Parks & Recreation introduced the audience to the fictional town of Pawnee, Indiana, which had a lot of colorful residents, including a cult of their very own: the Reasonabilists. The group appeared a few times through the series, but what exactly is the Reasonabilists cult about and what do they want? Created by Greg Daniels and Michael Schur, Parks & Recreation debuted on NBC in 2009 and came to an end in 2015. Though it had a rough start and its first season wasn’t exactly the best, the writers eventually found the series’ tone and the subsequent seasons were better received.
Parks & Recreation followed eternal optimist and waffles enthusiast Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) and her friends and coworkers from the Parks Department of Pawnee, among those Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott), Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari), April Ludgate (Aubrey Plaza), and Andy Dwyer (Chris Pratt). Pawnee was not an easy town, and as much as Leslie insisted it was “the greatest town in America”, it had a lot of unpleasant citizens (Jeremy Jamm, for instance) and strange groups, such as the Reasonabilists.
Pawnee had its own cult, and though it didn’t appear often in the series, it was enough to raise some eyebrows in the Parks Department and among viewers as well. So, what did the Reasonabilists really want?
Parks & Recreation: The Reasonabilists, Zorp, & the End of the World
The Reasonabilists (known around Pawnee as “Zorpies”) are a cult that follows Zorp the Surveyor, a 28-foot-tall lizard-God savior. They established in Pawnee in the 1970s, and even though the group was significantly reduced by the time they appeared in Parks & Recreation, they were still active. The Reasonabilists believe that Zorp was predicted to come down to Earth and end all human existence by melting off everyone’s faces with his volcano mouth. It was implied that the cult was quite influential at some point, as some of Pawnee’s former slogans were “Pawnee, engage with Zorp” and “Pawnee, Zorp is dead. Long live Zorp”, with the one that followed being “Pawnee, it’s safe to be here now”.
The Reasonabilists appeared in season 4’s episode “End of the World”, in which they insisted that the world was going to end as part of Zorp’s prophecy and arrival. Every few years, they claimed that the end was coming, but they were obviously never right, so no one took them seriously, with Leslie allowing them to hold an all-night vigil in a park. By the end of the episode, cult leader Herb Scaifer told Leslie he recalculated the apocalypse, and asked to use the park on May 19. When Leslie told him that date was booked, he corrected himself and said the actual date was May 20. The cult made another (brief) appearance in season 7’s episode “William Henry Harrison”, when Leslie was trying to find a historical reason to save the Newport land. Two members of the cult – one of them a “ninth level octo-priest” – met with her to tell her the land was very important to them as that’s where “all human souls will be transmuted” when Zorp “passes through Jupiter’s sphincter”.
While the intentions and actual goal of the Reasonabilists are not mentioned, it all points at the arrival of Zorp being what they want, even if that means they will die. They will also do everything they can to preserve anything related to Zorp and their beliefs, and might even hope they can expand again like they did in the 1970s. Parks & Recreation truly had a bit of everything, and proved that even the greatest town in America has its dose of cults.