I was thinking several days ago about how much more sufferable the show is when it is trying to be serious. If only the writers would publish an episode dedicated entirely to subverting our expectations to the point of utter bemusement. An episode like Sealab 2021’s ‘7211’, where you constantly wait for an explanation that never comes. Since the writers haven’t the courage to try this, though, they continue what they do best: pandering.

This is another season that could have been produced on an assembly line with how generic and uncreative it is. Its only distinguishing feature is that it has one of the most infamous episodes in the series, since it raised the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation’s concerns shortly after it aired. The writers, like the main characters, did not learn their lesson. I misled you earlier: it is not that the writers enjoy pandering in general, just to a certain audience, and I’ll let you guess which audience that is.

Let the suffering commence.

The Ring: It took me three minutes to realize that this story is talking about sex between prepubescents. Judas Priest, the writers are fucking creepy.

Am I the only one who finds this disturbing? I don’t care if the kids are crudely shaped. Children talking about craving sex or expecting it is creepy as hell.

I have to confess that seeing Mickey Mouse beat a boy band member bloody made me smile.

I kind of want to say that I despise this story for its sexualisation of children, and I rarely care about whatever Disney is doing, but seeing Mickey Mouse terrorise children amused me more than it should have. For that reason alone, I did not quite ‘hate’ this episode, but I still would not recommend it either, and this is coming from somebody who loathes Disney.

The Coon: Zzzzz… zzzzzzz… zzzzzz…

Here is how it should have ended: after the ‘antagonist’ unmasked his or herself and Mr. Garrison vaguely confirmed that the ‘antagonist’ was a student in his class, Trey Parker should have walked out of the crowd and said, ‘Okay, let me explain this joke for anybody who doesn’t get it: the reason that this is funny is that the audience doesn’t know who Misterion is even after he unmasked itself, but all of the characters recognize him! Isn’t that hilarious? This has been a presentation by South Park Studios. Buy my shit, buy my shit, buy my shit, buy my shit!’ I guarantee that that would have been less unfunny than the real ending.

This is another episode that would have fit in a kid’s show with only a few minor adjustments. Avoid.

Margaritaville: Oh dear, an episode with financial advice… well, not much. Randy Marsh advises South Park to adopt a lifestyle of simple living so that they can cope with the recession. Kyle—setting us up for another ‘adults go crazy; only kids know answer’ episode—disrecommends the lifestyle of simple living, and half of this story becomes a Gospel parody. It is mildly entertaining to watch, although some of the writing is lackluster, like the betrayal twist that never goes anywhere.

The other half is a more boring plot where Stan struggles to return his father’s margarita mixer. He approaches numerous grown-ups who decline to take his mixer, referring him to somebody else, and it becomes a wild goose chase. The ‘punchline’ is that the Treasury Department makes economic decisions by decapitating a chicken and letting it loose a game board. It’s an idea that could have been funny in the hands of a more competent writer.

What I like about this story is that, for once, it portrays Jews in a positive way: Kyle exhibits tzedakah and mesiras nefesh by exhaustively taking on all of South Park’s debts for hisself. Nevertheless, it would be extremely difficult to find anybody in reality who is that generous, so the positive portrayal is less effective than it could have been. Either way, though, not an awful episode.

Eat, Pray, Queef: Another rare example of a ‘feminist’ episode, this time about an even less dignified topic, but arguably a conversation that needs to be had sooner or later. It is indeed unfair how modern society stigmatises women’s bodily functions more than anybody else’s, and this story raises a good point about that, albeit by focussing on only one of them. (Strangely, this episode is completely silent on the fact that all women release wind from their other ends, just like everybody else.) I am unaware of anybody overreacting to vaginal flatulence, but I am sure that it has happened before and with a double standard behind it, too.

That being said, I never smiled—let alone laughed—at this episode, for the simple fact that I very rarely find emissions funny, and to tell you the truth, the double standard does not amuse me either; it is only typical.

While it is unique for a television programme to discuss this topic, and the messaging is fine, there is very little reason to watch it either if you already agree with it yet do not (generally) find flatulence funny. It is not the worst, but I would not recommend it either; it is too boring.

