Oh L-rd I’m back on my feet again. I have a good reason for that, though: the series fucking stinks. I basically say that in every one of these reviews because it needs to be emphasised that this uninspired crap did not deserve numerous seasons… and I can think of much better shows that received far fewer… so if you believe that the good die young, you can point to this awful franchise as evidence for your conclusion.

Now join me as we reenter the tedious, unfunny, and uninspired world of South Park! Remember: misery enjoys company!

Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina: Oh G-d, WHY‽ Why does this show have to be so fucking terrible? We’re already starting out with (quite possibly) the most cissexist episode in the series? Ugh… why…?

Sigh… okay, so, I need to admit that this story contributed to misconceptions that I had postoperative transgender people, because that is what it does: it spreads hurtful stereotypes about them and their bodies. Already in the first two minutes there is a scene showing us how disturbing the procedure looks—I know, a surgical procedure that looks disturbing? No flipping way! In principle, this is not vastly different from promoting heterosexism by showing somebody how ‘gross’ gay sex is, and I am sure that some cisgendereds seriously thought that postoperative transgender people are fully conscious throughout their surgical procedures because of this damn scene.

Fun fact: if you simply invert the colors on an image, looking at it becomes more tolerable. See, as humans colour is important to our sense of recognition, and when you drastically distort that color, it inhibits your recognition. This is how I got past the first scene (along with other scenes elsewhere in the series), and it is how I can look at various disgusting photographs without a visceral reaction. Try it sometime; you may be pleasantly surprised at how well this technique works.

‘Well, it’s just that… Jews can’t play basketball.’ I know that this joke is supposed to be funny for its blatant and frivolous antisemitism, but what I find funnier is how the writers overlooked the surprisingly long history of Jews in basketball. The including of Judaism in this episode is actually appropriate for a reason that the writers managed to miss, but more on that in a moment.

Mr. Garrison—or should I say Mrs. Garrison…? I’ll just call this character Garrison until the ‘detransition’. Anyway, this episode spends a lot of its time stereotyping transgender people as socially awkward, poorly mimicking how cisgendereds behave. I know of at least one transgender fan of this show who was angered by this episode, and it would be ridiculously optimistic to suggest that the propertarians who unleashed this abomination were merely trying to satirize cissexism. As the Pop Culture Detective once put it: acknowledging something is not the same thing as critiquing it. Simply repeating cisgendereds’ ignorant view of how transgender people behave is lazy satire—if it qualifies as satire at all.

Aside from stereotyping transgender humans, this story also reproduces the classic false equivalence that switching genders is just like switching races, and more obnoxiously, it also falsely equates it with switching species. (Remember when heterosexists would equate same-sex marriage with marrying animals?) The problems are that sex is a little more complicated than race, people who unjokingly want to switch races are very rare, and black transgender women are at a disturbingly high risk for violence.

‘What kind of woman can’t have abortions and bleed out her snatch once a month‽’ Yeah, it’s called an oophorectomy you dipfucks. Plenty of women get them. My mom had one years ago. The notion that transgender adults are clueless about the (current) limitations to sex-change operations, and that surgeons don’t tell patients about them, also strikes me as too blockheaded to merit comment. It’s like the showrunners think that everybody is just as fuckheaded as they are.

One last thing: the funny thing about this episode is that it completely skips over how goyim have been transitioning into Jews for millennia! Although a few communities are closed to converts, for the most part gentiles can convert to Judaism, adopt a Jewish culture, and even get a minor surgical procedure known as a circumcision (which is still compulsory in Orthodox Judaism). These converts are known as gerim if male and giyorot if female. Discriminating against them is almost universally discouraged; Judaists are supposed to treat them as equal to congenital Jews. Indeed, some converts even grasp Judaism better than many people born Jewish. That the writers skipped over all of this is almost amusing.

Overall, though, this may well be the most embarrassing episode released that was not about bowel products; the nicest thing that I can say is that it is only twenty-two minutes long. Unless you are doing research on cissexism, don’t bother. It’s horrible.

