Review: South Park “Hummels and Heroin”

If you don’t know what a Hummel is, don’t worry, you’re not alone.

Overview (Spoilers Below)

South Park has been hit with a wave of prescription drug overdoses, and the victims are all children’s entertainers. Poor souls in children’s cartoon character costumes are dying by the bushel, and an ambitious youth named Marcus is set to find out why after watching Chuck E. Cheese kick the bucket at his birthday party. Meanwhile, Stan is stuck visiting his grandpa, who keeps giving him mysterious “Crochet pillows” to deliver around town. Unsurprisingly, they’re filled with prescription drugs, and costumed performers all around town are buying them. But for these coveted drugs, the price is not in dollars, but “Hummels”, those kinda cute, kinda creepy porcelain figurines of children you may have seen on your grandma’s shelf. Stan’s grandpa needs those figurines because in the depressing prison that is a retirement home, whoever has the most hummels is the “baddest b*tch”, and grandpa is aiming to take that spot by any means necessary. Standing in his way is one “Beatrice McGullicutty”, an old lady who rules over the retirement home with an iron fist while constantly releasing her old lady farts, much to the dismay of anyone nearby.

Stan takes action to aid his grandpa by getting the aid of Cartman, Kyle, Butters and Kenny, who distract the retirement home by putting on a barbershop quartet performance for the old folks, while singing such classics as “Insane in the Membrane” by Cypress Hill and “Rape Me” by Nirvana. After a confrontation with Marcus, whose own investigation into the overdoses led him to the same discovery about the retirement home’s drug trafficking, Stan steals McGullicutty’s prized hummel collection for his grandpa, who proceeds to put all the hummels in a sack and beats the snot out of McGullicutty and her cronies.

And that’s how they do it in the nursing home.

Our Take:

This is one of those episodes where the fun is in the concept but isn’t really followed up on in the execution. South Park’s portrayal of the retirement home as a maximum security prison (Complete with old people gangster rap) is quite clever and funny, but the same gags get used over and over again to diminishing effect. The story goes basically everywhere you’d expect it to without any real surprises, but wastes a lot of time with this Marcus subplot, who spends the entire episode trying to uncover the truth about the prescription drug trafficking that is revealed to the audience in the first five minutes. Nothing Marcus did made me laugh and if he never shows up again I won’t be bothered.

The episode did win me back over some when Stan’s grandpa completely wrecked Beatrice McGullicutty with a bag of hummels in an old-school prison beatdown, but it was too little too late. A little bit more of that trademark South Park raunchiness and maybe this episode would’ve gotten somewhere interesting. As it stands, it’s about as exciting as a bowl of tapioca pudding.