South Park: Fort Collins Review

We’re less than two weeks out from Election Day and there’s already blood in the streets. Splatters of member berry juice stain our hallowed countryside. The smell of oil burning a troll to a crisp lingers from sea to shining sea. The stench is undeniable. The future feels uninhabitable. You start to see why half of South Park is embracing our imperfect past. It provides a simplistic, familiar solution rather than fixing our problems with an eye toward innovating in the future.  

Gerald is trolling to restore that gooey childhood feeling of calling someone a “fag” for no good reason and having a hardy laugh about it. In a similar vein, Mr. Garrison has spent a season and a half breaking down an iron-clad PC wall, threatening to “fuck illegal immigrants death.” Member berries can hum along to Toto’s “Africa” all they want, but the real damage is those surly little fuckers ‘membering Stormtroopers, The Cantina, and the Battle of Endor.  It’s all given us reason to look back fondly on last December’s The Force Awakens, as it becomes more clear that J.J. Abrams is the reason why America is going backwards in 2016. These are facts that mouth-breathing nutjobs like Alex Jones can’t even dispute. In fact, he’d be the first to get behind this conspiracy.

J.J. Abrams, racism, trolling, and Star Wars sequel member berry-bait could drag us down. With PC Principal still in a PC Pretzel, anger stands to defeat us. Despite the negative vibes, South Park season 20 is on the ascension. “Fort Collins” took loosely connected plots and bridged them together in a way that changed my outlook on this season. And against literally all odds, Cartman is the new face of hope.

Cartman is Barack Obama 2009.

When everyone was blabbering on about wars and terrorism and the economy and shit, Obama took a telescope to the window of the oval office, looked to the stars, and said: “Hey, is that a red planet up there? Conquer it, we shall!”

For the longest time, it looked like a pipe dream. Mars is cold, distant, out of mind. We already reached the moon, why even bother? That’s never been Eric Cartman’s attitude. He doesn’t let the past keep him from pushing forward. The thought of Eric even coming close to having a girlfriend is an insane notion. But he’s made it to Mars. And he’s not going to let online deeds of a past life sweep him away into a dusty, red sand storm. It’s some of the best character development for Cartman we’ve seen in ages, and the final stretch of episodes should be thrilling to see how his arc plays out.

Where that leaves us in South Park is a mad race to erase the past before the Danish expose it. South Park typically does a strong job of moving forward without totally blanking its past. Let’s see if its characters can follow suit.