After seeing somebody mention my reviews, and rereading them, I have thought about returning to this absurdly overrated series and taking a break from Futurama, which is better than this show in every way. Whereas Futurama sometimes suffers from its stereotyping and excessive gross-out humor, South Park manages to fuck up every single thing that makes Futurama good, and even some things that make Futurama bad.

I’ll give you one example: the needlessly long switchblade commercial in Bender’s Game pales in comparison to the tedious jokes that are ample in South Park. They are boring from beginning to end and they always go on for too long. Factor in South Park’s superabundance of loathsome characters along with its boring scripts and you have a series that could not compete with Futurama even if it wanted to. (I get the feeling that the Cartman cameo in The Beast with a Billion Backs was merely a quaint nod to the brief Futurama reference in The Snuke.)

But who knows, maybe the showrunners tried to be more experimental in this season. After all, they have had a literal decade of practice, so they must have improved their work somewhat… right?

Tonsil Trouble: Judas Priest, only one minute in: even the music would fit in a kid’s show. I am honestly wondering… are the writers consciously trying to copy kid’s shows?

‘Eric, I’m afraid that we’ve accidentally infected you with the AIDS virus.’ What an anticlimactic punchline, but it is par for the course.

Kyle kept asking the grown-ups in the room if Cartman had AIDS. If you know anything about their relationship, you can predict his reaction after he asks to be excused from the room. Yes, he laughs in the hallway. I honestly would have been more interested if he reacted with utter indifference.

I implied in my season 3 review that you’ll never see this show explore what it is like living with AIDS. I now have to admit that that was slightly inaccurate, but the next step is seeing the writers portray the situation satisfactorily, and we have no good reason to be optimistic about that. A good example: Cartman whinges about the low attendance at Airport Hilton, where he talks about his disease, and a celebrity sings a song called AIDS-burger. Do I even need to comment…?

‘Maybe somebody needs to teach Kyle how to have some compassion!’ He’s going to infect him with HIV. Sure enough, he did! Yawn. Funnily enough, though, this is similar to the episode where the boys intentionally infected their parents with herpes. I cannot put into words how fucking obnoxious this series is by handling adult subjects in the most immature ways imaginable. It isn’t funny; it’s just unpleasant and embarrassing to witness, possibly even more so than Porky’s. Speaking of immaturity: Kyle then vows to go Citizen Kane on Cartman’s room, which interested me at first, but it is much less exciting than it sounds.

The rest of the story is unremarkable: Cartman and Kyle plan to visit Magic Johnson, we get gay jokes, the cure for AIDS turns out to be a huge pile of money (hur hur), we get a joke about how Nigerians are poor, Kyle still vows to break Cartman’s Xbox 360—boredom all around.

Here’s the deal: it’s not that it is impossible to cope with STDs through humour. If you chose to watch the documentary on Terry Madeley’s experience with AIDS, you’ll have noticed that he still enjoyed his life and joked around despite knowing about his terminal condition. The problem is that the writers chose to approach this subject in the blandest way possible: the story quickly becomes a race to find a cure and we soon forget about the actual challenges that come with AIDS, because the characters solve it through deus ex machina. It makes for a very uninteresting, anticlimactic, and immature story that a twelve-year-old Yankee could have written in his sleep.

The closest that I got to smiling were the parts when Kyle laughed. Overall: do yourselves a favour and avoid this goatshit episode.

Britney’s New Look: Let me guess, a story about Britney Spears… yes. Fuck. (And in the late 2000s, too.)

‘We’ve blurred out parts of the photo so that it doesn’t offend.’ Naturally, they censored her… face. Ha, ha, ha. I have to say, though, I am almost impressed seeing a television programme portray a woman urinating. That is not exactly common, at least last time that I checked.

I have to confess, seven minutes in and this episode seems unexpectedly sympathetic towards Spears, or at least unfavourable towards celebrity-mania.

Otherwise, this episode really fucking stinks. The gimmick here is that Spears’s body remains alive despite losing half of its head through an attempted suicide, but everybody aside from Kyle and Stan is too indifferent or boneheaded to notice, so they act like it is business as usual. This leads to ‘wacky’ hijinks where she growls incomprehensibly through a recording and stands mindlessly on a stage with other performers.

The part where I had to take a break was when Kyle and Stan try to sneak her away from a paparazzi, then Kyle distracts them by dressing up as Britney… and it works. Judas Priest, nobody is that blockheaded you fuckwads.

The minor characters then reveal that Britney Spears must perish, which is why they have been trying to drive her to suicide by harassing her so much. They drag out this explanation for several minute and it is boring. Yes, I get it: wanting a harmless, mindless celebrity to die is silly. Parodying a horror film makes it sillier. You can stop now! Thankfully for us, Britney finally died, presumably fertilizing the crops, but we do get a super duper funny teaser for a mercifully nonexistent sequel.

