Review: South Park “SHOTS!!!”

 

 

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Now that Winnie the Pooh is dead, and playing Poohsticks a distant memory, it’s time to celebrate at Tegridy Farms. Because of his shady behavior, Randy has amassed a profit of $300,000. Since South Park is also low-key celebrating their 300^th episode, the themes go together quite well.

The rest of the town and Randy’s family aren’t as stoked about this newfound fortune as the man himself. Because he made his riches off the suffering of home growers and the Chinese proletariat, he’s no longer the good guy. Sharon reminds him that he got into the business to be an alternative to heartless corporate growers like MedMen who he is now working alongside. But Randy just wants to throw himself a ticker-tape parade and not have to listen to all the “jealous” haters.

Back in South Park, Cartman doesn’t want to get his vaccinations because he’s deathly afraid of needles. And because his mom’s such a pushover, she lets him skip the shot and still take a toy from the doctor’s toy chest. To be fair, she takes her brat to the doctor every week only to have the little psychopath take off all his clothes, grease himself up, and run around the office squealing like a pig until the doctor gives up.

PC Principal doesn’t like this, and informs the Cartmans that Eric can’t attend school until he’s vaccinated. They accept their fate—for a few hours—but then, Luanne sends Eric back to school as a conscientious objector. This angers the parents of vaccinated children—which is almost everybody else—and they argue that everybody needs to be vaccinated or it doesn’t work. Allowing Eric in school will only endanger his classmates who follow the rules. The town and Mrs. Cartman compromise by paying a dirty, hillbilly, pig-rustling dude to wrestle Eric to the ground and force a shot into him. Since Luanne was only relying on weak talking points and had no real objection to immunizations in the first place, she begrudgingly agrees.

Turning to Randy for guidance—and to split a fat joint—Luanne laments-+98/ about the abuse she receives as a parent. Mr. Marsh relates until he realizes his ruthless weed tactics are as bad as Mrs. Cartman’s parenting. And Luanne is the absolute worst parent in town.

Emboldened by Randy’s urgent words, Luanne rushes back to town to save her son from the pig rustler. She forbids her son from getting vaccinated, and takes a full dose of immunization in her butt to spare her child the pain. This vaccination turns her artistic which the Cartmans had been confusing for autistic the entire episode. It’s excruciatingly unfunny.

Finally, Randy does a complete one-eighty by breaking deals with China and MedMen to appease Towlie who he apologized to instead of his wife and kids. So… for the moment, Tegridy Farms is back to square one.

 

Our Take

We were up, and now we’re down again. That’s what I’ve come to expect from South Park over the years. You’ll seldom see two great episodes in a row, especially since they switched formats to semi-serialization a few years back.

Trey and Matt are not only a little behind on attacking the Anti-Vaxxer movement; they didn’t hit them very hard. While these people might not be as outwardly despicable as the Disney Corporation and Marvel Studios when they kowtow to China and their despotic regime, they pose a far greater national threat.

All the creators did was focus on how these people aren’t very smart—which is low-hanging fruit—and that they’ll repeat talking points even if they don’t fully comprehend what they mean. It was okay when Eric mispronounced “conscientious” and mistook “artistic” for “autistic” because he’s already been established as a moron. But that generally poor joke lost more and more steam as Eric, Luanne, and others kept repeating it throughout the episode. Repetition humor has worked for South Park in the past, but it’s typically more effective when the joke can stand on its own.

Is anybody else getting tired of Towelie? He’s a towel that smokes weed, so it makes sense as to why he’s hanging out at Tegridy Farms, but he really doesn’t do much else. The tired bait and switch during Randy’s apology that should’ve went to Sharon felt overused and repetitive. If we haven’t seen it in an episode of South Park, we’ve certainly seen it on another sitcom (animated or otherwise) at another time and in another place.

I didn’t laugh once at Cartman’s pig impression. It was in line with something Eric would do, but it didn’t have that wow factor I expected from their milestone 300^th episode. Cartman’s been to the abyss and back so many times throughout the show’s history, he really needs to step up his game in order for him to be an interesting character in 2019. Calling ICE and sending Kyle’s family to a detention center: sure, that’s adding something to an already brutal character. But having him greased up and running around like a pig leaves things pretty stagnant. Is there a Deliverance joke I’m missing, or something?

We’re not even halfway through the season and this ecosystem’s balance is already in danger. We’ve had one dynamite episode surrounded on either side by mediocre outings. For ten-episode seasons, we need at least half the episodes to surprise and delight for the experience to be worthwhile. And while that may seem like an arbitrary thing to say… well, it is.