In South Park: Post COVID: The Return Of COVID, the villains don’t know that they’re villains
The greatest trick of the show's latest movie on Paramount+ is making you sympathetic to just about everyone
TV Reviews South Park
As an animated sitcom, the primary goal of South Park is always going to be making the audience laugh. But as a show that’s been on for nearly 25 years, it’s only natural that its viewers eventually become invested for reasons that don’t always have to do with comedy.
And that’s where the gold lies in South Park: Post COVID: The Return Of COVID—not necessarily in the audacity of its jokes, but in the surprising direction it takes some of its longest-running characters. While the successful running gags are still there (pound for pound, South Park’s second made-for-TV movie on Paramount+ has more laughs than its predecessor), the most memorable moments come from the arc of the special’s villains.
Picking up where November’s Post COVID left off, The Return Of COVID finds South Park’s grownup kids in full Avengers: Endgame mode, trying to figure out how to travel back in time to reverse the shitty present in which they currently live. If that sounds like an overly basic distillation of the plot, that’s because, like the first movie, The Return Of COVID complicates the story with subplots that sometimes make the core narrative feel like it’s stalling. Granted, these threads justify their existence by coalescing in the end (even Randy’s last Tegridy Farms marijuana plant ends up playing a pivotal role), but with the promise of time travel at the end of the last installment, there’s an urgency to get back to the past that doesn’t become fully realized until the third act.
The main conflict stems from Cartman not wanting the present to change. Unlike his friends, he’s more than content with where he’s at. I honestly thought this week would reveal that his supposedly blissful family life was all some elaborate plan to get revenge on Kyle, but The Return Of COVID shows that Cartman’s love and fulfillment are genuine. Even when he does return to his villainous ways toward the film’s middle, the reversal comes more from an authentic fear of losing his loved ones than a desire for cold-blooded vengeance. And that feels so much more satisfying than if Cartman had been pulling a fast one on everybody this whole time. It shows that he’s capable of empathy and, more importantly, capable of great change.
By the time Trey Parker and Matt Stone have cut to the credits right after The Return Of COVID’s cruelest—and funniest—joke, it’s Cartman who’s made the biggest sacrifice and, as a result, lost everything he has just as he expected (no spoilers on the specifics here). And given Stan and Kyle’s squabbling and pettiness throughout both movies, you’re left wondering if they’re the ones who have become more villainous along the way.
Equally surprising is the reveal of The Return Of COVID’s primary antagonist, Victor Chaos, who of course turns out to be none other than one Leopold “Butters” Stotch. At the end of Post COVID, we were left in the dark about what Butters had aged into. Would he simply be an adult version of his Professor Chaos alter ego? A reversion to his Gollum persona from “The Return Of The Fellowship Of The Ring To The Two Towers”? Something else entirely?
No, it turns out that the true villain of the future is an oily, overly enthusiastic NFT salesman, which feels pitch-perfect for our current era. In keeping with the character’s history, Butters’ transformation occurred when, in the wake of COVID, he endured an inhumanely long grounding from his parents.
As funny as it is to see Butters blaze a path of physical and psychological destruction with his promises of non-fungible tokens, Parker and Stone never give him the mustache-twirling quality of countless other cartoon villains. Like so many people embedded in NFT culture, Butters is convinced that what he’s doing is actually helping artists and, by extension, society at large. That doesn’t excuse his behavior, but like Cartman’s heel turn (and, if we’re being honest, Stan and Kyle’s), it’s so much more compelling when we truly understand where the villains are coming from.
This sympathetic approach to everyone’s questionable behavior reaches its apex in The Return Of COVID’s climax. After a couple of gut-busting action sequences that borrow heavily from both The Terminator and Blade Runner, we’re left with a final can’t-we-all-just-get-along message. At first, it feels almost like an over-simplification of the fraught times we’re in, especially when South Park has been so sharply critical this past year of groups like QAnon.
But then that final unforgiving moment with Cartman hits, and it’s clear that, in the world of South Park (and our own), there’s no perfect solution to any of the issues the show has tackled since the onset of the pandemic. In the end, someone’s always going to get screwed. Here, it’s the show’s most unsympathetic character, and the fact that Parker and Stone actually make us feel bad for him is a truly impressive trick.