Fishsticks: The ways wherein Cartman imagines others in his distorted memories is actually kind of funny. Also, seeing Ye decapitate Carlos Mencia made me smile.

What I don’t understand is why the writers think that the fishsticks joke, which they repeat to death here, is hilarious. Try reading this out loud: ‘You like fishsticks? You like putting fishsticks in your mouth? What are you, a gay fish?’ That is it. That is the entire joke: ‘fishsticks’ sounds like ‘fish dicks’ and it sounds like you are admitting to zoophilia. Ironically, the funniest jokes in this script are the ones that have nothing to do with this.

The message here is—I am presuming—a generic lesson against plagiarism, although it is garbled by the fact that Cartman got himself and Jimmy out of a dangerous situation by falsely taking credit for the fishsticks joke and by copying a psychological accusation that Kyle flung at Cartman. It almost seems as if the writers are saying that plagiarism is fine if it saves you from danger, but somehow I doubt that that was their intention.

While I did get a few smiles out of this, they are nowhere nearly enough to make me recommend this episode. Apart from a few exceptional moments, it is boring.

Pinewood Derby: I have never checked the time more often than when I was sitting through this mindnumbingly boring episode. Want to guess? It’s another episode about the importance of telling the truth, because apparently ‘My Future Self n’ Me’, ‘AWESOM-O’, ‘Pre-School’, ‘Quest for Ratings’, and ‘Up the Down Steroid’ all failed to hammer the point home! A sixth episode about the importance of honesty? What the fuck were the writers thinking? Even Friendship is Magic has episodes more sophisticated than this!

If you need to publish another story about honesty’s importance, do it better and this time, situate it in a context that you know would be more interesting to grown-ups than to children. Make it about faking orgasms. Make it about pretending to have a (good) job. Make it about hiding an addiction. Make it about gaslighting spouses. A context about cheating in a race and then making contact with space aliens is something that would fit better in a kid’s show than in something presumably intended for us. If you are making an adult cartoon and the ‘adult’ parts are just a handful of edgy jokes, you are wasting the creative freedom that your network is giving you.

Fatbeard: ‘Jews can’t be pirates.’ Haha, fuck you.

This story is about Cartman and several other boys traveling to Somalia to act out their pirate fantasies, since piracy in Somalia was a bigger issue back then. If you know a few things about this show, you can predict the formula: the boys are in for a disappointment, but they find ways to compensate and adjust the situation to their liking. It is kind of like ‘The Red Badge of Gayness’, but much less ambitious and much less exciting. While this isn’t an obnoxiously lousy episode—at least this one is somewhat adventurous—I was still uninterested watching it and I barely smiled at all.

Dead Celebrities: Ike enters his parents’ room while they are trying to fuck, and Gerald responds by, of course, angrily scolding him. Sometimes I can’t help but associate nudity with anger, which seems odd until you witness situations like these.

I like how Kyle showed up at Cartman’s house, then after he watched a Billy Mays commercial, he and the other boys suddenly reappeared at the Broflovski household without explanation.

Man, what a boring fucking episode. I really don’t care about Ike’s woes, and I hate celebrities in general, so most of this story feels like nothing happening; it drags on and on and on. My favorite bit, though, was when Dr. Phillips babbled uninterestingly about dead celebrities for over one minute, and then said ‘it’s taking forever.’ That was the only part that made me laugh out loud, and I am guessing that the irony was completely unintentional.

This is a great episode to have on if you are having a sleepless night. Otherwise, you aren’t missing out on much.

Butters’ Bottom [insert slur here]: Kind of odd seeing a propertarian condemn pimping, but whatever. This episode is really uninteresting. Half of the humor comes from a seemingly innocent boy pretending to be a pimp, which is as unfunny as it sounds. The other half comes from the U.S. police hypocritically exploiting sex work through sting operations. I agree that using law enforcement is not a good way to reduce sex work, but something tells me that the writers don’t have strong feelings on the profession itself. Anyway, this is another dull episode. Find something better to do with your time.

