Review: South Park “Sora Not Sorry”

Overview

Butters’ Al revenge plan backfires, igniting an epidemic of fake videos at school that leaves Detective Harris struggling to tell fantasy from reality.

Our Take

This week’s episode of South Park,  titled “Sora Not Sorry,” centered on the emerging epidemic of AI deepfake videos but veered into the absurd with a recurring subplot involving the Washington, D.C. elite. The most talked-about sequence featured the photorealistic characters of Trump and Vance in the Lincoln Bedroom getting it on like Donkey Kong. 

The scene is absolutely “nightmare fuel,” showed the two politicians becoming intimate, with the diminutive Vance expressing exaggerated awe over Trump’s body depicting a moment with the Foreigner power ballad “I Want to Know What Love Is” playing in the background…ew.

The Trump-Vance coupling served as the latest twist in a season-long storyline concerning Trump’s demon baby with Satan. In “Sora Not Sorry,” the pair are seen scheming around the White House to deal with the unwanted love child, culminating in the shocking bedroom scene that fans reacted to with comments like, “Thanks for the nightmares I’m gonna have tonight South Park,” and calls for “eye bleach.

Despite the shock of what is going down on the main plot, Matt and Trey take aim at “new taboos.” The creators recently stated that their attraction to political themes stems from politics becoming “pop culture,” and they are drawn “like flies to honey” to areas where people are afraid to speak out.

The political commentary in the episode was multifaceted, with the main plot satirizing the proliferation of OpenAI’s Sora video creation app by having the South Park Elementary kids engage in a deepfake war, which even drew in legal threats from the animated dog Bluey. The creators used the theme of AI fakery to offer the president a convenient (though fictional) excuse: when footage of the intimate encounter with Vance was “leaked” on Fox News, Trump immediately dismissed it as an AI-generated fake video.

The episode teeters on the questions that the infamous “Imagination Land” trilogy in a lot of ways in terms of spirit, but once again Matt and Trey flip the script and have undoubtedly given us an episode that is going to have people talking for a very long time.