SOUTH PARK – Bass to Mouth Epic Madness

• Tweet
• Pin It

 What the hell did I just watch? Insanity, craziness, and dare I say it genius? It’s hard to put how I felt about this episode into words. As soon as the kids opened that door and saw a little gerbil with a camera on his back was the culprit behind the Eavesdropper, the episode began its descent into madness and the randomness of it all was somehow strangely appealing.

It all started off innocently enough, well, for South Park, with a student attempting to kill themselves after getting bullied because they ‘shit themselves’. At first it seemed like the episode would go the usual route, with Cartman making fun of the kid, but in a great twist the teachers offer him a bribe to be the good guy for a change. Not that he’d ever be good, his plan consisted of getting another girl to kill herself instead, which was classic Cartman and I was fooled for a moment with his nice, well-mannered attitude. I should have known better! I loved how he slowly converted the teachers to his point of view with his masterplan to make all the kids shit themselves. It’s not usually a position we see the teachers in, out of all the adults in South Park that trio are actually pretty sensible (relatively speaking). That’s what I liked about the start of the episode; it put the characters we know and love in unfamiliar positions. What came after that though was just insane.

As crazy as it was that Wikileaks the gerbil was behind the eavesdropper, the return of Lemmiwinks and his friends was just out of left field, and absolutely brilliant. The conversation between the frog and sparrow was hilarious as was CATATAFISH fish’s continued insistence that he did not have bass to mouth performed on him. Oh, and what can I say about the epic background music? It just made everything ten times more funny! Then we had a battle for the ages between the two gerbils which was great. Everything to do with this part of the story was pure gold! Random yet hilarious!

The ending to Cartmans storyline was also brilliant. Haven’t laughed as much in ages, especially when out of nowhere Mr Mackie tried to throw Cartman under a bus. That was just priceless! As was the ending when Mr Mackie shit himself, a victim of classic Cartman vengeance, made even someone who is not usually a fan of ‘shit jokes’ appreciate the hilarious visual!

I felt the message, the negative aspects of social media and how it used for bullying was lost amongst the madness. Again the message, like the last few episodes doesn’t seem as important as the story and the comedy, but the start of the episode did a good job in showing how social media networks can be used for nasty and cruel games.

Despite the madness and the insanity this was without doubt one of my favourite South Park episodes this season. I loved how they recalled old episodes and old characters, and a lot of the episode was nothing short of hilarious. While this episode definitely won’t win any prizes for narrative cohesion, it more than makes up for it in laughs, and at the end of the day, isn’t that what South Park is all about?