(This takes around fifteen minutes to read.)

I was watching a longplay of Beware when I suddenly realized that it has been a while since I suffered. Before going into this season, I have to remind myself that it is worthwhile to know what immature White boys are watching so that I can understand perspectives that are not my own, and understand what passes for ‘quality entertainment’ in the imperial core.

Let’s go for a drive.

HUMANCENTiPAD: The premise should make for a funny episode: somebody hastily overlooking all of the terms and conditions only to later realise that one agreed to a plethora of intrusions. The delivery, however, is poor. It involves corporate employés stalking Kyle, weighing him, measuring him, taking his blood, tasing his father, and so on, and the showrunners manage to make all of this so dull. Maybe it is only because I dislike all of these characters, but the execution is unimpressive to say the least.

Ms. Cartman declines to purchase an iPad for Eric, so Eric retaliates by repeatedly insinuating that she is (figuratively) a sonfucker. This is an uninteresting joke that goes on for too long.

When Steve Jobs showed up, I thought, ‘It sure would be nice if somebody shot him in the head.’ Then I unforgot that he’s already dead.

Per Kyle’s agreement, Apple surgically links him to another user’s arsehole, and Apple surgically links another user to his arsehole, which unsurprisingly leads to several defecation jokes. In a moment of weakness, I smiled a couple of times, but the rest of this story involves Cartman repeatedly implying that his mom raped him, and there is another subplot about Gerald Brovlofski along with Kyle’s friends slowly figuring out a way to free him, and it is mostly boring to watch. The only surprise in the script is that there is no explicit message telling people to patiently read terms & conditions.

Overall, this episode is a waste of time. It does have an agreeable point about how it is wrong for businesses to monitor their customers whether they read their terms & conditions or not, but this is a facile lesson and the writers don’t propose any solutions that we can take. As for the humor, I can understand somebody else getting a few chuckles out of it, but that is it.

Funnybot: Token laughs at one of Tyler Perry’s jokes, then Token looks around at the others in the audience, noticing that nobody else is laughing, and awkwardly says, ‘Oh G-d, how embarrassing.’ This was actually a good joke!

After Jimmy awards the Germans as the unfunniest folk on Earth, they ultimately retaliate by deploying an automatic comedian in Colorado. The story gets interesting in the last half, with Funnybot deciding that the greatest joke of all would be annihilating humanity. The characters stop Funnybot by tricking it into analyzing a paradox, then the script ends with a potshot at Tyler Perry.

There is a potentially intriguing discussion to have here about where comedians should draw the line, but the characters spend almost no time at all on that; the showrunners are more preoccupied with the concept of comedy awards, for reasons which I cannot fathom. A ceremony for comedy awards does not strike me as absolutely absurd, given that we already offer awards for other forms of entertainment, so I have better things to worry about than this.

This episode has a few surprisingly interesting action sequences, like the brief moment when the Germans invade South Park Elementary, and I was almost impressed seeing Funnybot abruptly massacre a live audience. That being said, while this episode is slightly funnier and a little more gripping than the last one, you aren’t missing out on much by skipping it either.

Royal Pudding: There are some mildly interesting scenes here: a mysterious force kidnapping a princess in the middle of a ceremony, Ike watching as well as answering the Canadian Prime Minister’s call to assemble with hundreds of other Canadians somewhere, and we get a rare example of aboriginal Canadians appearing for more than a few seconds.

On the other hand, we repeatedly return to Mr. Mackey’s play and how overly invested in it he is, which I guess is amusing for a second or two, but it feels overdone. Likewise, the ceremony at the end is too baffling to be funny, and the other jokes don’t satisfy me either. I smiled once or twice, like when the aboriginal Canadians threatened Scott, but otherwise this is a script that screams ‘trying too hard’ when it comes to the humor.

While I was not bored to death watching this, I still can’t recommend it either. It is neither interesting nor funny enough to be worth your time.

T.M.I.: I am only five minutes in and I am dreading the rest of this episode because it is about penile length. That in and of itself need not to be a problem: I liked Eric Clopper’s presentation on the subject of circumcision, which was a mostly serious discussion allowing for several moments of humor. Eric Clopper proved that it is perfectly possible to have a meaningful conversation about genitalia. In contrast, I don’t trust the writers with that at all.