Stray Observations
- It’s refreshing to see South Park continue to take advantage of showing full-frontal male nudity on the show. And it was even more refreshing to see that adult Butters still drops trou and lifts his shirt up at the urinal to pee.
- There was really no good reason to have Randy quote Roy Batty’s “tears in rain” monologue from Blade Runner, but boy did it make me laugh.
- It’s eerie how, almost immediately after the first film aired, the world found itself dealing with another COVID variant.
- While these South Park TV movies exist in this weird space between regular episodes and feature-length films, I think having the extra time to work on them benefits Parker and Stone. They were able to crank out a good Omicron joke while also delivering a story with multiple threads that mostly holds together.
78 Comments
Has anyone else checked out Centaurworld? It’s such a fantastic show. It’s like Galavant on acid.
Love the existential fear that constantly plagues them. Tiny sentient versions of themselves shooting out of their hooves into horrible reality was laugh out loud funny. Some Disney quality bangers too.
So many layers to this gag. Poor little dudes are born more fucked up then Rick’s butter passing robot. Gotta catch up on season 2 just released.
Is someone forcing you to comment on every South Park article?
God you’re unfunny and uninteresting.
Laser is trying hard to live by the principle of saying nothing if you have nothing good to say. Don’t ruin it.
Maybe this is the point where he starts turning into good future Cartman.
Passive-aggressiveness seems like a weird approach for him.
No one likes you.
This animation style is for small brains only
Oh my god shut up Laserface literally no one likes you
South Park is much, much better.
I may actually have to check this out, when P+ does a free trial or something. Which they might do, for all I know. I just don’t want another fucking subscription.
free trials are a trap
only if you’re an easy mark
Hey hey im lazy not easy.
Get the trial and immediately cancel it so you don’t have to worry about getting charged when you forget about it. I also have several credit and debit cards and email addresses I cycle through to get multiple trials on one service. I watched Orange is the New Black and Glow for free their entire runs on Netflix. You can also reuse a CC or debit account if you get a replacement card. I also watched every major PPV on the WWE Network for a few years on trials.
Or you could pay for a month once in awhile.
I sign up and then immediately cancel. You’ll never get caught in that auto-renewal trp.
I cycle through subscriptions now. When I finish a show, I’ll cancel whatever I have and jump to whatever has what I want to watch next. Sure, it means not having access to everything all at once, but I typically only watch one show at a time.
I tell myself I’ll cancel then I realize i’ve been paying Gamefly subscriptions for two years without owning a console.
Yea I don’t have the will to do all that. I just pirate
I pirated for half my life until recently getting constant threats from Comcast. Really annoying that I can’t tell how their threats build up or work because I have got a shitload over time and they haven’t shut it down yet.
They do them constantly.
I’ve got P+ because I’m a big fan of The Challenge. Right now if you use the promo code “THECHALLENGE”, it’ll get you a free month. Plenty of time to watch South Park, whatever else, and then cancel.
The first part maybe you can find it online
I would love to see the Goth kids as adults.
They were shown in the first Post-COVID special (part one), last month.
You can see them in the background at Kenny’s funeral in the first one.
I totally missed that.
I only saw the lanky one and I watched twice. Freeze frame for easter eggs.
They are also in the end sequence in this one.
They are in the background at the end of the second special as well. Dark eye makeup still going strong!
They were definitely in the background in these last two specials. There were actually a number of minor characters in the background, I spotted Mimsy at the end of this one.
from my experience a lot of them dont change much. Thats one of the sub cultures where you can be old as fuck and still be in it.
I haven’t watched the show in years and only sporadically then. The 2nd half of this feels like they’ve grown so much. Cartman really isn’t trying to undo anything because his life did work out that way. Breaking up the gang actually allowed him to grow. His end in the ‘good’ timeline is fascinating as it’s effectively canon until otherwise stated and feels about where it should be. The ‘everybody smoke weed and get over it’ is funny and I get the point but lobbing in the 1/6 coup attack is sort of pointless and Jimmy being an asshole insult comic in the good future is a reminder of how much I really don’t like SP about 2/3rds the time. Still, it’s the first SP I’ve watched in close to a decade and it makes me think I’ll maybe watch some of the other movies they put out.
