"But, when we weren't laughing about the absurdity of it all, we asked ourselves, "How did we ever get to the point where we were, in fact, ruled by a dairy product?" Oh, as a matter of record, we knew how it happened."
Humanity finds themselves in over their head when scientists accidentally engineer a sentient, intelligent bowl of yogurt. Narrated by Maurice LaMarche. Based on the short story of the same name by John Scalzi.
Tropes:
- Artistic License – Physics: It would be rather difficult to launch giant yogurt cups into space for aerodynamic reasons alone.
- Artistic License – Law: The question to give a territory and legislative and economic powers to yogurts in the US institutional system left aside, even if the president would do so, his decision wouldn't extend outside of the US and Ohio territories. So the yogurts would need to have multiple other plans for each other country. However according to the first sentient yogurt, they already were negotiating with China.
- But again, it's a story about yogurts outsmarting humanity.
- Batman Gambit: The yogurt gave the president a budget that would eliminate the national debt in a year, in exchange for Ohio, under the condition that the budget be followed to the letter. Any changes would collapse the economy. Congress ignored the warning and the economy collapsed, allowing the yogurt to talk the president into signing over all authority to the yogurt. The narrator ponders that the yogurt, being smart enough to make such a budget, would also have predicted Congress would screw it up.
- Bloody Hilarious: The economic devastation caused when the President diverges from the yogurt's plan shows a situation so desperate that we see someone making soup out of a baby within six months. This is Played for Laughs, of course.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: The yogurt is of course a stand-in for artificial intelligences and how they can render humans an irrelevance and hijack our civilisation if we are not careful.
- Easily Conquered World: Exaggerated in this episode where the Earth gets taken over by a sentient yogurt, of all things.
- Epic Fail: The US government somehow manages to cause an economic collapse in just six months despite being given explicit instructions on how not to do it by the yogurt.
- Everything Is An I Pod In The Future: Ten years after the yogurt took over, just before it takes off.
- Lighter and Softer: This short is much brighter in both visual style and tone than any of the other shorts, and is one of the most comedic in its storyline.
- Narrator: The only short to have one not tied to a character, provided by Maurice LaMarche.
- No Party Like a Donner Party After the economy collapsed, we see a hobo cooking a baby.
- Shiny New Australia: The yogurt demands Ohio in exchange for its help. It's initially laughed off, but then it says that China offered a whole province for the information, which gets the U.S. to concede to its demands.
- Synthetic Voice Actor: The yogurt once brought to life utilizes both male and female text-to-speech voices overlapping one another.
- You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: It's implied the yogurts are now going to conquer other planets now that they have their spaceships. Considering how humans are now reliant on their guidance, things don't look so great.
