals Mr. Hollis and his son Emmett where Randy discovers, to his shock, that the Hollis' car clocked 1.5 seconds.

At the finals, Stan lies at the check-in table (with Randy’s coaching) and says that he used only the parts in the approved pinewood derby kit. He wins first place, setting a new speed record; at the same time, the car shoots off the track and into space, reaching warp speed. Not long afterward, two NSA agents visit the Marshes and tell them that an alien species found the car and is on the way to Earth to make contact. A spaceship lands in South Park, but its pilot is a bank robber named Baby-Fark McGeezax, who demands that Stan and Randy build him a new warp drive while holding the entire planet at gunpoint. Everyone believes that they can do it using only the approved kit.

Meanwhile Mr. Hollis, ashamed to have lost to the likes of Randy Marsh, commits suicide in front of his son, much to Emmett's horror.

Stan tries to persuade Randy to tell the truth about the stolen magnet, but Randy refuses because he does not want to look stupid in front of the whole town. As they keep working, an Intergalactic Police ship approaches Earth; McGeezax cloaks his ship and drags Stan out of sight, leaving the townspeople to divert the officers’ questions until they leave. Even though the officers say that McGeezax stole a large sum of "space cash" from the Universal Bank, no one admits to seeing him.

As Stan and Randy finish the car, Stan stabs McGeezax to death at Randy’s urging. The ship is promptly decloaked and found to contain the stolen space cash. Instead of calling the Intergalactic Police, though, Randy persuades everyone to keep quiet and divide up the money, buying the world leaders’ silence by giving them shares as well. Four days later, as Randy is trying to keep the peace among them, the two officers land in South Park again. They now know that McGeezax landed here and Randy tells them of his death, but everyone denies finding any space cash — even though the country of Mexico has suddenly built many new hospitals and water parks. Randy berates the Mexican government for jeopardizing the cover-up with this spending spree after the officers have left.

While Stan glumly stares at his first-place trophy and the newspaper articles he has collected, almost every one of which shows Randy excited and himself uneasy, Randy is still trying to keep other countries from doing as Mexico did. Learning that Finland is about to tell the Intergalactic Police the truth, he persuades the rest of the world to wipe it out. The country is immediately destroyed in a nuclear missile attack. The Intergalactic Police pay a third visit to ask about the strike, prompting fake disbelief from the world that in turn rouses the officers’ suspicions. By this time, Stan has had enough of the deception, tells the truth about cheating in the pinewood derby, and returns his trophy; however, no one else on the planet is willing to confess about anything else that has happened.

McGeezax now emerges from the officers’ ship alive and well, having faked his death earlier, and reveals that the entire chain of events was a test to see if Earth was worthy of joining the intergalactic community. The space cash was only worth what the humans had decided it was worth, and were tested by the aliens to see if they would return the cash rather than keep it. Had they returned it, Earth would have become a member of the Federation of Planets. Unfortunately for the humans, they failed because they tried to conceal the fact that they hoarded the space cash. As punishment for failing that test so badly, Earth and the Moon are permanently enclosed in a gigantic, cubical force field and isolated from the rest of the Universe — to which Randy says, "Well, that sucks."

Cultural References

 * Randy dresses up as Princess Leia when he steals the superconducting magnet.
 * The suicide by Mr. Hollis and the response by his son parodies that of a scene in Dead Poets Society.
 * The movies referenced by the newsreader are Contact and Star Trek:First Contact. Contact was referenced in Tom's Rhinoplasty and Star Trek has been referenced in many other episodes. Specifically, Earth being enclosed in a giant "web", closed off from the rest of the universe, is a direct reference to the Original Series episode "The Tholian Web".

Politicians
The Politicians featured in the episode include:

Gordon Brown of the United Kingdom

John Howard of Australia

Nicolas Sarkozy of France

Angela Merkel of Germany

Alexander Stubb, Esko Aho and Matti Vanhanen of Finland

Raila Odinga of Kenya

Silvio Berlusconi of Italy

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil

Vladimir Putin of Russia

Im Young-Bak of South Korea

Felipe Calderón of Mexico

Hu Jintao of China

Taro Aso of Japan

Barack Obama is strangely absent from the episode where Randy is the one representing the country.

Trivia

 * Kyle Broflovski doesn't appear in this episode, possibly because he's in Jew Scouts. Strangely enough, however, his parents are seen standing in the background when the 'space police' land.
 * Kenny McCormick only appears in the bleachers with his dad and Eric Cartman appears in the crowd when the aliens land.
 * Cartman and Kenny don't speak in this episode.
 * Despite not having sons, Mr. Testaburger and Mr. Stevens appear in the bleachers with Wendy Testaburger and Bebe Stevens.
 * Mr. Mackey is revealed to be a member of the scouts as he is seen in a panning shot in a scouts uniform.
 * This episode depicts John Howard as Prime Minister of Australia but Kevin Rudd was voted in a year before Barack Obama.
 * This episode, which was supposed to have aired on February 8th of 2009 on the Latin American MTV, was banned, allegedly due to the complaints of Felipe Calderón due to the infamous image that is depicted about his country. However the Mexican government has since given its approval, and the episode aired on April 4, 2010.
 * In the South Park Season 13commentary for 'Pinewood Derby', Matt Stone and Trey Parker said that this episode was originally going to be about Randy finding a dinosaur fossil that has a gun, and Randy realises that the dinosaurs were wiped out because they killed each other with guns, so Randy tells everyone to get rid of their guns. But someone (to Matt and Trey's dissappointment because they had also planned this to be an hour special) told Matt and Trey that this happened in a Simpsons episode.

Deleted Scene
Randy and Stan are in the car while Randy calls the Hollis'. They claim their car clocked in at 1.2 seconds while Stan's clocked in at only 1.8. This causes Randy to curse and get pissed.