South Park looks at a post pandemic world

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   On August 5, 2021, South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone announced a deal that they made with streaming service Paramount+ regarding South Park. The deal brought a plethora of new South Park content, such as a new game, more episodes, and, what will be tackled in this review, fourteen new TV movies, with two being released every year for the next seven years. The first two of these movies just came out, both being a two-part event.

   The South Park: Post COVID special takes place forty years after the South ParQ: Vaccination Special where Eric, Kenny, Stan, and Kyle had agreed that they were not going to be friends anymore. The reason why the South ParQ: Vaccination Special spelled South Park like “South ParQ,” is because they were making fun of a far-right conspiracy theory group called “QAnon.” If you would like to know more about why they were making fun of them, I did a review of it when it came out. In this episode, quarantining is a thing of the past, and the virus has been mostly eradicated. Stan comes back to South Park to reunite with his friends after Kenny passes away. They all meet at Denny’s Applebee’s Max, a new restaurant to talk about Kenny. 

   Later on, it comes out that Kenny, who is a scientist in the future, died while researching a cure for COVID. Kenny sends his friends a clue because, according to Kenny, his friends are the only ones that can help him out. Because Eric, Stan, and Kyle haven’t been around, many of Kenny’s other friends have been helping out with trying to find a cure. When Eric, Stan, and Kyle get to the lab, they discover that Kenny had been trying to find a way to time travel. After finding a flash drive that Kenny had hidden, they found a video of the time travel experiment failing horribly, which ultimately caused Kenny to die. On the same flash drive, there was a document that said that the reason that he had been trying to perfect time traveling was because he was so upset that he and his friends weren’t talking to each other anymore, so he decided to go back in time. He thought that if they were friends again, that COVID would not have been as bad as it was. The rest of the two-part special focuses on Eric, Stan, and Kyle trying to find a way to travel back in time.

   The two TV-movies were very good, and it really goes to show that Parker and Stone can tackle real-world problems while still being comedic, particularly when they were talking about NFTs and cryptocurrency. I won’t say who they run into, because South Park fans will love it when they see it, but they showed the horrors that many people have faced when they invested in NFTs and cryptocurrencies. Some people have lost their life savings because they have been suckered into investing in something that’s not real.

   The one thing that I don’t like about this special, though, is that they are all adults. In the show, Eric, Kenny, Stan, and Kyle are all kids. It’s not a huge complaint, and I get that for the context of the special it does make sense, but it’s still just very odd to see them all as adults.

   Overall, I thought that the two-part South Park: Post COVID special was a very good start to the fourteen South Park movies that will be coming out. It sets the bar high and I can’t wait to see what Parker and Stone come up with next.

   The South Park: Post COVID TV-movies are streaming exclusively on Paramount+.