Okay, I’ll admit…after the debacle that was last week’s South Park, featuring more fictional character sodomy than I ever really wanted to see, this week’s South Park was a great improvement.  Though frankly, it wouldn’t exactly be difficult to top that steaming pantload, I have to admit that Matt and Trey did indeed pull a winner out of the hatch for once.

This time around, Cartman is once again in fine form, mocking Wendy Testaberger’s heartfelt research paper on breast cancer because of, of course, the frequent involvement of the word “breast”.  To fourth grade boys this is actually rather funny but also laden with symbolism and mystery because it’s only a matter of time before these things start to run lives.

Wendy of course isn’t taking this lightly and thus issues a challenge: after school. she’s gonna beat the fat off of him.  Cartman accepts, but soon realizes that this isn’t exactly a good idea because even if he WINS the fight, he still loses in the long run.  Thus, in a surprising display of good sense, Cartman tries to patch things up with Wendy via a series of increasingly desperate tactics.

Ultimately, Cartman manages to delay the fight and then short-circuit it by completely sacrificing his dignity, but dignity never meant much to Cartman anyway as it doesn’t come with frosting.

Now, most reasonable people in this situation, especially since the only person who knows what humiliating lengths Cartman had to go to to get this fight called off is publicly discredited, might well dummy up for a while and let the whole thing become water under the bridge.

Longtime viewers know that Cartman is not a reasonable person.  He takes the opportunity to, repeatedly, spike the ball and do the Cartman Shuffle all over the end zone, thus earning his inevitable fate which I won’t spoiler for you here.

And so, Matt and Trey have achieved improvement here, but at what cost?  Cartman is rapidly becoming a caricature, and his long-term sustainabilty is in question.  Continually going nuclear is going to wear Cartman’s welcome thin and probably run Matt and Trey clean out of ideas for escalation.  At the rate he’s going I look for him to discover roofies at his first school dance in season fourteen and be in full Hannibal Lecter-style facemask by season seventeen.

But still, it definitely beats watching Indiana Jones get anally raped.

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