South Park heads back to Middle-earth to lampoon performative allyship
Season 25 continues the show's relationship with the works of J.R.R. Tolkien
TV Reviews Middle-earth
Since its sixth season, South Park has gotten a lot of comedic mileage out of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. First, the show riffed on Lord Of The Rings, with the boys embarking on a quest to return an adult videotape rather than destroy a piece of enchanted jewelry. In the very next episode, a gerbil traveling up a man’s ass took its cues from Rankin/Bass’ animated version of The Hobbit.
These early forays into Tolkien’s storytelling were effective yet surface-level parodies of their source material, simply relocating the epic tropes and whimsical balladry to more disgusting scenarios. But as South Park soldiered on through the years like a band of fighting Uruk-hai, the Middle-earth references got deeper and weirder. By the time Trey Parker and Matt Stone reached season 17, they were using Hobbits to comment on body-image issues and once again take the piss out of Kanye West.
But of all the outstanding Tolkien episodes throughout South Park’s history, I’d be hard-pressed to find one as funny and insightful as tonight’s “The Big Fix,” in which fantasy mythology and weed-farming come together to take on the hefty task of satirizing performative allyship.
It all begins when, after attending a seminar at a Cannabis Cultivators Expo, a very high Randy feels that he needs to diversify the workforce at Tegridy Farms. Naturally, the moderator’s finer statistical point about communities of color being kept out of wealth creation in the marijuana industry goes right over Randy’s head. Like many white people before him, he operates solely from a place of fear, only hearing the part about his business being boycotted if he doesn’t do something about the imbalance. In a panic, he invites the wealthy Black family over for dinner in an effort to bring their sons even closer than they already are and hopefully partner up with the father, Steve. Almost immediately, Randy’s taking selfies of the entire table in hopes of showing off his new Black friends on social media.
Stan has a similar storyline with Token, although his desire to be a better ally to the Black community seems to come from a more genuine place than Randy’s—or so it appears at first. While at dinner, he discovers that his friend’s name isn’t actually Token at all, as he’s thought for so many years, but Tolkien, as in the surname of one John Ronald Reul. It turns out that Steve is such a big J.R.R. Tolkien fan that he named his son after the author.
Stan feels horrible for not knowing this, especially when it becomes clear that everyone else in town—even Cartman!—was aware of the true meaning and spelling of Tolkien’s name. Stan, Randy, and—let’s face it, the audience (more on that in a bit)—seem to be the only ones who assumed his moniker was solely meant to be a joke about race. Unsure of what to do, Stan confides in his doctor, who accuses him of being racist and forcefully urges him to do “a lot of reading… from the perspective of a Black person.”
There’s a brilliant bit of meta humor in this scene when, while shaming Stan for assuming Tolkien’s name is racially motivated, the doctor looks directly at the audience and addresses his lines to them. The joke is that of course that’s why Parker and Stone originally gave Tolkien the name that they did. By now retconning it, they’re getting to have some fun with wordplay and South Park’s lore, as well as poke fun at how, as white people, we often scramble to “fix” often unfixable issues of social justice and race rather than address them thoughtfully and effectively.
Despite how horribly misguided it is, Stan takes the doctor’s advice quite literally and reads the entire Tolkien canon, but imagines the text being narrated by a racially caricatured Black man. He makes an even bigger misstep when he tries to convince his class that the Lord Of The Rings trilogy should be required reading so that they can all understand what Tolkien is going through and that he won’t feel left out. Never mind that Stan doesn’t even let his friend into the classroom to be part of the conversation. And as we eventually discover, Tolkien never even liked Lord Of The Rings all that much anyway. None of this is as much about truly listening or helping out a friend as it is Stan becoming obsessed with his own guilt and atonement.
In that regard, Stan proves to be no better than Randy, who quickly commodifies his new partnership with Steve without actually letting him make any business decisions. While supposedly fighting for inclusion, the Marsh men end up excluding the very people they claim to be helping. The cherry on top comes at the end of the episode when, after splitting from Randy, Steve moves his family right across the street from the Marshes and starts his own marijuana farm. To Randy’s dismay, Steve calls it Credigree Weed, leaning into the idea of “street cred” so that he can capitalize on the increased number of patrons who want to support Black-owned businesses. When he adopts an AAVE dialect that he’s never used before, Randy accuses him of being a phony (all while touting his own fake, folksy accent, of course). It was okay when Randy commodified Steve’s blackness. But for Steve to do it himself is, in Randy’s eyes, unforgivable.
In the episode’s final moments, it seems that Steve and Randy are on the brink of some kind of war straight from the pages of The Return Of The King or The Silmarillion. Although “The Big Fix” and last week’s “Pajama Party” are both self-contained episodes, maybe South Park will once more be dipping a toe into longer-form storytelling this season. Maybe Parker and Stone aren’t done with Tolkien—or the messy racial dynamic between the Marshes and the Blacks—just yet.
Stray Observations
- Between it being Black History Month and Amazon just announcing the title of its Lord Of The Rings series, the two main plot interests of tonight’s episode feel timely.
- I was thrilled to hear another nod to Rankin/Bass’ The Hobbit when Randy burst into “That’s What Bilbo Baggins Hates”.
