Boat Puzzle
'No, my cabbage moths have already started laying eggs in them! Send the trolley into the river!' 'No, the sailing wolf will steal the boat to rescue them!'
'No, my cabbage moths have already started laying eggs in them! Send the trolley into the river!' 'No, the sailing wolf will steal the boat to rescue them!'
This comic is a twist on an old riddle. In the original riddle, a person has to cross a river in a boat that can only hold them and one other object. They have a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage that they need to bring across with them, similar to the first panel. If the wolf is left alone with the goat, however, the wolf will eat the goat; and if the goat and cabbage are alone, the goat will eat the cabbage. (The problem can be solved in seven trips.)
However, the comic quickly devolves into surrealism in the later panels as new characters show up, bringing deviations of the original "cabbage", "goat", and "wolf" that add extra layers of complexity to the riddle. White Hat brings extra wolves and cabbages. Black Hat, in his traditional classhole style, brings cabbage moths which will infest unsupervised cabbages with destructive larvae, and boat-destroying termites. How he intends to bring them across the river (or even if he wants to) is unknown, but it brings to mind the parable of The Scorpion and the Frog, where the scorpion stings (out of instinct) the frog ferrying it across the river. Beret Guy arrives with a wolf who can operate a boat, who could perhaps serve as a second pilot to expedite the crossing, so long as he is not asked to ferry a goat, and also a goat who eats wolves, possibly in addition to the cabbages. This is unusual,[citation needed] as one would expect from Beret Guy's associates.
The last panel is a reference to the Trolley Problem, a moral test that asks the participant whether they would passively let people in the way of an uncontrollable trolley die or actively divert the trolley to kill a single person standing on a branch of the tracks. The comic gives a twist here too: according to the title text, the characters must choose between stopping the trolley full of wolves with a cushion of cabbages (in which Black Hat's cabbage moths have laid eggs, which he implicitly argues are morally equivalent to "innocent children") or letting it crash into the river (at which point the wolf who can operate a boat will steal the boat to rescue the wolves from the trolley, which will delay the other characters from crossing the river).
The River Crossing puzzle was also mentioned in 1134: Logic Boat and referenced in 589: Designated Drivers and 2684: Road Space Comparison.
The Trolley Problem was also mentioned in 1455: Trolley Problem and referenced in 1938: Meltdown and Spectre.