Awaken my child, and embrace the glory that is your birthright. Know that I am the Overmind; the eternal will of the Swarm, and that you have been created to serve me.
Behold that I shall set you amongst the greatest of my Cerebrates, that you might benefit from their wisdom and experience. Yet your purpose is unique. While they carry forth my will to the innumerable Broods, you have but one charge entrusted to your care.
For I have found a series that may yet be the shittiest in adult American animation. Even now it resides within a protective Chrysalis, that being Comedy Central, awaiting its cancellation.
You must seek Comedy Central, and ensure that all harm comes to the series within it. Go now and cleanse the world of South Park forever.
The Return of Chef: I shouldn’t have smiled at Chef’s perverse comments towards the boys, but they were so unexpected in context that they worked for this unusual occasion. Since Isaac Hayes left the show before this season, the showrunners had to splice together old soundbites to voice Chef’s Cassetteboy-esque lines, and it is pretty clear that they had fun doing it.
The rest of this story is boring. Half of the jokes are about child molestation, and yes, they are as unfunny as you would expect. One part that got my attention was Chef’s surprisingly gory death scene, which strikes me as an overly harsh way to dispose of a character who was slightly less loathsome than the main four.
Smug Alert: I have never been this bored in anticipation of an upcoming environmental disaster.
What I found odd was how the writers defended hybrid cars at the end (as long as no-one is smug about them), but the major reason to use them was to reduce global warming, something that they denied.
Cartoon Wars: ‘The cartoon that’s always pushing buttons with their careless toilet humor. […] Family Guy doesn’t care who[m] they insult. They only care about their… precious money!’ It baffles me that the writers would insult theirselves like this given their loathing of that cartoon.
In fact, this episode is saturated with meta humor. It’s a two-part story about a two-part story about an Abrahamic prophet that FOX doesn’t want to show uncensored that Comedy Central doesn’t want to show uncensored. I can see this amusing other adults, but this technique would have worked better for me if the writing were more autocritical, like when BoJack horseman dissed Back to the Future’s time-related humour in a flashback to the 1980s.
As usual, some of the jokes go on for too long, like almost every scene involving George Bush and the part where Kyle and Cartman have a sissy-fight. The criticism of Family Guy was not particularly deep either. It is true that it has too many cutaways and that many of the jokes are irrelevant to the story, but what is worse is that most of the time they just aren’t funny. Like this show. (Although I still think that the funniest moment in this show is, ironically, Kyle saying ‘You can’t make a distinction between what is ok to poke fun at and what isn’t. Either it is all ok. Or none of it is.’)
The messaging is worthless, too. ‘Freedom of speech’ has never been anything other than a meme anyway, but the biggest threat to our speech is not ordinary Muslims, who would be likelier to roll their eyes at immature depictions of their beloved prophet than go apeshit over them. The biggest threat to our speech—including Muslims’ speech—is, and has always been, the U.S. government.
I know that this two-part special was popular at the time—it certainly attracted my attention—but it definitely hasn’t held up. Don’t bother.
A Million Little Fibers: I have to admit, I can’t say that Towelie is one of my least favorite characters. I don’t find him especially interesting or funny, but he does annoy me too much either. There are a few moments when I get close to smiling.
Anyway, this episode is about… uh… Oprah’s vulva and anus, both British, trying to get her fired so that she’ll spend more time with them. It is an original idea, I’ll give it that much, but it does not work for me. Towelie saves several people whom the nether regions held hostage, they die, then Towelie learns an important lesson about using marijuana as a reward rather than a method for creativity. I can see somebody else getting a few chuckles out of this episode, but I would not recommend it. It is too inane for my tastes.
On a side note, what was up with Comedy Central’s weird fixation with bashing Oprah? Crank Yankers, Lewis Black’s Root of All Evil, and this show made fun of her. I thought that hardly anybody apart from bored housewives and Duke Nukem took her seriously. What is the point?
ManBearPig: In another episode that aged faster than warm milk, we have an (obvious) allegory for how fake global warming is and how Al Gore is a pathetic loser. I don’t know why anticommunists think that you can disprove something simply by attacking a writer associated with it, like how Axis sympathizers try to ‘disprove’ the Nanjing massacre by attacking Iris Chang even though people were writing about it long before she arrived. No, you fucking boneheads.
