Review: South Park “Dead Kids”

Lock and load.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Quite frankly, it’s another normal day in South Park, Colorado. This time around, Cartman’s furious that his once reliable way of cheating through a math test, Token, isn’t helping the fat kid pass his tests anymore. As a result, Cartman decides to stalk Token about whether or not he had seen Black Panther and the fact that Eric may have secretly not liked the movie. In any event, we never truly get the answer as to whether or not Token saw/enjoyed Black Panther. 

Meanwhile, Sharon is losing her mind and Randy just think she’s just being way too emotional and eventually succumbs to the fact that his wife could be going through menopause. And while at first, Sharon disputes Randy’s notion that her attitude has anything to do with her bodily functions, she eventually comes around to the fact that she shouldn’t get too emotional about mundane details…like school shootings where Stan is injured.

Our Take

This is old-school South Park as it gets. Possibly an Emmy nominee right here, Matt Stone and Trey Parker have vividly highlighted the fact that school shootings are so common nowadays that the details, no matter how gory they are, are really just treated like bad weather by the media which quickly highlights the ongoing issue as strictly political, very seldom giving any coverage to the victims. It’s a controversial topic that is brought to light in a dark comedic way. This isn’t the first time that these guys have highlighted the ease of use in getting a gun or even mass shootings, but this episode shines a light on just how regular we’ve become accustomed to these mass murders and have even begun to accept them as a regular way of life.

In terms of production value, the scene where Cartman is trying to escort Token through a wave of gunfire on his way to take a test could’ve been a lot better than it was, but it was still very good. The producers had begun to present the scene as almost something out of 24 or something, but that quickly was brushed aside in favor of a normal South Park side-scroller. I’m totally ok with this, but I think that had the producers continued on the action-sequences that were originally setup instead of quickly going to the standard, that could’ve made this episode all the more gravy in its delivery.

In any event, South Park may get some ink from all of the “comic book” sites about highlighting Black Panther, but then that would prove their point in a very Stephen King sort of way. Like King did with It, when kids getting killed becomes only the second most controversial thing talked about in artistic representation, are we then the problem?