I see that Eric Cartman is now in therapy. Okay, maybe that was a false alarm. I am still not expecting this to be a good story, though… oh, we are back to the original subject. Damn. Sigh. Yes, one plot is about genitalia, and the subplot is about anger management. Anger and nudity do go together well, don’t they?

This is a surprisingly boring story. They try to make it exciting by having the anger management group burn the room before holding hostages in a FedEx building because of penile size and whatnot, but it does not work for me since I do not care about any of these characters, let alone their frivolous worries, and not even the potshots at stereotypical conservatives were enough to entertain me. The lesson, I guess, is that a small penile size correlates with anger issues, but here is a secret that the writers never mention: you can satisfy others in bed without your genitals.

In conclusion, this is another worthless episode. It had the potential to say something meaningful about body acceptance, but the writers, as usual, pissed it away. What a waste.

Crack Baby Athletic Association: It took me fourteen minutes to figure out that this is about sports owners compensating their team members poorly, which is a bit of an odd subject for the writers to discuss. Of course, it would not be a South Park episode without the writers giving it an ‘edgy’ twist, hence the reason that the players are babies born to drug addicts.

The most intriguing thing about this story is the implication that Kyle does not follow Orthodox Judaism, given that he does not seem to be totally disinterested in pork here. Otherwise, this episode is tedious. There is a jab at EA Sports for being greedy (no shit), a ‘funny’ attempt to parody Santa Claus by replacing him with a guitarist, and a facile lesson about how it is wrong not to give any of your excess wealth to those whom you exploit, which sounds like a lesson that propertarians would decry as ‘socialism’, but whatever. This is episode is as inconsequential as it is boring.

City Sushi: Uuuuugh… I have not even started watching this episode and I can already tell that it is going to bore me with corny racist jokes.

Oh, ha, ha, a child psychologist is confusing Butters’s imaginary rôles for dissociative identity disorder. Judas Priest, what a lazy script.

The Chinese guy and the Japanese guy can’t understand each other. Ha, ha… feck me.

And it turns out that the psychologist is the one with dissociative identity disorder. They drag this joke out and I am bored out of my fecking skull right now.

Damn, what a boring episode. I actually know somebody with dissociative identity disorder and her personalities neither rotate this rapidly nor lack any memory in common, so something tells me that the writers did not do their homework for this script. The twist near the end was also unsurprising considering that a White guy already voices all of these characters. This episode blows.

You’re Getting Old: Well, sorry that we can’t be like your crudely animated children who never grow up, Mr. Fucking Mature Fuck Man.

Ha, ha, the music has sounds of somebody blowing raspberries (or least I hope that that is what they are). Randy is also lying to his wife saying that he enjoys it. Ha, ha. You can let the joke stop!

Okay, this is basically a coming of age story where Stan is growing up and becoming bitter about the world, interpreting noises and nearly everything else around him as bowel movements, which creates difficulties between him and his friends, who lack his bitterness. The premise of a child becoming bitterer growing up is mildly interesting, as is the argument between Randy and Sharon.

The problem is that the writers bury these promising moments in layers and layers of the same tedious dad jokes. Early on I smirked in a few moments of weakness, but most of the time I was facepalming because the showrunners place so much trust in their axiom that bowel movements are inherently funny. Even if you agree with them on that point, half of this script feels like it’s on autopilot because of how frequently this joke reappears. This is lazy writing at best.

If you absolutely must watch this episode, look up how to invert the colors on your monitor or television set so that the visuals will be more tolerable. Otherwise, you aren’t missing out on much by overlooking it.

Ass Burgers: Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh… G-d, somebody please end my suffering.

Oh fuck, this episode is a sequel to the previous. That means that you have to watch the first to understand this one. You can tell because they’re already repeating the ‘sudden bowel movements’ joke that is part of Stan’s pessimism. Piss in my skull.

In between the dad jokes, though, we see Stan being depressed and mostly passive to the world around him, although he does have an outburst in class that earns him a trip to the counsellor, who is of little help.

