South Park: Season 21, Episode 7
Giving Cartman a girlfriend is one of the funniest character moves South Park has ever pulled. It was fun to watch him turn into a happier, better person for a little while and then even more fun to see his true prickish self re-emerge. I just love how much he hates being in a relationship. I think I would’ve enjoyed it for quite a while longer if the relationship existed mostly as a running gag (Heidi shows up, Eric’s face falls, he puts the bare minimum effort into responding to her, and then she leaves). However, “Doubling Down” pushes their dysfunctional relationship to a new stage. To the show’s credit, it openly acknowledges that Cartman is being abusive. It doesn’t really seem to be playing it for laughs. Unfortunately, the end result is still a dark, unfunny episode. The thing is that the B story is perhaps even darker, following a few days in the life of President Garrison. This is the first time this season has taken such direct potshots at the Trump presidency. For the people who felt like it was South Park’s job to satirize Trump and Co., this is what that looks like. In a way, they delivered. Very few comic critiques of Trump dig into how truly dark his presidency is and what horrible things it portends for the world (the only other show doing this that I can think of is Comedy Central’s own The President Show). The analogy is dead obvious: these politicians bend over and take whatever Trump gives them. In South Park, this is made literal. However, again, it’s not funny. It’s more disturbing (and there’s some stuff thrown in there about Garrison saying the n-word to top it all off). But maybe that’s the way it should be? Probably the most subversive thing comedy can do is not laugh at this presidency, but show how unsettling it is. But, well—much as I hate Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Mike Pence—I still can’t say I had a fantastic time witnessing the sexual abuse of their cartoon avatars. Plus, both plots are let down by the storytelling. The cleverest thing the episode does is thematically parallel the A and B storylines, showing that both are about abusive relationships. But neither storyline progresses organically. Cartman secretly feeding Heidi meat and then making fun of her for being fat feels like an especially random way to demonstrate his manipulative cruelty. Even more random is that Cartman finds out Heidi left him for Kyle from Token’s dad, of all people, in a scene that seems inserted purely to let Cartman be racist some more. I didn’t laugh once throughout “Doubling Down,” but at this point in the series’ life, that’s not necessarily out of the ordinary for me and South Park. That said, I’m one of the few people who thought the previous, serialized season was one of their best, even though I rarely laughed, enjoying it almost exclusively on its storytelling merits. “Doubling Down” isn’t funny or well-plotted. It’s relentlessly dark and cruel and—though I can appreciate some of the darkness of the Garrison plot and enjoy some of the broader plot developments about the Cartman, Heidi, and Kyle love triangle—the storytelling is ultimately too scattershot.
