Review: South Park “Bike Parade”

Let’s bike to the finish!

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The kids are getting their packages, but the adults are at odds over the Amazon workers’ strike. Randy’s actually doing great with a steady increase in pot business and Mr. Butterscotch has a new job as a shift manager at the local fulfillment center managing all of the ex-mall employees.

With the competition slowly heating up, Randy decides to begin a program that brings the weed to the South Park denizens, most notably the Amazon ex-employees, via e-scooters. All this while preparations for the bike parade are hitting an all-time high in sophistication. With Butters’ dad doing well at work and thereby getting all of his packages, Butters has equipped his bike to win out at the bike parade. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Cartman, Kyle, and Stan due to the fact that Kenny wants nothing more to do with the parade and opts to quit. Instead of trying to win the parade, Cartman, Kyle, and Stan decide to team up and try to cancel the bike parade for being too insensitive.

While Jeff Bezos is going bananas in knocking out all who oppose him, including the local businesses of South Park going out of business leaving the entire town without presents or decorations. As luck would have it, Santa shows up, but when he learns that Mr. Hankey is no longer in town he decides to tell South Park to fuck themselves and takes off. Because of this, Cartman, Stan, and Kyle decide to confront the mayor who just ordered the assassination of Kenny and has pretty much taken over like the one in charge of the town…or so he thought. Turns out, Amazon’s got some competition in the form of Tegridy Farms and the CEO of the competition, Randy, teams up with the rest of the town’s citizens in running Amazon out of town. The bike parade proceeds as planned without any of the outrage cultures to tear it down.

Our Take

This season of South Park wraps very reminiscently to the way season 19 did. Having a finale episode that touches upon all of the prior episodes but also giving closure to most of the “outstanding warrants” that we came across during the show’s season. Moreover, we’ve officially established Jeff Bezos as part of South Park lexicon, right up there with Tom Cruise or Snooki in terms of memorable portrayals.

To finish the season, Matt Stone and Trey Parker give their final thoughts on Amazon, the ridiculous outrage culture permeating through social nets, and even the Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi murder. The ongoing cameos of past South Park classic characters continue with Santa, the sort of reintroduction of Randy in being a focal point to plots, and a certain red-faced former teacher makes a “blink and you’ll” miss it appearance as well.

We never really got to see the finish to what the guys think about outrage culture and it would’ve been nice to get one final check-in on PC Principal and Strong Woman before we let out, but while the show started weak to kick things off, South Park’s back half of the season was as good as anything on TV right now.