I am not exaggerating when I say that this show is so much more interesting when it tries to be completely serious. The drama and the mundane scenes are welcome breaks from all of the terrible attempts at humour, but these scenes are not enough to justify watching the episodes either.

About halfway through the story it turns into a parody of The Matrix. I suppose that this could have been a mildly entertaining and creative way to cope with depression—at one point I coped with it by imagining that it must have been my sentencing in a show trial—but the delivery feels too slow and tedious to be entertaining.

I can’t say that it had much of a payoff either. Stan puts a stop to the Matrix parody by basically saying that he needs to accept the way that things are. For a minute the story seemed ready to end on the message that the worst situations needn’t be the last ones and that embracing change can be rewarding… until the writers hit the reset button: Stan’s parents decide to stay together, he gets his friends back, and he stops hearing as well as seeing bowel movements everywhere—the sole concession is that he develops a drinking habit.

Overall, this story is a waste of time. As I said, both it and the last episode have some interesting moments, but they simply cannot compensate for the overwhelming amount of figurative and literal crap therearound.

The Last of the Meheecans: I remember first moving into my present home and accommodating an indigenous carpenter whom my parents hired. I gave him a cup of water and even fanned him as he was working; I could tell that he was impressed by my hospitality given the look on his face and how he repeated ‘thank you, my friend!’ to me.

In contrast, the White grown-ups here who… uh… ‘adopt’ Butters provide him with little besides a bed, and presumably offer him food and let him use their facilities. They aren’t especially abusive, but any responsible grown-up would have attempted to reconnect him with his family rather than exploit his labor power. I understand that their irresponsibility is part of the humor, but the joke gets old pretty quickly.

Anyway, Butters expresses his will to go home, and the ‘adopters’ decide that his home is a Mexican restaurant. While there, Butters inspires the fast food workers to return to the United Mexican States, who in turn inspire other indigenous workers to go to the UMS. Basically, everybody realises that living in Imperial America is overrated, so the indigenous people are, counterinuitively, leaving the Empire en masse. Now Border Patrol’s job is to keep them from escaping. This is one of those jokes that could have been ingeniously funny if only the writers were more competent. Oh, and Randy quotes Darth Vader shouting ‘no’ as he realizes that now he has to do yardwork. Ba-dum-tish!

I feel like I should have enjoyed this episode more than I did, because the concept of so many people leaving the Empire that Border Patrol now tries to keep them in does sound kind of funny. It may not be ingenious, but what makes the concept sound funny is how plausible it would be in reality. But the execution left me unamused, and Butters becoming a White savior is barely even worth talking about because of how uninteresting it sounds. Unfortunately, I predict that this mediocre episode is going to be my pick for the ‘best’ of the season.

Bass to Mouth: You should not ridicule anybody for accidentally releasing waste products. You should not even ridicule terrible people when they do it, since they have said or done things so much worse than accidentally releasing their waste. Accidental defecations and urinations should be personal matters, not public concerns. Thankfully, Kyle agrees with me on this.

After Cartman ridicules an accidental defecator, he reports to the principal and she vaguely promises that if the said defecator does not suicide over the teasing, the principal will make it worth Cartman’s while. Afterwards, Cartman offers another student a cupcake, and I can already tell where this is going: the cupcake has a laxative. Sure enough, the student suffers in class and… you fill in the blank.

The thing is that I was Cartman’s plan to make the other students defecate in public so as to make the last defecator feel less guilty about his accident, but now I am unsure… oh wait, it is his plan, and while the principal opposes it, Mr. Mackey gives it the green light. How lovely. Later we find out that a rodent named Wikileaks is the one spying on students and his brother has to fight him to the death.

G-d, what a dull episode. There are so many scenes that go on for too long, like almost all of the scenes with the spirit animals. My least favorite bit was the fish insisting over and over again that he did not have sexual relations with an underage fish, and it’s a classic case of the writers needlessly emphasizing the obvious. Trey Parker might as well have made a cameo so as to explicitly explain the joke to us.

