Review: South Park ‘You’re Not Yelping’

Spoilers Below:

With all the new businesses in the hip part of town, many residents became Yelp reviewers for special treatment – including Gerald and Cartman. While the former simply took it too seriously, the latter used it to pressure people into waiting on him hand-and-foot.

Finally a restaurant owner got fed up and kicked out all the Yelpers, and soon other restaurants followed suit. A powerless Cartman decided to invite all the other reviewers over to assert his dominance, but realized there were hundreds of them, and inadvertently caused the mob to loot several businesses. It then turned into a massive a power struggle filled with civil unrest.

The son of a local restaurant owner who Cartman was constantly harassing became enraged and challenged him to a fight. However, making a vague threat to a reviewer via the TV news resulted in every Yelper in town showing up.

Kyle then had the idea to get the mayor to privately, one-by-one, declare each Yelp reviewer as the number one food critic in town. They were given special badges to recognize this “achievement.” And now restaurants could recognize them easily, and load up their food with various bodily substances.

In Case You Missed It:

1) Cartman referred to the Mexican restaurant’s music as “this pagan shit.”

2) Butters’ “panda mania” poster made a cameo.

3) “Is this the right place?”

4) The mayor’s full speech: “And for all your service to this community, we want to once-and-for-all declare you are most elite food critic. To distinguish you, we present to you the golden badge. Wearing this badge means you will always get the special treatment that you deserve.”

5) Yes, the “Boogers and Cum” lyric aired unedited.

Thus far in the current season of South Park, we’ve seen them poke fun at PC people, tackle the immigration issue while literally sticking it to Trump, and weigh in on the different sides of gentrification. But they have yet to pick one specific group of people and just berate them all episode long – like they’ve done with Mormons, Scientologists, cash for gold & QVC scammers, Kanye West, and countless others.

Until now.

The South Park folks really laid into Yelpers and other social media food critics in this episode, mercilessly shouting how unimportant they are. Of course the installment also showed that reviewers do carry some power, but ultimately people don’t care that much.

Personally, I use Yelp and find it helpful for locating the next bar or restaurant option (who am I kidding, it’s always a bar), and do put some stock into what the reviewers say, but it’s also obvious that there are a lot of pompous assholes that frequently rate establishments, and for that reason anything on the website should be taken with a grain of salt.

I’m not sure if Yelpers were an especially worthy target, but it was a legitimate gripe, and the subject matter flowed so perfectly from the previous weeks’ plots. South Park used to be known for throwing together a completely random episode in six days every time, with its contents basically a secret up until airtime. Now there’s clearly a loosely-planned arc, and it will be interesting to see where the show will take us.

As far as the humor goes, I’d say this was about on par with the rest of the season. South Park once again proved it does mobs better than anyone else (“CAN YOU SPEAK A LITTLE LOUDER?!”) and also proved they can take a touchy subject (a beheading by a radical group) and turn it into something that’s not offensive or insensitive. (Okay, maybe just a little bit.)

I think last week probably still gets the title of best episode of the season, if only by a tiny margin. However, this one was right in line with the first two, continuing a strong and consistent 19th year.