I had to pause this episode to check if Al Gore is friendless, which seems highly unlikely given that he was married at the time of its airing. He also received numerous awards only one year afterwards, which is only one of the less glaring ways that this story has aged.
The boys get trapped in a cave-in that Al Gore caused, and Cartman complicates matters by eating treasure—which the audience quickly learns is fake treasure—and at one point Kyle drowns trying to swim Cartman to safety. Nobody in this story explained how they survived. We just get a predictable ending about Cartman accidentally expelling the treasure from his other end in public and how he wasted everybody’s time since it only costed $14. Ba-dum-tish!
Ironically, the most interesting bits in the episode were the blatant graphic errors. At the beginning there is a brief part where we see Mr. Mackey addressing himself while speaking to an audience, and there is a shot where he and Garrison are standing next to the gymnasium door, glancing at each other, then immediately reappear in the audience. When Mr. Gore was giving a eulogy, there was a flower vase that switched places multiple times between shots. How did nobody notice this shit? Did the animators run out of time before they could fix it?
Tsst: Ugh, I always feel uncomfortable with cartoons offering parenting advice. Listen up, parents: if your unruly little shits aren’t responding to time-outs, revoked privileges, beatings, or yellings, be passive–aggressive and ignore them when they want attention. Pinch their necks if they misbehave. Be sure to forcibly take them out for walks, as well. Basically, treat them like dogs. Seeing as how Eric Cartman likened his mom to an Axis dictator, it is only fair that I mention that a popular parenting book from the Fascist era promoted passive–aggressive methods.
As much as I dislike Eric Cartman, this story does nothing to make me feel better—his interactions with the failed nannies, his friends disregarding his pleas for help, his brief attempt at running away, the way that he almost tried to commit matricide—it all makes for a thoroughly unenjoyable experience. There is an implication at the end that he might have bettered his behavior, but we all knew that that was not going to last long. In conclusion: another unpleasant episode. Avoid.
*Make Love, Not Warcraft: Ahh, an episode so popular that even I had to see it around the time that it first aired. Unlike Scott Tenorman Must Die, this one’s popularity is easy to explain: it is a crossover with the perpetually overrated computer game World of Warcraft, and it is very unusual to see a television programme incorporate machinima, too. Even though the main joke of the story is ‘ha, ha, people who play World of Warcraft are losers’, it is not too surprising that many World of Warcraft fans enjoyed this episode anyway.
A good example is when the boys are in Ms. Cartman’s basement (I have to admit, I failed to notice the ‘basement dweller’ stereotype until rewatching this), and they keep babbling in terminology that would only be comprehensible to anybody who played World of Warcraft. The segment goes on for around two minutes and I am betting that somebody would have added canned laughter if he could get away with it.
As with most other South Park scripts, the biggest issue is how predictable the humor is: the writers think that the ‘gamer with no life’ stereotype is inherently funny, so they’re content to hammer the point home over and over again, expecting it to be funny every time. The melodrama, like Stan’s dad acting out his own character’s death, screams ‘trying too hard’ and does nothing to make the story more enjoyable. This is facile writing.
I chuckled when Mrs. Marsh asked ‘So what?’ about their characters dying, and I got close to smiling after the boys finally killed the antagonist’s overpowered character, but otherwise this is another deeply overrated episode—and I say that as somebody who finds World of Warcraft boring.
Mystery of the Urinal Deuce: Oh great, another instance where the title has me dreading the episode. Sure enough, roughly half of the writing is about bowel humor… I think that I just cringed internally.
The other half of the episode makes fun of 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Here are my two cents: we’ll probably never know for sure if the U.S. government was directly responsible, but I don’t see it as a hypothesis totally ruled out either, and we can say with absolute certainty that 9/11 became a casus belli for Washington. The writers don’t seem to have an answer for the strangest phenomena either, like an explosion suddenly appearing at the base of a tower. This script should not make anybody sleep more safely at night.
