But at best they were a reminder that, like Tenorman, South Park never forgets an insult."Super Best Friends" portrayed a superhero team made up of religious figures such as Jesus, Buddha, Moses, Krishna, and Muhammad, the latter being strictly prohibited from being figuratively depicted in Islam. “200” and “201” weren’t in the league of “Scott Tenorman,” nor could we expect them to be. Said Cartman’s now-insane tormentor, “Revenge is a dish best served-chili!” And the episode climaxed with a callback to what I would have to rank as the best South Park episode of all time, “Scott Tenorman Must Die,” in which Cartman had forced a rival to eat a bowl of chili made from the flesh of his dead parents.
Like last week, however, the strongest part of the episode was that focused on Cartman and his right-hand, or actually left-hand, man, Mitch Conner, who gave us something of his own background in a pitch-perfect parody of a Vietnam-movie flashback. The lesson of the episode: whether for religious figures or celebrities, there is no such thing as a magical immunity to ridicule or criticism, only arbitrary and needless restrictions that we impose, often inconsistently and out of fear rather than respect.Īt least I’m guessing that was the lesson, if we could have heard it. Also, the trademark “what we learned speech(es) at the end of the episode were entirely bleeped (such a long stretch of censorship that I’m guessing the writers used it deliberately for effect). In addition to hiding Muhammad’s figure (this time with a “CENSORED” bar), this episode (unlike “200”) also bleeped his name. īut it’s not entirely clear to the viewer which censoring was the writer’s satirical work and which was actual after-the-fact network censorship. A statement at the South Park Studios website says that, after delivery of the episode, the network added additional bleeps to “201,” and that Parker and Stone do not yet have network permission to stream the uncensored version. “201” took that meta-parody further, though it’s hard to tell how much was by design and how much was forced on Trey Parker and Matt Stone. (Though the comedy depicted the prophet in 2001 without incident.) The first half, as you’ll recall, spoofed the show’s earlier run-in with a nervous network by returning the character of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, who Comedy Central refused to let the show depict out of concern over violating religious taboos.
Or at least the parts we were able to see and hear were.
“201,” the conclusion to South Park‘s two-part 200th-episode celebration, aired last night, and it was an improvement on an already very entertaining first half.
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