W.T.F.: An amateur wrestling instructor unfamiliar with professional wrestling? Are the writers serious? I know that there are important differences between the two phenomena but you can’t be an ordinary American yet somehow also completely unacquainted with professional wrestling. I don’t watch it and even I could tell what the kids were doing and why they were doing it. In fact, I am willing to bet that for the majority of youths who got into amateur wrestling, professional wrestling was probably their introduction to the sport!

When the instructor finally understands that the boys have professional wrestling in mind, he scolds them and tells them that professional wrestling is acting. Are there no instructors who explain to kids, before the fact, the differences between amateur and professional wrestling?

Anyway, most of this story is about making fun of professional wrestling for (supposedly) having little fighting, and it implies that the average pro-wrestling fan is a gullible hick who thinks that it’s all real. Yeah, and I’m sure that smokers have never heard anybody tell them that their habit is unhealthy either! We also get several ‘hur hur, wrestling is homoerotic’ jokes, which speak volumes about the writers’ creativity.

In conclusion, this episode is a waste of time. I kind of like the idea of a story demonstrating the differences between amateur and professional wrestling, and the writers had an opportunity to demonstrate that the two phenomena could be collaborators rather than enemies, but the writers pissed it away—save for one minor concession at the end where somebody promotes the instructor to professional wrestler for his dramatic monologue.

Whale [insert slur here]: A little over one minute in and we already get some casual racism. This sucks. The funny thing, though, is that they could have replaced the Japanese men with Norwegians and it would have been less uncreative and less racist.

I like how in the later half of the story, we see Japanese men killing ocean life through aerial kamikaze attacks… when the Imperialists had naval kamikaze attacks, too.

The only thing that I genuinely liked about this episode is the scene where a Japanese politician educates three of the boys on the bombing of Hiroshima, showing us actual recordings of survivors and telling us the approximate number of people who died. Unfortunately, this otherwise surprisingly educational scene is nothing but a set-up for the punchline where the politician reveals the bombers of Hiroshima to be a couple of fish (LOLRANDOM), and the boys ‘fix’ the situation by blaming a chicken and a cow (LOLRANDOM AGAIN) for the bombing instead.

The message is basically that we are hypocrites for opposing whaling while tolerating the slaughter of cattle and poultry, which is an imperfect analogy (I am unaware of anybody breeding whales for slaughter), but I suppose that it makes a modicum of sense. Either way, though, this is another unfunny episode, and I am unhappy to remember that there are still Whites cracking lousy jokes at East Asians’ expense.

The F Word: ‘All right, look, you’re driving in your car, okay? And you’re waiting to make a left at a traffic signal. The light turns yellow, should be your turn to go, but the traffic coming at you just keeps coming. And even when the light turns red, a guy in a BMW runs the red light so you can’t make your left turn. What goes through your mind?’ The words paskudnyak, scumbag, jerk, or prick. One of the judges suggests a heterosexist slur, which says more about the writers than it does about anybody else.

‘Right. But you’re not thinkin’ “Oh, he’s a homosexual,” you’re thinkin’ “Oh, he’s an inconsiderate douchebag like a Harley rider.”’ ‘This, this is, making insanely good sense to me.’ Hahahahaha! This show is so much more enjoyable when it is being unintentionally funny.

On the other hand, Big Gay Al defends the application of heterosexist slurs to annoying people, which may well be one of the most embarrassing moments in the show’s history. This is no different from saying that your imaginary Black friends gave you permission to say a racial slur, and I have seen Whites seriously insist that they aren’t being racist when they apply racial slurs figuratively.

The episode finally became enjoyable when we saw the biker gang terrorize South Park, but the enjoyment stopped in the scene where the gang confronted the boys, then the gay community defends the slur together, and by the time that the lead biker hisself was defending the slur, I could almost feel physical pain.

This is, quite possibly, the most embarrassing episode in the entire series, which is saying a lot considering that the showrunners have published entire episodes dedicated to bowel products. It has also aged poorly, too, since these obnoxious slurs have been becoming increasingly uncommon and for good reason. We now have an easy contender for the worst of the season, because the one laugh that I got out of this cannot compensate for the agony that I suffered.