It’s almost as if comedy is funny in the good future.
I am sorry, but in no universe was Cartman not fucking with Kyle when he was referencing scripture while fucking his wife.
I think he was messing with Kyle on a subconscious level. He got back at Kyle by being happy and a better Jew than he is.
the whole shtick is that in the presence of Kyle Cartman becomes toxic. By moving away Cartman become decent; and became shitty again when reunited with Kyle. In the “corrected” reality they never really get away from each other so the reality much grimer for Cartman.
Sad that Kyle and being in South Park is what drives Cartman to either become good or bad, but of course Cartman is the one making these choices in life.
Still entirely Cartman’s fault and problem.
actually, out of both episodes the thing that has me breaking out into giggles was that “covenant with abraham” stuff while railing his wife
This is exactly what I wanted for this episode, for Cartman to be genuinely changed and it’s the good guys of the show that undo all that for their own ends.
A better and more fitting fate for Cartman (and one that would make for a better sequel hook) is that by changing the past, Kyle and Stan create a new feature where someone high off of Randy’s pot kills Cartman and his mom when Cartman’s around 12-13 years old. Effectively giving Cartman a horrific ending (dying before he even has a chance to live let alone getting married and having kids) and having the final future segment end with the new future version of Kyle and Stan finding out that Cartman died mid-scheme that is now coming home to roost and forcing a cliffhanger where Kyle and Stan must once again travel back in time; this time to save Cartman to stop his scheme, in a later movie to allow them to avoid having everyone’s future set in stone.
they couldve done a bit where the killer keeps blaming the murder on the weed, and people are like “no, noone goes crazy and kills someone JUST because of weed, (even special variant tegridy weed) you’re just a crazy asshole.”
Loved the bit about NFTs. On the other hand I found the bit about Alexas to be very sexist, and the jokes about “we can’t say anything anymore because of the woke” or something around Jimmy stinked a lot too.
(btw why are my comments still greyed out? I created another account because I changed computer and now it’s in “pending approval” mode or something). This website account system has a problem; why can’t I create a real account?
You know who I WASN’T sympathetic towards? Clyde. Screw him!And also, there’s just something WRONG about Cartman being the only one who got to be happy in the future, so I feel like it all worked out for the best in the end.
Clyde was the worst. His punishment for being too full of himself after the girls’ cutest boys list. It was just for the shoes, Clyde, just for the shoes.
That ending was strangely upsetting. We found out throughout this special that even after all the shitty things he did as a kid, even Cartman is capable of redemption… then he ends up with the most miserable possible future, all because he did the right thing for his friends. I was expecting him to at least end up as the fat surly plumber version of himself from the end of “My Future Self n’ Me”; having him be homeless was pretty harsh.
As the Bible says, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few”
The expert who told Clyde that the vaccine made titties on your head turned out to be . . . future Clyde.
I don’t think Kyle was unhappy – unlike Stan, who was miserabnle. But the “corrected” future Kyle was definitely happy.
Except for the two children that were annihilated from existence.
I thought Stan and Wendy would have been married
The villains of South Park are the animators. They gave all the other animators permission to just bang out half-assed crap and pretend it was irony.
Just like with NFTs, in the end someone is always going to get screwed.
Although I do think they genuinely fleshed out Future!Cartman to be sympathetic, I think you’re reading too much into the joke that… yeah, in a *bad* future, of course *only* Cartman gets to be happy, and *of course* he gets to be happy in a way designed specifically to mess with Kyle.
The ending was, and I can’t believe I’m going to use this word, devastating. Quite an accomplishment.
Having grown up with little brothers, I can confirm that the drop-trou-lift-shirt method of peeing is like, classic little boy bathroom etiquette and I think this is the only animated show I’ve seen actually put that on screen, and that’s hilarious. Of course Butters pees that way. Of course he STILL pees that way.