Don’t bother.

Major Boobage: I know that you couldn’t see it, but as Mackey was correcting a student, saying that cat urine can’t intoxicate you but a male cat’s concentrated urine can, I was shaking my head as my eyes rolled and I had an unpleasant look on my face. We already fucking know that Mackey is misleading students into intoxicating theirselves with unusual substances. He even says ‘Probably shouldn’t have told you that just now. That was probably bad.’ Are the writers seriously receiving thousands of dollars just to type out this shit? Ugh.

Anyway, this episode was (somewhat) famous at the time for parodying the cult classic Heavy Metal, and I can understand why: Heavy Metal is an unusual film and it is even odder to see anybody parody it. This, in addition to the number of mastophiles in the world (mostly from Western cultures), along with this episode’s unique experiment in visuals, easily make sense of its popularity.

Unfortunately, this story is also punctuated with returns to reality, some of which involve Cartman hiding cats in his attic, and these cuts are very clearly intended to be references to gentiles hiding Jews during the Shoah. I actually find these scenes much more uncomfortable to watch than the cats pissing on people’s faces; at least those bits aren’t references to a traumatic period in history. Towards the end, Kyle even points out the obvious, you know, just in case you were too historically illiterate to get the joke!

I should mention that this episode is casually misogynist, too. Not for the aesthetics, but for how it reuses the ‘damsel in distress’ and ‘woman as reward’ tropes. I am sad to say that the most empowering thing that the princess did in this story was drive a flying car with a fancy decal on its hood.

Gerald gives a speech near the end discouraging drug abuse but defending legalization, and on this point we easily agree. I think that this episode’s real purpose, though, is parodying Heavy Metal with deliberately over-the-top, breast-obsessed aesthetics. While I can understand others rolling their eyes at this, I have to give the showrunners credit: it is highly unusual. Brainless, maybe, but highly unusual nonetheless. Very few artists to this day have the audacity, or perhaps the mindlessness, to add breasts to almost everything. Even the animation consciously imitates Heavy Metal’s, but there are some moments where it is glaringly jerky.

This is likely going to be my pick for the best of season 12, although I rarely got close to smiling. What makes this episode interesting is the art: visually this is easily the most creative South Park episode that I have seen, even if half of the time it is just Heavy Metal with a bizarre breast fixation, but art that is this obsessed with breasts is difficult to find anywhere. I could almost recommend it for that reason alone, but I could understand others finding that concept too inane to bear, and the reality scenes are mostly tedious to watch.

One last thing:

They also mention that the worst part of working on this episode was having to watch Heavy Metal multiple times during production of the episode. Despite this episode being a nod to the film, both Trey and Matt thought the film sucked when they were kids and that it still sucks now.

I have to admit, I would have never suspected that!

Canada on Strike: ‘What is it that makes Canada so important?’ Nickel. Apparently.

Oh G-d… it is usually not a good sign when Internet memes show up in television. In fact, I think that this is the ‘Internet meme’ episode that was (in)famous for a while. I guess that these don’t date the episode that much, though, because they could have inserted some nonexistent memes and the effect would have been practically identical: to this day, many online videos become memes for no good reason.

This episode is boring and pointless. Kyle’s verbose message at the end is outdated, too.

Eek, A Penis!: Uuuuuuuuugh not another fucking episode about censorship. I don’t want to watch this.

Oh wow, it opens up with Garrison regretting Garrison’s sex change. Thank you, Garrison, for speaking on behalf of transgender people everywhere.

Hey, why didn’t Wendy Testaburger offer to teach the class? That’s something that she would have done, and she’s right there!

‘Boys, have you seen my penis?’ Oh hardy har-har very fucking funny. This is the joke: a scientist genetically engineered a rodent to grow human genitalia (LOLRANDOM) but the rodent got loose and now Mr. Garrison (and yes, that is what he wants to be called) asked several boys at a playground that question. Get it? Wooooo, that sounds so funny out of context! This is a good example of South Park’s lazy writing: characters avoiding the obvious solution to an obvious problem.

‘If you can’t have babies, then you’re a man.’ ‘Whoa uh wait, uh, hang on a second. My wife had ovarian cancer, so she can’t have babies.’ ‘Well then get an AIDS test, Thompson, ’cause your wife’s a dude, [insert slur here]!’ And then the episode ends. Thank fuck.

There is a mildly creative subplot where Cartman teaches lower-class high schoolers how to cheat, but it has plenty of tedium, like the overly lengthy scene where Cartman persuades somebody to have an abortion, and Cartman repeating ‘How do I reach these kids!’ in a fake Mexican accent. The rest of this story is a very tedious chase after a mutant rodent. By the time that the rodent sang at the moon, I seriously contemplated ending my viewing right there. This is a painfully unfunny script, and I am not going to praise the writers for mildly improving their oversimplified understanding of human bodies.