Die Hippie, Die: Yes, I get it: it’s funny (well, not really) to deliberately dehumanize people, especially when they’re harmless. Change the damn record already. Also, who the fuck still gets this pissed off over hippies? Old school hippies are very rare and I have never seen more than a handful of neohippies in my three decades of existence. Seeing somebody who was barely even alive during the 1960s get this pissed off over hippies is just… baffling.

There is not much else to say about this one, because it beats the ‘hippies = vermin’ dead horse so much and seeing the normies take everything so seriously does not make it funnier. Assuming that this story accurately sums up neohippies’ anticapitalism—which is a big assumption—I do think that it needs more work, but that these people are anticapitalist at all is likely the main reason that the writers hate them. I got close to smiling during the ending, but otherwise this episode is boring.

Wing: Ugh, watching this only makes me want to replay Portal of Prævus, which is at least umpteen times more entertaining… wait, Wing is a real person and she offered her talent to South Park Studios? That’s fucked up. I am guessing that she probably enjoyed this episode but I still feel like she deserved something more dignified than this. By the way, her website looks like vaporwave album. Make of that what you will.

Best Friends Forever: Those of us who are old enough to remember the controversy can clearly tell that this is a parody of the Terri Schiavo case, which was an argument over whether or not somebody who was nearly brain dead should be kept on life support. Maybe it’s only because of my low self-esteem, but if I were so severely brain damaged that I’d be unable to enjoy anything anymore, it would be better if everybody accepted my inevitable death and pulled the plug on me. I wouldn’t recognize my loved ones anymore, and I’d be a completely different person. Why would somebody want to see me in a state like that?

Otherwise, this episode is nothing special. The problems are the usual suspects: jokes that go on for too long (yes, I am aware of Keanu Reeves!), characters about whom I don’t care (thereby eliminating any tension), and the writers don’t have a deep message to send. I think that they would basically agree with me on this particular issue, but that they had to present their stance so facetiously makes me wonder if they want to be taken seriously or not. This is a waste of time.

The Losing Edge: Remember how The Red Badge of Gayness started out with Confederate reenactors beating the Union when the Union was supposed to win? This is almost like that: South Park’s baseball team wants to lose so that they can quit playing baseball, but the problem is, all of the other teams want to lose too because they all think that baseball is boring.

It is a unique premise, and it even gets slightly ambitious with team South Park unintentionally making it to state championship. Unlike The Red Badge of Gayness, though, this is very mundane by comparison, and I was much more bored watching this. I did crack a few smiles, especially towards the end where it becomes a race to the bottom until Randy’s subplot about fighting other dads surprisingly bails out team South Park, but overall I found this more boring than entertaining.

This is a relatively creative episode, and I found it more tolerable than the previous four, but I still would not call it good. Sadly, there is a good chance that this will end up being the ‘best’ of the season. (On a side note, some baseball fans sincerely enjoy this episode for its unique approach to their game. How ironic…)

The Death of Eric Cartman: I have to say, it is a nice change of pace to see Cartman behaving decently for once, even if the basis for his good behaviour is farcical and temporary. This still isn’t a good episode, though, and like the previous one, this one could have fit in a children’s show if you subtracted the coarse language and the small number of dirty jokes.

Erection Day: This is a rare example of a story where the young characters would be necessary for the inappropriate subject matter, because unwanted erections are something that nearly every cis boy has had before. Naturally, though, there is no convenient advice herein for that. Butters misleads Jimmy into thinking that sexual intercourse shall cure him of his hormonal woes, which leads into a nice little tangent where he saves a sex worker from murder, but after intercourse with her (ugh) he gets another unwanted erection and the story ends on a cliffhanger. What a pointless episode.

Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow: ‘… no statistical proof has ever been confirmed that global warming exists.’ That says it all.

Marjorine: Oh look, another episode where about 90% of the script would fit in a kid’s television show. Yes, I get it: the boys are too fuckheaded to understand how the girls’ paper fortune-teller works and the grown-ups also have puke for brains so they can’t figure out the boys cheaply faked Butters’s death and that he never returned as a demon. It’s okay to let a joke stop! Seriously, this shit plays out more like a rejected Home Alone script than anything else. Avoid.