The climax involves the U.S. government conspiring to spread conspiracy theories. This is a concept that could have been funny in the right hands, but the writers fucked it up royally. Even worse, a recurring joke is a parody of the Hardy Boys where they repeat gay (and incestuous) innuendo with each other. It’s cringy as hell, much like the rest of this worthless episode.
Miss Teacher Bangs a Boy: G-d, I hate this fucking episode.
Hell on Earth 2006: A lengthy potshot at My Super Sweet 16. If you know anything about that show, you know that it is an easy target, because the gimmick is that the hostesses have shitfits if they find a single imperfection in their overbudget parties. So this story has nothing important to say, only pandering.
For me, the most tedious segments were the ones involving Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy, which are just ‘The Three Stooges only edgy’. These segments are a microcosm of South Park’s humour: the content matter is inappropriate for children, yet paradoxically the execution would have been better suited for them.
Come to think of it, this entire episode encapsulates so many of this show’s problems: tedious jokes, pointing out the obvious, shameless pandering, characters acting like paskudnyaks for no reason, and there are moments when it almost feels as if the writers are trying to be offensive for the sake of being offensive, like the scenes showing Catholic clergy with naked boys. For some reason, child sexual abuse is a little more prominent than usual in this season, and I have no clue why.
Go God Go: Richard Dawkins is an obnoxious snob with an oversimplified idea on how religions work. On this point we agree. Nevertheless, depicting him as shagging a transgender person (who literally threw Scheiße at him, no less) is entirely unnecessary and epitomizes how the writers, like other paskudnyaks, use sexual shaming as a means of petty revenge. We’ve seen this before, most notably with how neoclassical liberals depict Trump and Putin as lovers, and it is a phenomenon that needs to be called out and questioned.
Telling militant atheists that religion does not have a monopoly on violent factionalism is something that they need to understand, but a better, nonfictional example of this was the U.S. Civil War, where both sides idolized George Washington and saw theirselves as defending his values. That they were both mostly Christian is beside the point: many of their other aspects were decidedly secular.
Finally, as you likely guessed, most of the humour here fails, like Garrison namecalling others and poorly explaining evolution. I shall admit this much: future Cartman’s telephone calls with past self and others amused me, and it is refreshing when the series gets somewhere close to being autocritical. Those few exceptions aside, you are not missing you on much by overlooking this two-part special. It’s boring.
Stanley’s Cup: What the fuck? What the fuck is this? A team of grown-up hockey players beat the shit out of kindergarten hockey players, and then a little kid watches in disappointment before dying at the end? This is supposed to be funny?
I almost want to praise the writers for taking an unexpected turn, but this ending is so confusing and so blatantly unfair that I cannot do it with a clear conscience; the tragedy feels so forced. The jokes are puke, too, like the guy who mimics movie trailers umpteen fucking times.
Here is what the writers said:
Parker: A lot of people didn’t get that one. We thought the ending was really sweet and weird, but nobody really got it.
Stone: The hockey one is like three-quarters of a show, but the ending is fucking sweet.
(Emphasis original.)
Grown-ups beating the shit out of little kids and another dying of cancer is ‘fucking sweet’…? Am I reading this correctly? Is that what they meant?
Judas Priest, I thought that The Losing Edge was kind of boring, but the way that it parodied sports films was ingenious compared to this tedious pile of shit. Unless you are a hardcore misopedist—like Parker and Stone, apparently—leave this pukestain of a season finale alone.
This may be the worst season that I have seen so far, which is impressive considering that the last one had an episode entirely dedicated to mocking transgender people. Aside from the reactionary politics, the twoth biggest issue with this cartoon is that it is so. Fucking. Boring. The fake movie trailer guy in the finale is a perfect example: they rehash the same dull joke umpteen times in the boringest ways possible. Who the fuck laughed at that joke more than thrice, let alone once? He’s imitating a movie trailer: we get it! Come up with something better already you paskudnyaks!
Normally I would pick which episode was the most tolerable, but I don’t feel like doing that today. This season is too horrible. You know what is great, though…? I’m done watching season 10!
Thank god for free-ish will
