Non-Spoiler Review
As an ardent fan of South Park since it first premiered all the way back in August of 1997, the first episode of South Park after a long, eight month wait is always a bright spot in my year. Last year, with Season 21’s middling ‘White People Renovating Houses’, I wasn’t satisfied. It wasn’t until the second episode, ‘Put it Down’, in which North Korea started launching missiles over Tweek’s House because of President Garrison’s incendiary tweets, that I was satisfied.
But I didn’t have to wait until episode two this season. I didn’t even have to wait until the second minute.
I was cackling immediately
Only South Park could start a new season with several school shootings in the first few minutes. And the school shootings don’t stop there. And while you do need a dark sense of humour to laugh at little kids being surrounded by school shooters and SWAT officers firing at each other, the stark apathy of all the characters reaction to school shootings is what hits home. Upon being prompted by his mother at the dinner table to tell his father what happened at school, Stan says, “Oh, yeah, I failed a math quiz”, instead of talking about the school shooting. Sharon is frenzied the entire episode that so many shootings happen. And no one else being as frenzied only makes her more flustered. In typical Randy fashion, there can be only one reason why his wife is acting this way: she’s on her period.
The B story of the episode features a familiar conflict between Token and Cartman, where Cartman is pissed that he failed the math quiz because Token wouldn’t let Cartman cheat off him. In typical Cartman fashion, there can only be on reason why Token is mad at him: he heard Cartman didn’t like Black Panther. And it seems if there is a plot thread that is going to linger and lead into something grandiose, it’s Cartman’s casual racism over Black Panther…and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
All-in-all, ‘Dead Kids’ didn’t only make me laugh harder than any episode since ‘Cock Magic’ back in Season 18, but it said a lot without saying a lot. The images of school shootings and apathy and terrified mothers say a lot, and in the end I was left really pondering not necessarily what Trey Parker and Matt Stone were trying to say, but what they stirred up inside of me. And it made me realize that I relate to everyone in this episode. I’m apathetic, jaded. It’s too much to care about everything; it’s too hard to feel for everything. It’s easier to check out and accept that school shootings and dead kids are a part our lives, and they probably always will be, no matter what we do.
RATING: A+
Thoughts w/ SPOILERS
There were so many great little touches which really brought everything together, like the way Randy, mid-ballad to his wife, pauses to drop a “Surprise, Sharon!”; the barely there sound bite of one SWAT officer saying ‘you shot the wrong one’ while trying to get the school shooter; the way one of the mothers has a bullet wound in her arm and she doesn’t even seem to notice; Butters nearly shooting Cartman with an AR-15 for going ‘psst’ – just the fact they gave BUTTERS an AR-15 to be Hall Monitor was hilarious enough.
One aspect of the episode I adored, is that Randy is usually the one character who is freaking out about something and taking that something into obscene, hyperbolic histrionics. In "Dead Kids" we she Sharon (though she’s had moments before) taking the Randy role for the first time in the series. Randy doesn’t know how to handle what he usually puts his wife through. And it really speaks to his character that, unlike Sharon, who is typically upfront with him, he can't just come out and say it. An example is in Season 15’s ‘You’re Getting Old’ when Randy convinces himself he likes Tween Wave Music, and she says, “You don’t really like Tween Wave, Randy! It sounds like shit and you know it!” Her candor and love for Randy is often what brings him back, such as her giving him a handjob (thanks to Shake Weight’s training) makes him realize “Cooking’s lame” in the Season 14 finale ‘Crème Fraiche’. Randy, being who he is, naturally blames Sharon’s extreme mood on ‘woman’ problems. Yet in his own selfish, ignorant way, Randy manages to bring Sharon to the same kind of catharsis she usually brings to Randy, except unlike her, Randy only does it because he cares about himself. And that’s beautiful. That’s a marriage that functions naturally in dysfunction.
The Cartman/Token stuff is kind of old hat, but this is what their character relationship has pretty much always been, going all the back to ‘Hate Crime 2000’. The two characters have such great tension with each other that I don’t care if it’s retreading old ground. We watched Cartman and Kyle war with each other for 20 years and that was always good too. I do want to see where this Black Panther talk leads to in the next few episodes. And while it wasn’t the strongest material, I thought its casual innocence...cheating in class and Marvel movies...really balanced out all the school shooting stuff. Though I have a feeling it will connect to something odious down the line.
Finally, let’s talk about the school shooting stuff. It’s accurate if still overplayed. Sharon is the vocal minority and everyone else is accustomed to the craziness of the world. Statistically, school shootings have actually gone down since the 90's, but we were so blissfully unaware of it until Columbine, when they really entered the social consciousness. Now, with 24 hours news cycles and social media, school shootings seem so frequent because they dominate discourse and headlines and politics for such long stretches of time. Every time there is a school shooting now, I don’t think “how tragic” or “what horror” I think, “I can’t wait to hear people argue about gun control for the next three weeks”. Like I said, I’m jaded and apathetic. But that’s what this constant barrage of current events and news and opinions and opinions disguised as news have done to me. All I see are dollar signs being dumped into the coffers of CNN and other media giants as people are glued to their devices and TVs and absorbing and disseminating every new piece of news, every tick added to the death toll, every possible detail. And it’s milked until the udder falls to dust. There is a limit to how much human beings can care, and how much human beings can feel, and how much they can fear, until we either shut that part of ourselves down, or we jump in and headfirst. With ‘Dead Kids’, Parker and Stone present us with seemingly the only two options we have to deal with school shootings: we can accept them as part of life and just go about our days, or we can obsess and drive ourselves insane with fear and anxiety.
In the end, I had only one gripe with ‘Dead Kids’ and that is that Kenny wasn’t a victim of a school shooting. But there’s still time.