Follow That Egg!: I have a better idea: read this script and let me know where exactly you tuned out. If you could get past Bill Owens’s outdoor speech without cringing, hats off to you.

Ginger Kids: Man… what a boring fucking episode. There are so many parts where the joke just drags on and on and on, like when Cartman is at the bus stop or when he slowly convinces a crowd of gingers to respect others. I haven’t seen the rest of this series yet but I can already tell that none of the main characters learnt anything from this experience. Trey Parker, of all people, has no business lecturing others on the wrongness of white supremacy.

Trapped in the Closet: Yes, I know that ridiculous Scientology is a scam. If by some chance you were unaware, then you can consult better resources on the subject than Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

There’s a really, really tedious joke in this episode about Tom Cruise locking hisself in a closet, and he does not want to come out of it. Ha, ha, get it? Well, the writers must have thought this joke was ingenious because they run it into the ground for six fucking minutes. Ugh. For Hell’s sake, why‽ Could they not come up with something better? It’s like they just wanted to tell (or remind) people that Scientology is a scam and then they ran out of ideas. Oh, and apparently some Scientologists pressured Isaac Hayes to quit over this episode. I hope that the showrunners were happy.

Free Willzyx: Two oceanarium employés play a prank on the boys, misleading them into thinking that a whale wants to go to the moon, and sure enough, it results in an ambitious adventure for that purpose. It actually gets mildly exciting in the later half of the episode, I guess because I wanted to see the pranksters pay for their shenanigans, though I find it more sad than funny that an innocent, clueless animal had to suffer because of a prank that got out of hand. Overall, not the worst episode.

Bloody Mary: What the hell, why is this the season finale? It would have made a modicum of sense for the previous episode, but this one comes nowhere close to epic.

Anyway, this is about how placebos, notably Alcoholics Anonymous and miracles. I agree that A.A. is probably more useless than anything, and I doubt miracles, but I don’t trust South Park to deliver messages like that one in an impressive way. I’ll concede, though, that in this case the delivery was acceptable.

One notable problem with this story is that Randy Marsh seems more clueless than usual. Not that he was especially circumspect beforehand, as seen in Two Days Before the Day After Tomorrow, but it is pretty glaring here. It really feels like the writers needed him to behave this incompetently to teach a generic lesson about self-discipline and believing in yourself.

Still, I can’t say that I ‘hated’ this episode. The moral is good, if facile, and I have definitely seen season finales that were more obnoxious than this one. They overdo the already unfunny gag about the Mary statue expelling blood from the waist down, but I’ve seen worse. So, all in all, by South Park’s standards this episode is okay, just don’t expect anything mindblowing if for some reason you want to watch it.

While The Losing Edge is maybe the least awful of the bunch, I would not recommend any of these episodes. This a boring, boring show. I mean it is boring. The characters are uninteresting, the stories are rarely engaging, and there are jokes so tedious that they baffle you. How the fuck can any sober adult laugh continuously about a celebrity who keeps refusing to get out of a closet? There are plenty of other examples, like Mr. Mackey repeatedly pulling out papers calling him gay, but the closet one has become my favourite example of the writers refusing to let a joke go. No wonder that Reddit loves this franchise!

For anybody who has read this far, I have a reward. Recently I got into a little adult animated series that started on the web in 2000, received twenty episodes, and then received a film in 2006 before exiting gracefully from the scene. If you don’t enjoy any of the episodes, that’s fine, because they’re all gratis and fewer than five minutes in length.

The title of that series… is… Queer Duck, starring Jim J. Bullock and a bunch of cishets! Yeah, it isn’t great. In fact, it has a few ‘yikes’ moments, and depending on your personal tastes, you might be a little annoyed to see yet another stereotypical, hypersexual gay character. Me, though? I’d say that even Queer Duck still kicks the ass of South Park Studios’s tired piece of shit. I felt better—euphoric, even—watching that than watching South Park, season 9. So, there you go! Queer Duck: it’s umpteen times shorter but umpteen times better! Should you ever feel desperate for some adult animation, watch that instead and leave this propertarian goatshit alone.