Unfulfilled: Oh wow, they actually portray proletarians at work. That is unusual. Later, they show technology physically harming a worker. This segment did not amuse me until somebody kept pushing the emergency shut-off button, saying, ‘It’s not shut down.’ Mr. Stotch’s remark that ‘Whenever there’s a workplace accident you need to fill out a 1081 form’ also made me smile.

There is a subplot here about a bicycle competition and the boys wanting to enter it. I can quickly tell that this is going to devolve into generic anticonsumerism. This is not to say that consumerism is a perfectly healthy tendency in which we should always feel free to indulge, but nine times out of ten, anticonsumerism is just petty bourgeois smuggery that shames lower-class people for having either an addiction or a scarcity of alternatives, and falsely proposes reliance on small businesses, or even pure self-reliance, as solutions.

We then get to see laborers go on strike: a rarity in this show and television more generally, but given the writers’ propertarianism and their utter inability to propose sustainable alternatives to capitalism’s defects, I can only expect the worst. Surprisingly, though, Josh Carter’s anticapitalism was more sophisticated than I expected. On the other hand, most of the other characters have no interest in it.

The rest of this story is boring. The take on Jeff Bezos does not amuse me, the musical montage was uninteresting, the mall scene looked like a joke that could have been only thirty seconds long instead of three minutes, and then we end on a cliffhanger. I’ll admit that this is marginally more interesting than, say, a tale of Cartman infecting Kyle with HIV (which is for another time), but I am mostly unimpressed.

Bike Parade: I find it odd how the consumers are counterprotesting the strikers. Surely there are more than a few lower-class consumers who understand what it is like to be stuck working a lousy job and can therefore side with strikers over the upper classes. It feels like the writers are trying to create a false dilemma where we have to choose between the proletariat and ordinary consumers (as if there were no overlap between the two).

I have to say, the joke where Josh Carter becomes a box is much less funny than the writers thought that it was, and it almost feels forced. A talking cardboard box would fit flawlessly in a children’s show, but it shouldn’t be good enough for an ‘adult’ cartoon.

‘There’s no way we can’t win, you guys.’ Thanks for spoiling the ending, Cartman.

Well, not exactly. Just as the strike was dwindling, Randy Marsh’s microbusiness delivers weed to everybody in town. Soon, all of the grown-ups are too stoned to either work for or buy from Amazon, then the bike parade goes more or less as planned (though the winner is ambiguous). I am presuming that the writers are not seriously suggesting that we all indulge in weed in response to Amazon, so it is probably — get ready for this — buy from small businesses, which only contradicts the lesson in Something Wall-Mart This Way Comes. In fact, this story feels quite derivative of that episode.

While there were a few moments that could make others chuckle, like the little kids unintentionally killing Josh Carter, most of this episode is uninteresting and comes with jokes that are outright cringeworthy, like the PC Babies and the numerous potshots at ‘cancel culture’. The episode was not nearly harsh enough on Jeff Bezos either; depicting him as an evil genius yet literal arsehead was being too gentle on him, and it is unsurprising that the writers kept Jeff Bezos alive but killed off the two socialist characters. Sure, it may be startling that they depicted a socialist as reasonable, but there are plenty of antisocialists who unjokingly believe that might makes right, too, and one can easily interpret his ignoble demise as an endorsement of that sentiment.

In summary, this two-parter is pretty worthless. I can see how it sounds mildly interesting in concept, and it may sound vaguely anticapitalist at first, but it isn’t, really. It’s just another ‘both sides are wrong; truth lies somewhere in the middle’ story. If Josh’s recommendation to ‘follow [him] to Hell’ sounded too ambiguous to suggest that the writers are antisocialists, then the fact that Josh and his socialist pupil Kenny died ingloriously while the marijuana microbusiness prospered should confirm that the writers have no interest whatsoever in abolishing capitalism, and why would they? There has to be somebody around to make and sell South Park merchandise!

Skip this crap.

@AnarchoBolshevik@lemmygrad.ml

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