- Speaking of knockout musical moments, Parker and Stone really outdid themselves with the boneheaded metaphor of “Black Puppy, White Puppy.” Also, I wonder if the courtroom scene is meant to imply that they tried and failed to secure the rights to Paul McCartney and Stevie Wonder’s “Ebony And Ivory” for the episode, so they just penned a shameless ripoff instead.
- “I thought I told you to get out of my office because you seriously make me sick. I’m gonna shit my fucking pants right now.”
27 Comments
You know its funny, the first time I saw Lord of the Rings Through the Two Towers, I thought Tokens name legitimately was Tolkien. So I guess the younger me was correct, it just took what, 18 years?
This episode seems really designed to fuck up the people who keep track of this stuff on wikis.Funny episode, though as someone who hasn’t seen much in the way of recent South Park, Stan’s voice sounded weird and it really threw me off. I was thinking it was sometime in the past, like 6 or 7 years, but then I looked on reddit and noticed people talking about it. So I guess Trey Parker just has a cold or something.
It sounded weird to me too, and I’ve been watching regularly for years.
The voice not only sounded weird, but all the kids’ lines sound weird‘clipped’ at the beginning of their sentences, like they’re hastily cut-and-pasted mp3s that were cropped a little too closely.
I think Trey Parker is getting Julie Kavner Syndrome. All of his characters are starting to sound a little off as he gets older (and I think he’s admitted he had to change Cartman’s voice because it was such a strain).
I’ve noticed Butters started to sound more and more like Kyle, so Matt seems to have leaned into more of an accent for him. I think for Trey his voice has deepened so for Cartman he’s definitely had to change it.
I thought so too, and I thought Mr. Mackey sounded totally off in last week’s episode too.
It was like he was going through puberty. Tolkien sounded similar
They did change a bunch of those really fast. Even on Youtube, and noticed a few people changed their comments.Also agreed on Trey sounding off. Maybe it’s just a cold or something and he didn’t want to postpone the premiere
With South Park you never know. It’s either a quirk of the 6 day cycle and Trey and the other actors were sick, maybe their voices changed, or this is intentional and will become a plot point eventually.
This retcon was the most I’ve laughed at an episode in years. The 4th wall breaks just killed me.A well deserved A.
Loved the running gag throughout the episode of Stan increasingly over-correcting his pronunciation of Tolkien’s name. “Hey, Tolllll-keeeeen…?”
This sounds very good. Seems like a line drive toward the folks I’ve seen on dating apps, who post glamour selfies of themselves with confused, impoverished children from some two-week “humanitarian mission” stint.
I was wary of this episode at the start, because I really don’t care about Randy or his farm, but once it was revealed that Token’s name is actually Tolkien, I perked up immediately. The amount of meta humor mined out of that was hilarious. A huge step up from the last episode.
I think this one is going on my list of all time favorite episodes quite frankly.“And how long did you think this?”“THE WHOLE TIME!”
Whoa now. Going full A might be too far since I think that should be reserved for your classic episodes, but this one was very nice step up from last week’s premiere. Maybe you could go A- but its certainly B+.
Token actually being named “Tolkien” might be the best retcon of all time.
I initially thought Stan and Tolkien were playing one of my favorite board games, The Dark Tower (yes I am old) only to discover on these here tubes that there is a new kickstarted version called Return to Dark Tower which is probably what they were actually playing.
Still in my 30s, and I instantly thought the same thing as well. Haven’t heard of the new Dark Tower game though.
I think they changed Mr. Black’s voice at the end too, which is a creative way/reason to recast. For once I’m excited for the Tegridy plotline and Randy being caught up in a race war.
In the early days of South Park, Token – oh, excuse me – Tolkien, used to wear a shirt that literally said “Token” on it.
Did anyone else think they were trying to make Stan a parody of Robin Diangelo, I thought the glasses he was wearing resemble hers.
Yeah, I gave up on Parker & Stone years ago. They’ve had an absurdly rich vein of nonsense to mine since the wokeness hit big around 2016, and they’ve played it safe, to the point that one gets the idea that they’re both scared and at least a little bought into the whole idiotic narrative.Got tired of watching them whiff it, phoning in a few chuckles here and there and calling it a day. Certainly not the right move for a show already grown long in the tooth even at that point.
Perhaps I’m reading the episode wrong, but I thought it was a general comment on a race-based interpretation of politics — i.e. that ‘race’ is baloney and has no coherent political constituency, even amongst the subset of people it presumes to appeal to. Rather, it is a way for the petit-bourgeois to launder their own class interests without invoking said class interests.
This might be the retcon to end all retcons. It’s deliciously brilliant.
A few days before watching this I was telling someone how funny it is that south park has a token black character named Token Black. And then my friend laughed and asked if I saw the new episode. I guess I was secretly a racist the whole time! Who knew
Dont know if its an A but after hearing about the pandemic stuff I got back into South Park after a couple of years off because it was really stale after the trump timeline. They really seem back on the A game. Dont know if its them changing or if just there is so much stupid stuff for them to make fun of going on in the world right now. Historically I do recall them slipping a bit when there wasnt something in popular culture or world events to crap all over.For their sake America gonna America.