To my surprise, this episode is not about censorship at all, as I predicted from the title, but it is obnoxious all the same. Don’t watch it.

Over Logging: This makes me glad that I have ebooks, videos, and a few video games stored on my computer.

I shall give this compliment: it is unusual, but important, to have a tale about lacking Internet access. It is good to unplug every once in a while, if only for the privacy.

‘Where is the Internet?’ In a massive network of servers all over the world. (To my surprise, the answer is not ‘satellites’.)

The first half has a lot of whining over South Park’s inability to access the Internet; the story quickly becomes a lengthy reference to the Great Depression, and a sci-fi film that I don’t recognize. It gets pretty rancid in the later half, where we learn about Randy’s turn-ons, overhear his self-stimulation, see the results thereof, and I think that at least some of the pornographic audio that we hear was taken from real videos. Shudder.

My personal recommendation is that you watch the Close Enough entries Cyber Matrix or Where’d You Go, Bridgette? (or better yet, all of Close Enough) and steer clear of this almost bone-chilling—but otherwise boring—episode.

Super Fun Time: ‘What’s a siren? We ain’t never heard of no siren in 1864.’ Except that you have, in a sense.

‘A phone? Why, what’s a phone? We ain’t never heard of such a thing.’ You could have, though.

I like how Burger King exists in this universe even though somebody established in the last episode that a Burger Knight exists… then again, it could be a bootleg. Never mind.

Anyway, as you could guess by my comments above, this entry is about South Park Elementary visiting a historical reenactment village, only the reenactors are obstinately committed to their bits, creating difficulties when the terrorist team from Die Hard raids the village and holds dozens of people hostage. It makes for some interesting challenges for the main characters to overcome.

The subplot is about Butters’s similarly obstinate commitment to holding Cartman’s hand on Garrison’s orders. Butters apparently has a titanium grip, but this situation does not make for as many interesting difficulties as the reenactors who never break character during work. It is mainly only Cartman or Butters being annoyed with each other.

I can’t say that I laughed during any of this, but I was not bored to death watching it either. Overall, not the worst episode.

The China Probrem: Before you say anything, remember: don’t judge a book by its cover!

‘There’s two billion of them and their economy is getting better and with all their advances in technology they’re gonna bring down America!’ See? There’s something that aged well.

At first I was perplexed wondering why Stan was being so vague with Kyle. I thought that he was referring to some obscure incursion in China, or maybe the Vietnam war. Nope. Turns out that it was about George Lucas and Steven Spielberg literally raping Indiana Jones. Ugh. I am guessing that The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is lousy (I have never seen it myself), but the showrunners could have coped with it better than this.

I know that the situations aren’t really the same, but seeing the Chinese-Americans express confusion at Cartman’s accusations of an invasion plan, I can’t help but unforget the times when the Fascists would accuse Jewish civilians of starting WWII, to which they naturally responded with confusion.

There is a really tedious, unfunny joke where Cartman chastises Butters twice for shooting men in the genitals. Halfway through the twoth joke, I actually said out loud, ‘You can stop. You can stop.’

At first glance this episode might sound appealing since it mocks George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Cartman’s neo-McCarthyism, but the rape jokes alone make it too disturbing to watch. Stay away.

Breast Cancer Show Ever: Finally, another Wendy Testaburger episode. This can’t be worse than what I saw earlier.

I remember my second grade teacher being far more confrontational and intimidating to me when I uncontrollably chuckled as she was trying to talk. It is odd that Mr. Garrison would be much less assertive than that, especially since he once exploded at Rosie O’Donnell.

‘You’re gonna fucking die!’ Don’t make promises that you can’t keep, Wendy, especially ones as appealing as that.

The first umpteen minutes are pretty boring. Seeing Cartman’s constant and pathetic attempts to prevent the fight aren’t amusing to me. They’re just repetitive and slow down the story. At first it looks like his attempts finally paid off, but the principal bails her out because she herself had breast cancer (and apparently loathes Eric Cartman). It is a fairly clever solution to Wendy’s parents trying to make her a pacifist.

Finally, Wendy spends a whooping one minute beating up Cartman. It is almost satisfying to watch since Cartman is such a dull, loathsome character, but of course he rationalizes why the other students say that they never liked him anyway; he learns nothing, as usual.

I can’t say that this is the worst episode, because at least we get to see Wendy beat up Cartman, but there is so much unpleasant tedium in between that you are justified in skipping this entirely. I am not kidding when I say that I wished that I were at a dental appointment instead.

Pandemic: Although the showrunners suggest that Peruvian panflute bands are omnipresent, this may well be the first time that I have seen any. Likewise, I have never seen anybody act this agitated over them. On the contrary, judging by their music here, they actually sound pretty groovy.

