South Park: Season 5

Just recently finished Season V of South Park, and I hate to report that it started off as one of the most "blah" seasons I've yet to see. I'm making a distinction between how it started (for the first eight episodes or so) and how it was in general, because this season was that which straddled 9/11, and for whatever reason, it almost seemed like the tragedy reinvigorated the show's creativity, despite how horrible that sounds.

Although South Park is really quick to jump on recent events in their shows due to their ability to make a show in a matter of days, they didn't make their response show (or any show for that matter) until almost two months after the tragedy, and the show they did end up making was surprisingly full of American pride (unlike their fairly anti-American film Team America, released three years later). Anyway, I guess if nothing else, September 11th must have helped kickstart the series again, if only because it bumped them out of a growing complacency with the show.

As such, three out of my four favorite episodes from the season were aired after 9/11. Here are all four:

Scott Tenorman Must Die:
Cartman gets repeatedly duped by an older kid who convinces him to do ridiculous things with other kids' pubes, and in a final effort to get back at him, Cartman kills the kid's parents and feeds them to him at a chili cookoff. Easily the darkest episode I've seen.

How To Eat With Your Butt:
Kenny takes his yearbook photo with his ass hanging out his hoodie (somehow standing upside-down in his outfit), and Cartman takes the resulting picture to a missing child service, which then finds two parents who have butts for faces that are missing a child. Upon seeing this, Cartman loses his ability to laugh, as he's seen the funniest thing he'll ever see in his life.

The Entity:
Frustrated with airline holdups post-9/11, Mr. Garrison invents a new form of transportation that requires you to sit on a butt plug and suck on a phallic object to make it go. Surprisingly, people still buy it, as it's still less of a pain in the ass than the TSA.

Here Comes The Neighborhood:
Token, the black kid in town, always gets ribbed for being rich, so in an effort to bring other rich kids to town to hang out with, he ends up placing an ad that draws in other super-rich black families, who then get discriminated against by the rest of the South Park community for being too rich. So, to scare them out of town, they put burning "lowercase T's" in their yards ("T" stands for "time to leave", of course...) and they dress up as ghosts, because rich people are extremely superstitious.

Overall, those four shows were funny enough to save the whole season, but not enough to ignore its obvious shortcomings. Hopefully the sixth season will be better...