Grid Effect

If you watched anything on network last night, we hope you Tivo’d this. Because even though we probably rank this episode right in the middle of everything we’ve seen from Parker and Stone this season, it still beat the shit out of anything we previewed yesterday.

It’s nice to see that during the hiatus South Park didn’t forget how to make non-topical episodes. “Super Fun Time” was alright but nothing to write home about, I was kind of out of the loop on this one since I’ve never experienced the fervent dedication to character of the tourist trap living museums that they were portraying. Still, it was at times hilarious to watch without any prior reference.

One thing South Park has managed to do, more so than any other comedy, is given you what you expect from each character in a certain predicament while managing to avoid predictability and staleness.

Only Leopold could enjoy that field trip.

So last night the class goes onto a field trip to a mock town from 1864 and it is held hostage by German thieves who robbed a Burger King (the constant exchanging of what they stole was arguably the highlight of the episode). So what happens? Stan plays the hero, Kyle plays the concerned friend, Cartman evades the whole thing by dragging Butters and all his passivity and teacher loyalty to an elaborate arcade and Kenny is almost used as an example when the town actors refuse to break character for their captors.

All stay true to character and leave us with a decent episode of television. We prefer the episodes lacking a contemporary take on socio-politics when they reign in such outlandish premises, but after close to 200 episodes we’ll take what we can get, as it is probably increasingly difficult to find new situations for the 4th graders to be in. Again, the episode wasn’t a misguided idea, just executed haphazardly.

As we said earlier we’ve never visited one of those tailer made for elementary school field trip places and been so annoyed or patronized by the employees. But we have been condescended to, probably not to the same degree but any time you’re treated like an idiot it comes off as irritating. So that end of it was relatable. But on the whole, while what was being presented was indeed funny in and of itself, it struck me as something almost unique to Colorado, or wherever Trey Parker and/or Matt Stone grew up.

Some choice moments:

-Butters actually getting angry, only to break down crying.

-Every interrogation by of the town actors.

-Kyle pointing out the mill worker’s digital watch, only to have an SUV roll up behind them.

-The one actor contemplating breaking character and using a telephone, only to have his supervisor pin him against the wall and physically silence him.

-All of the actors at the living museum breaking character at 5pm in a Pavlovian fashion.

Since the previews for next episode are the season premiere, we’re assuming this was the last of this half of the season. It was a decent run but with more clunkers than we’re accustom too., but we’d be lying if we said we weren’t expecting more from them in the second half.

This was mailed in and we apologize for that. We’ll have a Survivor recap later today that will be much more comprehensive.