Well, that’s it, folks–another season of South Park is in the can and I’ve been following it all the way from Indy Jones getting repeatedly banged up the ass to this very moment.
And Matt and Trey went out with a…well…subdued bang as they went back to South Park Elementary and targeted the vampire craze that my colleague Liz just discussed recently and of course the upcoming release of the film / book series / collectible merchandise machine Twilight.
Not surprisingly, it all starts with Butters.
Butters is…well…something of a jagoff. We’ve known this for several seasons now–sure, he’s really very earnest, and determined to please just about anybody who crosses his path. His parents are some kind of horrifying dictatorial cross between Hitler and Bill Cosby, even though they never really do anything more than “ground” Butters (from what, precisely?) they do it for the most insane reasons. This week it’s taken to a whole new level as we discover Butters’ father is such a massive moron that he requires pantry goods to be organized alphabetically, and won’t even bother to read packages before emptying the contents into anything, including Hamburger Helper into a glass of milk and Rice-a-Roni into his coffee.
Butters, somewhat fed up with the cripplingly massive levels of nonsense (stronger words apply and make much more sense here) he’s getting at home and at school, eventually discovers a clique of “vampires” running around South Park Elementary and steadily expanding. Of course, in this case, a “vampire” basically becomes one by shopping at Hot Topic and drinking clamato juice from pewter chalices.
Butters starts out as a vampire hunter of sorts at Cartman’s subtle urging (frankly, the image of Butters, Vampire Hunter just makes me HAPPY, and watching him fend them off with the gold cruicifix he for some reason carries around is just a hoot), but soon discovers he’d rather be one of them. After a short period in which Butters briefly Renfields himself out to the vampire clique, fetching among other things a case of Dr. Pepper and cherry Twizzlers, they take him to the Hot Topic and dress him up.
Needless to say, this whole thing doesn’t sit well with two groups: Butters’ parents, who find they can no longer ground their son, and the goth kids, who resent having their style ganked out from underneath them.
I’ll leave it to you to watch to see how it turns out–let’s just say that the title of this post isn’t just a song title–and the end is somewhat…blah.
That’s not a vampire pun, either. For the season finale of South Park, I feel vaguely cheated. This was a good episode, sure–nothing GREAT, definitely not Peruvian flute band great–but it certainly wasn’t as bad as Elementary School Musical was or even as bad as the whole Indy-Jones-taking-it-up-the-ass episode.
At the end of the day, I’m left concerned about the future of South Park. This season was a mixed bag of fun and total crap. Will next season improve? It can’t get much worse….
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