2009-12-18
Explanation
This wordless comic tells its story entirely through visuals across seven panels. A rocket ship launches from Earth, flies past Saturn toward Enceladus (one of Saturn's moons, labeled in the comic), lands on its icy surface, and drills down through the ice. The ship then transforms into a submarine and explores the subsurface ocean, where it encounters alien fish-like creatures. The final panel reveals the entire mission's purpose: a McDonald's restaurant with a sign reading "Fish Filet is back!"
The joke plays on the real scientific speculation that Enceladus, which has a subsurface ocean beneath its icy crust, could potentially harbor extraterrestrial life. NASA and other space agencies have seriously discussed missions to explore this ocean. Weinersmith imagines that such an enormously expensive and technologically ambitious mission would not be undertaken for the sake of scientific discovery, but rather so that McDonald's could source fish for its Filet-O-Fish sandwich. It's a commentary on how commercial interests might drive space exploration more effectively than pure science.
The votey panel drives the economic absurdity home with an advertisement showing the fish filet sandwich priced at 9,000,000,000 (39 billion dollars), reflecting the actual cost of the interplanetary fishing expedition. The joke suggests that even if corporate greed did motivate a mission to Enceladus, the resulting product would be hilariously impractical from a business standpoint.