Don’t watch this pukestained episode. I am not exaggerating when I say that I still felt better watching this video than I did sitting through this episode. That is how awful that it is.

Dances with Smurfs: I smiled seeing the bored students during Cartman’s first broadcast. Finally, heroes for whom we can root!

I am guessing that Cartman here is supposed to be a parody of generic conservative commentators, given his repetitive griping about Wendy. (I later learned that he was specifically parodying Glenn Beck.) It is typical that the writers would be ambiguous and indirect when criticizing a conservative, and unfortunately, it is nowhere nearly harsh enough.

The climax is somewhat clever, though: Wendy, rather than continuing to express confusion, plays along with Cartman and manages to turn his own accusation of populicide against him by implying that he had some involvement in it and that Wendy had no choice. (A classic defense of Herzlian atrocities.) Then we get a dull joke about how James Cameron plagiarized from him. It turns out that a lot of people have accused Cameron of plagiarism, and I am sure that the writers were making fun of that accusation, but either way, this episode is mostly uninteresting.

Pee: You know, Trey Parker could spend twenty-two minutes pissing on a camera lens and I am sure that his fans would continue to hail him a genius.

They named the water park Pi Pi’s Splashtown. I have no comment.

Yes, I get it: Eric Cartman is a white supremacist. He sings about it for slightly over two minutes but it feels so much longer than that.

I find it baffling that Kyle has urophobia yet we have seen in previous seasons that bowel movements are fine by him even though they are more toxic than urine. The writers desperately needed a neat freak for this story, so they picked Kyle simply because he is the least irrational of the four main characters.

The waterpark literally floods with piss, and the writers exhibit their sadism by forcing Kyle to swim through the piss to safety. Later, the waterpark owner invents an excuse to manipulate Kyle into drinking urine so that he can swim underneath the piss and drain the park. He reluctantly agrees—somehow managing not to vomit—but his self-harm goes to waste because a helicopter rescues him, his friends, and the park owner. Are you laughing yet? The final punchline is that the survivors have to eat bananas per a physician’s orders, but Kyle hates bananas even more than urine. Ba-dum-tsh!

In a moment of weakness, I uncontrollably chuckled when the scientists pissed on the monkeys, but significant portions of the humour centre on Cartman’s white supremacy and the writers sadistically exploiting Kyle’s urophobia while the plot parodies generic disaster films. Overall, this season finale is another waste of time.

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What an awful season. It would be one thing if the writers were merely cracking boring jokes, but ‘The F Word’ is a worthy contender for the worst South Park episode of all time, as it is not only unfunny: it also has a toxic message. In this respect, it rivals ‘Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina’, an episode promoting cissexism. To be fair, nothing that the writers said was new, but certainly nobody needed the encouragement either.

As for the least awful of the season, my pick is ‘Margaritaville’ since at least it has a somewhat interesting story even if most of the jokes fall flat, and it is the most ‘Jewish’ of the season, which makes it less intolerable than all of the other dreck on offer here. That being said, you aren’t missing out on much by overlooking this season entirely. There are better things to do than watch South Park.

An excellent idea enters my mind: to attract South Park’s haters to these threads, and make them liquidators of Trey Parker’s and Matt Stone’s futures on Earth. We shall finance an extraterrestrial colony populated entirely by the two adults who love this show the most: Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The colony shall have to be settled on Uranus (for obvious reasons) and Beijing can supply at least half of the funding as well as the resources. We must make this colony as attractive as possible to Parker and Stone so as to induce them to leave our planet: millions of Parker and Stone clones to help populate the colony, a Times Square that broadcasts South Park 24/7 (along with their other works like Orgazmo and BASEketball for special occasions), a show-accurate recreation of South Park, a theater that constantly plays The Book of Mormon, a South Park theme park for all of the little Parkers and Stones, and a minimalist government dedicated to free market policies. In other words, a propertarian utopia. Join me in establishing this Parker–Stone ethnostate, because if you can will it, it is no dream.