‘South Park: The Pandemic Special’ Skewers the National Response With a Comic Dystopian Present

South Park” opens season 24 with “The Pandemic Special.” Like the 1999 animated feature, “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut,” the series first hour long special opens with a song. It is equally joyous, but the polar opposite of the film’s. The hills are still alive with the sounds of music, but they are socially distanced. Showers are a luxury when lives are on the line and the only thing standing between Eric Cartman and a good education is better Wi-Fi. In the meantime, he can sit on the toilet as long as he likes, and that’s something to sing about. But when it looks like the kids are going back to school during the pandemic, it appears Cartman’s lives don’t matter.

Stan is most affected by the shutdown. Kyle is very supportive, and thrilled to be going back to school with other kids, but Stan is a bundle of suppressed anxiety. Butters also suffers because of the pandemic. He was promised a trip to Build-a-Bear, which had to be postponed to April, when all the stores were closed. The Build-a-Bear story takes on a life of its own. We see the slow buildup of exasperation from the very opening scene. This is Butter’s unique kind of arc and he is given a minor tour de force. He even gets to do James Cagney in “White Heat,” although he never gets to be on top of the world. His pain becomes Stan’s redemption. 

What Trey Parker and Matt Stone do most brilliantly is twist the world through a Libertarian lens. They kid themselves it is an objective filter and use it in the great tradition of P.J. O’Rourke, token conservative at “National Lampoon” and the author of “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink.” Parker and Stone never forget the Colorado setting and prevailing sentiments. It’s snowy in Colorado. It’s always snowy in Colorado, and the citizens of the quiet mountain town are always at odds. Some engage in mask shaming, others indulge in conspiracies about how COVID-19 might not be a real disease. The episode opens with people asking whether they’re protesting or rioting.

Luckily most of these exchanges happen on Zoom. At the dinner table, parents know not to quote the president in front of children. In the “South Park” universe, former elementary teacher Mr. Garrison is The President of the entire United States. Fronting for Donald Trump, brainwashed by Caitlyn Jenner and wearing an off-center and off-color toupee to match his off-color real-life counterpart, he made a promise to all Americans: to kill all the Mexicans. The pandemic is a gift which keeps giving, and the world can eat shit off his balls and die before he lifts a finger to help. He is actively inactive.

The South Park police force has also been rendered inactive and all the defunded cops are now elementary school teachers. They are told not to cause unnecessary deaths. An easy job? Maybe for most people, but it’s a tough reach for cops. Detective Harris is a new teacher, so he leads with simple math. That’s all it takes for a uniform cop to put his hand on his gun. In the ensuing melee, he shoots Token, even remarking “got him” as if the only black kid in class was going to be the target all along. 

The incident is deemed Covid-related in a police-state government coverup. The police commentary is positively barbed. All of South Park Elementary becomes militarized, the children oppressed. This culminates when the kids break out of school. A reassuring call that there’s no cause for alarm, harrowingly turns into a warning these kids have been exposed to Covid and may be spreading mustaches right now caricatures how fear is used to sell basically anything to a gullible electorate. The result is scary though on several unintended levels. People see cops shooting kids and think, “why can’t I do that? I hate kids as much as any cop. That should be me in that tank blowing apart a third-grade runner.” What does Stan learn today by breaking all the rules? Build-a-Bears don’t build themselves.

The “South Park” team didn’t just play with the lockdown, they lived it. “The Pandemic Special” was recorded remotely. You can’t tell. The sound design is still very professional. The special gets its title from a marijuana promotional sale Stan’s dad Randy Marsh is running: the Pandemic Special, which promises 10 percent off his best strains. But what really makes him a pandemic specialist is how close he is to the source. Mickey Mouse has fucked a lot of bats in his day. Almost as many as Disney’s done to every other species. But Randy has only fucked one. This makes him an unwitting patient zero, a “Typhoid Randy” whose pot dispensary made bank while everyone stayed home and got high. It doesn’t matter if the vaccine lies in the corrupted DNA of a pangolin. Randy’s tapped that as well. 

South Park is not a very forgiving place. You can still hear complaints about the Terence and Philip special which interrupted the “Cartman’s Mom is a Dirty Slut” reveal. So, Randy decides he has to do the right thing: Hide any evidence he had anything to do with any breed of Wuhan wildlife. Mickey Mouse may have sold his soul to the devil when he sold “Mulan” to China, but Randy ultimately goes on a quest to redeem him. He believes he can cure Covid through his own special blend, and it’s a personal one, hand-rolled. Randy’s scene as a visiting nurse to Jimbo is pretty scary, even without the ejaculative drug delivery system. One good thing comes out of Randy’s experiment though. When everyone in town comes down with Marsh mustaches people finally start to wear their chin diapers over their mouths to cover it up. So, Randy saves part of the day by mistake.

“The Pandemic Special” seems like a perfectly good idea. In spite of what Sharon says. People are suffering, children are confused, society is becoming a conglomeration of agoraphobic Tik-Tok bingers and unmasked marauders. Stan wants to go back to the “before time,” back in March. He’d probably be just as happy in the “before time” before that when accusations of child abuse tore parents from children and left the town at the mercy of grade school youth gangs. 

“The Pandemic Special” brings people together. It gives them hope, with a mix of fear. But that’s mainly because mustaches are scary. Sure, Randy wants to own up to his part in the pandemic, but in the scheme of things, what would it solve? Besides an international health crisis. Ultimately, “South Park” doesn’t have any answers. Why should it? It’s a cartoon on Comedy Central. But it raises a lot of questions, especially the ending. Who really benefits if no vaccine is ever found, why doesn’t Mr. Slave ever call President Garrison and, if Sharon has no interest in the “Pandemic Special,” what is that above her lip? 

South Park: The Pandemic Special” premieres Sept. 30 at 8 p.m. on Comedy Central.