One day we will look back and laugh. For real. . . do not. No, we won’t. As long as many of us remember the broader details of this pandemic year, very few will find it funny. A more likely scenario is to choose to forget and move on, without having learned anything. Not all of us can or want to; supporting the burden of 500,000 deaths does this to a country; or perhaps it is better to say, it should.
But if there is one thing we should recognize on this one-year anniversary of the global pandemic, it is that many aspects of American society remain fundamentally broken. A glorious summer can be a real possibility. Returning to an earlier “normal” state is probably not.
This sums up the overall message of the “South ParQ Vaccination Special”, the one-hour companion to last year’s “Pandemic Special” and the only new episode in the series we’ve seen in the 15 months since the end of the 23rd season in 2019. to him as a companion is a guess, I admit. Although Matt Stone and Trey Parker previously oversaw the serialized seasons of the animated series, they did punctual events again after the 2016 election.
Some changes had to remain consistent, including the election of Donald Trump’s program representative, Mr. Garrison, to the highest office in the country. This is something that the creators probably did not expect and had to follow for the 21st, 22nd and 23rd seasons. Having him roast a living scientist at the end of “The Pandemic Special” before happily reminding the public to vote was a brutally humorous shock. In the light of the new Wednesday night hour, it also functions as an appeal.
Last fall, Parker, who wrote and directed that hour and “Special Vaccination,” may not have predicted how widespread the QAnon infection would spread or even how quickly pharmaceutical companies would develop effective vaccines.
But when Stan said, “I can’t take these outages anymore and I’m afraid of what they’re doing to me,” we should have paid more attention. Maybe the guys in “South Park” had no idea how the pandemic would change their two-dimensional world at that time. They do now.
“South ParQ Vaccination Special” begins with reportable absurdity and ends with an imperfect reinitialization of the show world that reconstructs a wall between him and the real madness of our society. Everything in between, like life itself now, seems irregular.
The opening scene models the city’s local Walgreens as an exclusive club complete with velvet rope and security, with elderly customers designated as VIPs.
After being vaccinated, the city’s elderly are totally “Cocoon” – they are revitalized and mischievous, occupying bars and burning rubber on motorcycles.
While this is happening, South Park Elementary Cartman worries that the forced quarantine separation has threatened to break the “friendship” he has with Stan, Kyle and Kenny, inspiring him to play a trick on a teacher in hopes of raising the bar. everyone’s mood.
Since he never thinks of anyone but himself, Cartman doesn’t understand why the professor responds by complaining about risking his life just to be mistreated and to get out of work. This puts the term “bro-ship” even more in jeopardy, so Cartman redirects his tendency to opportunism to organize the boys to steal enough vaccine to inoculate the school’s faculty.
This is the scenario to which a post-White House Mr. Garrison returns flanked by Mr. Service, a Secret Service agent who wears a loincloth instead of pants.
Most of South Park hates him, including the managers of South Park Elementary, who refuse to return his old job to him. But then he comes across a family of supporters, the whites, who also organize the city’s QAnon faction.
From there, Parker weaves his usual web of pandemonium just to destroy it at the climax. Classrooms empty after the service organizes a private tutoring service, “Tutornon”, which teaches most children in a youth sect called Lil ” Q’ties.
The boys succeed in their mission only to be attacked by hordes of people who also want the vaccine – and even Kyle, who is generally sensible, cannot resist trying to steal a little for his parents. All of this collapses in a real battle in front of the school at the same time that Mr. Garrison and Mr. White discover that in the world of “South Park”, a part of the QAnon conspiracy is true: there really are Hollywood elites controlling their world . Their names? Trey Parker and Matt Stone.
Not every episode of “South Park” achieves its goal. Some of them are not particularly funny. The “South ParQ Vaccination Special” is a strange entry, because it reminds us that sometimes hilarity is beside the point. Sometimes, we need to see the obvious and disturbing parallels between real examples of human behavior and the easy reasoning that informs the decisions of cartoon characters.
The only “Vaccination” proves the near impossibility of satirizing a reality that has become a living parody to the point of making it almost useless and, in case you haven’t noticed, this is the world we’re living in now.
We actually have teachers and parents preaching QAnon conspiracy nonsense to children, or trying to pass on the big lie about the November election results as a fact. We do have wealthy people who do everything they can to get a vaccine designed to protect members of vulnerable populations, including working-class people who don’t have the luxury of staying at home.
In both cases, the reasoning is similar to Butters’ excuse: “I just wanted to believe something that got me out of the house.”
Typically, “South Park” refracts the image of who we are in a way that skews our sense of righteousness, mocking religion, politics and all kinds of sacred cows, while usually validating some part of our beliefs. The land of failed logic is your playground. And yet, what is there to laugh about in our current state of affairs? An alarming number of people are so hungry to return an inept and dangerous man to power that he refuses to believe the facts, regardless of who is presenting them.
A dangerous band of terrorist cultists attacked the capital. People died there, in addition to the half million people killed in COVID-19. Even so, half of our political leadership, along with their followers, wants us to move on. Unfortunately, as the Wednesday special describes, we brought the city together for a character’s funeral just to abandon mourning in the midst of praise, kick chairs and get the party started.
There is no way to “get back to normal” in our reality. “South Park”, however, is subject to the whims of its manufacturers, which it shows by launching Garrison, White and Service into an arctic void. In the blink of an eye, Mr. Service turns into Mr. Hat, and Mr. White – criticizing the invisible forces that control everything – undergoes a series of ridiculous transformations, including mixing his body parts and putting him in one dressed without form, before turning him into a giant talking phallus. The perspective changes, showing Mr. Garrison, and us, how this world works, that at any time the people who create it can add layers or remove it. So Mr. Garrison makes a deal with his invisible and omnipotent puppets – everyone in town gets an injection and he gets his old job back. The lesson he learned, he explains, is to always be on the same side as people with more power.
It is as if the last five years of madness have never happened.
Stan, Kyle Cartman and Kenny will not forget. When the special ends, their “fraternity” is fractured and they agree to share Kenny’s custody using the standard 2-2-3 scheme familiar to the children of the divorce.
“South Park” has portrayed existential crises several times over the course of its 23 seasons and somehow manages to continue. These pandemic specials created by the quarantine are evidence of your dedication to keeping track of time, regardless of how it manifests.
Although Comedy Central has not set a premiere for its next 10-episode season, it has been renewed until 2022 and the channel is more or less keeping the lights on by eliminating many repetitions throughout the week.
Between that and access to the full library of previous seasons on HBO Max, it’s very easy to escape to the old pre-pandemic times, when the program inflated the vulgarity of our self-centeredness across the culture in ways that made us roar.
But if the “Pandemic” and “Vaccination” specials are not the most entertaining entries in the “South Park” library, it is because they refuse to discount the ways in which the past year, in addition to the four that preceded it, changed the boys, and us, and Parker – and probably Stone. In admitting this, they can also do something that those of us who live in a three-dimensional life, breathing in reality cannot do. They can reconstruct the division between the world and their cartoon and write a story in which their star characters find ways to express their complaints and overcome them.
They may even simply decide and eventually agree to move on and go back to the way things have always been, reminding us that although “South Park” is not really America, it is a true mirror of who we really are. One day, soon, we will be eager to laugh at what this shows us. Not just now.
The “South ParQ Vaccination Special” is available for free online broadcast.