South Park, "#HappyHolograms"

Briefly, the first few minutes of this episode seemed like, after flailing last week between so many seemingly unconnected threads, the story was finally zeroing in on the point is was trying to make. Turned out that grasp was short-lived, as the episode kind of crashed into another big meta mess. It wasn’t as big a mess as last week, but it was far from a great episode.

It kind of forgets about the Randy/Lorde subplot without much conclusion, and doesn't explain what the deal was with all the holograms of celebrities. The one arc it does wrap up was Kyle’s loneliness from his brother Ike watching PewDiePie and parents being glued to their social media instead of sitting together and watching TV as a family. A rather sly commentary on the nature of technology taking over our lives for viewers who remember when people lamented that television was replacing quality family time. But, that was all relegated to the very first scene.

Kyle’s solution to bring his family together again is participating in a big Christmas special, and along with all the subplots (and in some case, instead of them), the episode crams in segments from that fake special, all narrated by Cartman’s online alter-ego. All this did was make things murkier. Matt Stone and Trey Parker should have just done another episode like “Mr. Hankey’s Christmas Classics” if they wanted to do a spoof of seasonal specials (they could have even continued with the interconnectedness of the whole season with acts referencing each episode). But then, none of the Christmas skits were all that funny, settling for just a lame extension of a sight gag involving Iggy Azalea, and a Bill Cosby joke that could have been so-awful-it’s-hilarious but was badly executed.

The one element that did click was the reference to all the recent police killings that have dominated the news. At first dealing with it with the understated, passive ruthlessness of which the show is sometimes capable, the episode builds on the joke to make a very biting comment on institutional racism. It would have been interesting if the show made a whole episode on that subject, but alas, it was only a small part that shined in an overall scattershot episode.

As a whole, my feelings about this season are lukewarm at best. I can’t really say if the show’s getting worse, as throughout its run there have been bad episodes mixed in with the good (“Pip” comes immediately to mind). But, none of the good ones were great, and the bad really seemed to stand out. Maybe it was harder to move on from a bad idea because all the episodes were connected, or the fact that the continuing narrative experiment didn’t quite work. That’s what I’m hoping, at least, that and that this season isn’t the first sign of a decline. Still, this is the first year where my feelings overall weren’t positive.