The writers tried to make the story interesting in the latter half by rushing to stop Wikileaks before he can publish a story about the faculty giving the students laxatives, but I am so utterly uninvested in the plot that it does not work. The message is a facile lesson about respecting privacy, but the writers complicate it by showing Mr. Mackey accidentally defecate in public (Cartman gave him laxatives because he tried to murder him earlier). Don’t bother.

Broadway Bro Down: The only part that I enjoyed was Shelley’s annoyed expression as she stared silently at the dorky kid trying to serenade her. The rest of this episode is fucking puke.

1%: A bland take on the Occupy Wall Street protests. It comes with a few swipes at the police and other conservatives but is mostly concerned with ridiculing the protestors, their sympathisers, and identity politics. The joke is that the protestors called theirselves the 99%, but they were a small minority. Har-dee har har, very fucking funny. Oh, and there is a barely consequential murder mystery involving Cartman’s stuffed animals. In summary: avoid.

A History Channel Thanksgiving: Uuuuuuuugh, they’re gonna ventriloquise a person of colour again. They are already showing a White pretending to be Native American and saying that Thanksgiving is wrong, so logically, a real Native American is going to come along and tell the audience that everything is cool. That would be so typical.

Well, maybe not. Before the writers can ‘properly educate’ us, we get a long and tedious mockery of the History Channel for how full of tosh it is, then—shock and horror—it turns out that everything that it was saying about aliens was right! This leads to a wacky conflict between extraterrestrial pilgrims and extraterrestrial Native Americans and they are fighting over stuffing. The sad thing is that this plot would fit so easily into a children’s cartoon.

Contrary to what I predicted, no token Native American showed up to assure us that everything is cool. That is a plot device for another time. Instead, we get a wacky sci-fi epic with a Thanksgiving theme, which I suppose would be mildly stimulating for little kids, but viewers with higher standards deserve something better than this. If you already know that the History Channel is a joke, you can skip this story and not miss a thing.

The Poor Kid: I feel like I should have had a break before turning on this episode, because I was so exhausted watching the last few that my attention span was a mess. I was moving back and forth in my seat, glancing at the walls, and glancing at my right foot.

Nevertheless, I did not ignore everything. The episode’s problems are the usual suspects: jokes that repeat too much, jokes that go on for too long, jokes that aren’t funny to begin with, and an uninteresting story. It is mindboggling how many times the writers recycle the same jokes, like the one about the suspects saying ‘I’m White trash and I’m in trouble’, or Cartman’s jokes about poor folk, or the authority who hands out his mugshots to others and constantly tells the children that he likes to have fun, or the agnostic guardians. It is so fucking boring.

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There is something about this season that makes it feel so much emptier than the others. Sure, it does touch on some important subjects in ‘Crack Baby Athletic Association’, ‘The Last of the Meheecans’ and ‘Bass to Mouth’, yet even in these stories, it feels like the writers have hardly anything to add to the discussion.

This is not to say that you need to say anything especially important so as to be entertaining or worthwhile: there are almost certainly cartoons out there that have fun episodes where the characters simply spend all of their time at home. But because there is so little about this season that is either entertaining or important, it becomes all the easier to just ignore it. You can check it only to make sure that the showrunners haven’t caused any trouble therewith, but that is it.

If I had to pick the best for the season, it would be ‘The Last of the Meheecans’, but because the writers executed their ideas so unimpressively, you are justified in skipping it, along with the rest of the season. As for the worst… wow, that is a tough one. As a matter of principle, I should pick ‘City Sushi’ because of its unapologetic racism, but to be honest I was the most bored watching ‘The Poor Kid’, so (in terms of boredom) that is my pick for the worst, closely rivalled by ‘You’re Getting Old’ for its excessive reliance on bowel humor. I almost want to be angry at the showrunners for wasting their good ideas, but there would be no point.

If you can’t keep your head throughout this shitty show,
About unlikeable honkey kids who never grow,
If you can’t deal with hours of piss-poor writing,
That could drive anybody to harsh nail-biting,
When you grow so mad that you must burn Parker’s home,
And let it become a spot for the deer to roam,
When you feel rage in your areas that are ventral,
And need to utterly wreck Comedy Central,
If you can drown these worthless hacks in the waters,
You shall become women, my beloved daughters!