Better than the last episode (or movie? Doesn’t feel like a ‘movie’ to me) but I gotta say the ending rubbed me the wrong way. Not the bit with Cartman, that was hilarious and I loved all of that. Not to sound too much like Laserface, I genuinely thought the whole ‘hey, both sides were dicks’ bit was bullshit in regards to Qanon and anti-vaxxers. But whatever, it was still hilarious.
the reversal comes more from an authentic fear of losing his loved ones than a desire for cold-blooded vengeance.There was also a bit of a persecution complex mixed in. It seemed like Cartman thought Kyle was trying to go back in time specifically to screw over him which was never the case.
As funny as it is to see Butters blaze a path of physical and
psychological destruction with his promises of non-fungible tokens,
Parker and Stone never give him the mustache-twirling quality of
countless other cartoon villains. Like so many people embedded in NFT
culture, Butters is convinced that what he’s doing is actually helping
artists and, by extension, society at large. That doesn’t excuse his
behavior, but like Cartman’s heel turn (and, if we’re being honest, Stan
and Kyle’s), it’s so much more compelling when we truly understand
where the villains are coming from.
Not sure I buy this about Butters. At one point in the special, he’s literally demonstrating a pyramid scheme and says (paraphrase) “these people on the bottom? Fuck them. We’re getting money”. Pretty sure he understands on some level what he’s doing. He might believe some part in NFTs, but he also knows he can get rich by fucking people over.
Is there a joke behind some people in future wearing what appears to be balls of yarn on their heads? I think all the news anchors, store workers, etc all had them on. I couldn’t tell if its just a “hey, its the future, its just weird” joke or something I’m missing
Tin foil hats, hence the lack of it.
The only explanation I could think of was that Clyde was right and all those yarnheads had boobies growing out of their skulls. That couldn’t have happened though, right?
Probably referring to movies like Conspiracy Theory
I thought they were the evolution of head diapers
The adult Stan, Kyle and Cartman said they had no way to get back to their present. I wonder if we will see them again in future episodes, along with their younger selves.
I think they just get, “blipped.”
Although it throws up a grandfather paradox, within the logic of the specials those versions of them (and time travel) no longer exist as they altered the timeline, so Kenny didn’t work on time travel, Stan and Kyle never fell out, and so on.
I think the reason for the Roy Batty speech was simply that they had worked so many Blade Runner jokes in throughout both shows that they couldn’t let the most famous scene be left out.The Blade Runner jokes cracked me up. Every one.
It’s sort of blowing my mind at this point that South Park can still break out all-timers like this. Every now and then I think the show’s finally succumbed to age, but I loved every moment of this outside of maybe the Alexa jokes getting a bit old. If they keep this up through the whole Paramount contract, I’ll be very happy indeed.
For those that feel bad for Cartman’s lost happy future, rest well knowing that by the rules set up in this special, that version of Cartman must indeed continue to exist in an alternate universe. What do I mean? Clyde saw himself as a child, he established this prior to anyone time traveling, explaining how a really smart guy explained that if he gets vaccinated he’ll grow boobs on his head, which we see later was his future self. YET, we see a scene in this special where the future versions of the kids interfere with a scene from the Vaccination Special, even though when we first saw that scene in that special, those future versions were not there. This must mean that time travel works in the multiverse sense. The adult Clyde we’ve been following comes from a universe where future Clyde interfered with his timeline, but the others did not (yet somehow, Kyle still lived). Point is, whether they meant to or not, Matt and Trey made the multiverse in effect with this special.I know it’s silly to dissect the rules of time travel, especially in something like South Park, but when something that happens within the plot makes it clear that there are certain rules in effect for time travel, then I can’t ignore it.
I don’t know why I thought there would be a different type of conclusion – the (essentially) “aren’t Both sides jerks?” garbage is just…invalid? Historically wrong?Some people are responsible for the demonstrably preventable spread of a disease that has killed literally millions of people across the world…others are like, “hey, get the vaccine and booster – that we likely wouldn’t have needed if you masked/got the vaccine earlier – and wear the mask over your nose you stupid idiot”?Sorry – just ranting into the digital abyss