Oh, a Cloverfield parody. How… typical.

This episode is pretty boring. It’s hard to feel invested in the tension or action when you don’t care about all of the losers involved in either.

Pandemic 2: The Startling: Yes, giant guinea pigs are terrorizing humanity. Very funny… for little children, to be exact.

Oh, I just unforgot that Craig has a pet gerbil. That must have something to do with all of this.

I miss the days when Craig was more taciturn and flipped off people.

What I hate about this two-parter is the utter want of progress. Everything feels so slow and drags on. The boys get closer to their goals with all the celerity of a dripping sink. I could almost fall asleep through this. They keep cutting back to the giant guinea pigs in costumes terrorising people, and I can’t put into words how disinterested I feel. Let. The joke. Stop. Please.

Actual lines from the episode: ‘Dude, this is boring. This is just a bunch of walking around.’ ‘Yup, nice and boring. Just the way I like it.’ This is the first time that this season made me laugh out fucking loud.

I was so relieved when the credits started rolling. I did get one pretty good laugh out of this, but it is nowhere close enough to justify sitting through forty-four minutes of the writers beating a few jokes into the ground. Unless you love guinea pigs, you are better off avoiding this two-parter.

About Last Night…: This might be the worst Barack Obama ‘impression’ that I have ever heard.

It turns out that Obama and McCain are secretly jewel thieves and want to steal a fancy necklace. I could almost fall asleep now.

Uhh… do the writers know that presidents-elect aren’t supposed to be staying in the White House? Oh, whatever.

This episode is almost useful for telling Yankees how they always overreact to elections, but I am betting that Obama and McCain voters alike enjoyed this story for how inoffensive it is. As you might have guessed by my brevity, this episode is a waste of time.

Elementary School Musical: Don’t tell me that we’re getting musical numbers again… G-d damn it, I was right. Fuck. Well, this is the penultimate episode, so the agony shall be over soon.

Are these songs taken from the High School Musical series? I know that that sounds unlikely, but the lyrics are so inoffensive that it would make sense. This is only the first two minutes, though; I am sure that they’ll turn up the heat later. (After rereading this paragraph: they don’t.)

‘Well, I’m out, guys. If this is what’s cool now, I think I’m done. I no longer have any connection to this world. I’m gonna go home and kill myself.’ It has been a while since Cartman made me smile.

There is actually not as much singing as I was expecting, and there are a few points where the singing ends abruptly. The tragedy is that there were signs that this was going to be a deconstruction of the musical genre, which would have been very interesting to watch. Instead, this is largely about a boy named Brindon who wants to play basketball yet his effeminate father won’t let him, then we get a generic lesson about how you should follow your heart. It barely even feels like they’re parodying the High School Musical series, let alone deconstructing its genre.

What a waste.

The Ungroundable: Okay, we’re nearly at the end. Thank goodness.

I never thought that I’d see a goth kid say a heterosexist slur. To somebody in a competing group of goth nerds, no less.

I really, really don’t care about these goth kids’ identity woes, so, naturally, the writers keep cutting back to them.

This was such a dull choice for a season finale. It’s pretty much just a little rant about mall goths who pretend to be vampiric. The speech at the end was cringeworthy, too, but I like how the official website had to confirm that this was supposed to be a spoof of Twilight. Could have fooled me!

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It is so easy to bash this season because there are long stretches where nothing interesting happens, but there are rare moments where it shows potential… only to disappoint you. The Heavy Metal parody was fascinating, until the writers interrupt it. The unsuccessful songs in Elementary School Musical could have gone somewhere interesting, but they don’t. The episode about coping without Internet access could have been useful, but it wasn’t. The writers consistently piss away every glimpse of brilliance, losing them in a sea of tedium.

My pick for best of the worst has to be Major Boobage, but it is an unprincipled choice because it is very much an episode that favors style over substance. It is almost worth seeing merely for its highly unusual choice of aesthetics, but there are numerous breaks in between and the overall story is fatuous. In terms of writing, Super Fun Time is the best, but I found it less interesting to watch. If you can’t be bothered to watch any of these, you are good.

If you reason instead of repeating what they taught you; if you analyze South Park and strip off those cloudy fictions with which it has been draped in order to conceal its real purpose, which is pandering to dysfunctional White boys, and its substance, which has ever been the consecration of all the uncreativity and painfully tedious jokes handed down to audiences through its long and rancid history; when you have comprehended this, your contempt for Trey Parker and Matt Stone shall be profound indeed. You shall understand that to remain a fan of South Park is to place yourself every day in opposition to the law of conscience, and to make a bargain on the wrong side; and, since this struggle cannot go on forever, you shall either silence your conscience and become a dullard, or you shall break with tradition, and you shall work with us for the utter destruction of this shitty comedy.