Review: South Park ‘Taming Strange’

Spoilers Below

This week’s South Park sure was interesting. Clearly it was one of those episodes that was going to make a political statement, as was apparent from the opening scene where South Park Elementary introduced IntelliLink, an integrated internet portal for the school. An obvious nod to Obamacare and its site, IntelliLink was also crawling with bugs.

The episode then shifted to focus on Kyle’s brother Ike and his journey into puberty, despite still being a baby. I’ll admit right here that Trey Parker’s crazy Ike voice provided the biggest laughs for me in this entire episode, which was great considering Ike had lines throughout the entire half hour.

However, by the halfway point of the show I began wondering where the hell they were going with this. The allegory was obvious, but what was the point the SP guys were going to make? Then another element was added: it turns out Ike is a fan of the children’s program Yo Gabba Gabba, and Foofa (an actual character on the actual show) decided to split from the group and basically go all Miley Cyrus, with obvious references to the musician artist sticky-looking former child star.

Of course there was a moral at the end involving not growing up too fast and the opinion that, “Anyone who thinks streamlining healthcare into an integrated computer system would go smoothly, deserves a giant queef in their face,” and everything more-or-less went back to normal.

Highlights from this week included the creepy (who I’m assume to be) Bill Hader voice for one of the other Yo Gabba Gabba crew members, the hilarious Tom Brady cutaway gag, and Mr. Mackey mistaking a dick drawing for that of a bird. I also enjoyed when Mr. Mackey appointed a faculty member to the position of head of IntelliLink, just so he could immediately blame her & make her a scapegoat, a la Kathleen Sebelius and the Obamacare site debacle.

I honestly was thinking this was a 5/10 at the aforementioned halfway point, but – as often happens in South Park episodes – everything eventually came together to make a clear and intelligent stance on several relevant topics, and a solid episode. Oh yeah, and it was funny too. That’s kind of important.

@Gonzo_Green