‘South Park’ Shuts Down Fan Whining With An All-Time Classic B-Plot

Trey Parker and Matt Stone have declared that “South Park Sucks Now,” but, luckily, they’ve put the South Park Police Department on the case. 

Many long-time South Park fans have spent the duration of Season 27/28 complaining that the show should go back to basics and just tell stories about a small city in Colorado and its eccentric inhabitants. Two weeks ago, in the South Park episode “The Woman in the Hat,” Stan, Kyle and Kenny commiserated about how national politics has taken over their town and they simply aren’t getting up to the low-stakes, age-appropriate antics that typified their first ten years in elementary school.

Then, last night, Parker and Stone proved that they haven’t lost touch with the cornerstone of the South Park community: the proud, passionate and completely inept South Park Police Department. In “Sora Not Sorry,” Parker and Stone pulled off one of the best B-plots in years by having Sergeant Yates attempt to bust the ring of beloved cartoon characters who he believes to be abusing the town's children.

“Sora Not Sorry” opens up with an A.I.-generated video of Santa Claus pissing on Red McArthur, prompted by a vindictive Butters who is, apparently, in a full-on incel arc. Over the course of the episode, the deepfake war between South Park Elementary Students escalated to the point where law enforcement had to get involved – after all, they couldn't just let Totoro get away with assaulting children.

In their timely critique of the rise of A.I.-powered video generation tools like Sora 2, Parker and Stone demonstrated how hard it will soon be to differentiate reality from fakery by having Sergeant Yates and the rest of the police force go on a wild goose chase to track down Droopy Dog, Popeye, Yogi Bear, Garfield, the Pink Panther and the rest of the animated pedophiles whose virtual crimes are indistinguishable from real atrocities in the eyes of the cops.

The highlight of the SPPD cartoon crackdown was easily Yates and Mitch Murphy going undercover as a kid-diddling Rocky and Bullwinkle.

Then, in the final act of “Sora Not Sorry,” SPPD's side plot suddenly crashes into the multi-episode arc about billionaire Peter Thiel using Eric Cartman in his quest to prevent Satan and Trump's antichrist butt baby from being born, as Yates and the rest of the squad bust Thiel in a motel room with Cartman and pin the pedophile ring on him.

From a story structure perspective, "Sora Not Sorry' was classic South Park – Parker and Stone have always loved slamming the B-plot into the main arc in the final few scenes, thus tying together the episode narratively and thematically. But, more than that, it's nice to see that the South Park Police Department, which has been such an integral part of the show's formula since the very beginning in Season One, can still bust out a laugh-out-loud manhunt nearly three decades into the series.

Thanks to the boys in blue, “Sora Not Sorry” felt like vintage, timeless South Park. A plotline grounded in the characters of the town that uses topical subjects simply as a jumping-off point for hilarity is exactly what the “South Park Sucks Now” fans have been calling for, which means it's time to dump the SPSN crypto coin.