Review: South Park ‘Let Go, Let Gov

Spoilers Below

Season 17, holy crap I’m excited.  You should be, too.  For one, BRAND NEW INTRO and I love it.  Second reason, this season promises to take on all the most current news stories South Park style.  This means a no holds bar, coming in hot, grab onto your joystick and try pulling the plane up before it crashes, in your face funny.

South Park decides to tackle the story of the NSA for its first episode of the newest season.  Cartman takes it upon himself to ironically scream on his phone about the NSA, then tells the guys not to listen in on his conversation.  After trying to start a rally at his school via Twitter, the screen pans out to none other than Butters!  Butters sits in his room as he thinks about what Cartman was chanting at school and starts praying to Obama in an attempt to please the government. Oh, Butters, how I adore thee.  Still ignorant, he goes down to the DMV for a confession session. You need to watch this more than the NSA watches Edward Snowden.

What would you do if Alec Baldwin tried selling you something?  How about a new social media network that plugs into your brain and uploads all your thoughts for you?  It’s called “Shitter”.  But, why wouldn’t it be called that?!  Cartman decides to hop on the Shitter train to organize a way to infiltrate the NSA and extort them.  He travels to the NSA building and applies for a job.  When he enters, he is offered the job and is shown what really goes on.  After a few humorous jabs at them, they find a twitter account from a pizza delivery man who tweets he wants to blow up the Lincoln Memorial.  Cartman is immediately rushed to the house of the man with the Chief of the NSA.  If you want the full effect of the monologue the Chief uses, you need to watch it (I can’t do it justice).  He uses the transitive property to spit out rhetoric that you need to rewind and watch 4 times to get the full effect.  He uses the words “crap stars and stripes for a week”, and “Star Spangled Montezuma’s Revenge”.  Golden.

Butters is now walking around as a Jehovah’s Witness, but asking if people have welcomed the government into their hearts.  As he walks around with DMV brochures using it as the bible, I couldn’t help but laugh.  South Park has such a way of bashing on people and what they view as normal.  I appreciate the humor and human mannerisms that they pinpoint more than a turkey club sandwich stacked on a pornstar holding another sandwich.

As we come back to Cartman, it is unveiled to him how the NSA knows everything.  It, of course, is because they have Santa Claus tied up and use him for his knowledge of who is naughty and who is nice.  After Cartman literally pulls out a whistle and starts blowing it, there is a blatant Edward Snowden reference.  Instead of fleeing to Russia, Butters talks Cartman into accepting the government into his heart and is shown he can confess to the DMV.  The DMV is then shut down due to allegations of sex with little boys.

If the first episode is just scratching the surface of things to come, I want to be the rash it scratches.  Wear a condom, kids.