South Park - "Pandemic"

It's a weird thing to see a South Park episode that isn't quite sure what its doing. It usually doesn't happen that often. The specificity with which the show explores issues and the parodied manner in which they do so make it easy to identify that "Oh, this is an episode about homelessness in the style of a zombie movie", for example. Tonights episode, however, had no fucking clue what it was doing.

It started off with Stan noticing the increasing number of Peruvian Pan Flute bands popping up everywhere. He then notices how much money they make, and the boys naturally decide to start a Peruvian Pan Flute band of their own. Their promise to Craig that his investment in the band would yield profit, combined with the government's growing concern with the proliferation of pan pipe bands led me to believe it was going to be an episode about the US/global economic crash as a result of the faulty subprime mortgage system. I was wrong.

No, rather than go the economic crisis route, Stone and Parker went somewhere...different. The pan pipe bands are gathered to be deported, where they tell the guards that they are trying to protect them from "the Furry Death". Here, Stan's father's obsession with his new camcorder, established early in the episode, suddenly becomes our point of view and the episode turns into Cloverfield. Except instead of some half-seen unidentifiable monster, they chose to superimpose guinea pigs onto the streets of South Park. Carnage ensues, to be continued.

I wasn't disappointed with the new creativity of Stone and Parker, but rather, confused. It would be false to say that every episode has had some sort of social or political commentary, but every episode has at least held itself together in some sort of logical manner. Tonight's episode failed to do so. I had no idea where they were going with it, why they decided to mimick Cloverfield halfway through the episode, or what, if anything, they were trying to say. It just felt like a haphazard attempt at something. What that something was, though...who can say. Maybe next week's continuation will help clear things up.


C+