TV-Reviewed

South Park ends its twelfth season without a bite. Sorry, had to. But, seriously, this episode kinda sucked. Sorry, too easy. This episode is clearly coming from a place that is meant to allude to society’s obsession with Twilight, a bad vampire Romeo & Juliet book series. However, South Park doesn’t even get around to mocking that; it just meanders off into nonsense with a war between the Goth kids that are so funny in cameo, and some other random kids dressed in black.

The episode starts well enough with Butters bursting into Mr. Mackey’s computer class, where the kids are all secretly playing video games, claiming that he found vampires in school. After learning that kids are pretending to be vampires, Butter decides to avoid being grounded by becoming a vampire and thus (for some reason) ungroundable. The Goth Kids, meanwhile do anything they can to try to make preppy kids stop dressing like them so their two groups will stop being confused by adults.

I will admit to not being familiar with the Twilight franchise, but there was no biting commentary in this story. Or wild humor. It felt like the guys were tired of playing in their stacks of money and decided to go through the motions of what would be a good premise and then let someone fill in the rest. The groups war never escalates in a direct manner, Butters actions feel like an incomplete story, and the main boys are wholly absent except for a nice scene in which Vampire Butters tries to feed on a sleeping Cartman, who assumes Butters is coming onto him. Butters’ father has also lost a lot of his comedic edge by being turned into some weird angry man ready to punish Butters for anything – what happened to the man with the secret gay lifestyle or just walked by calling Butters a bad little bear?

What hurts most is that this episode serves as the finale until March, making its whimpering conclusion even more of a letdown. That’s supposed to hold us over until spring? This was a season that felt largely hollow, and while not everyone can be perfect all the time, this was a show that had built quite a legacy in the past several years. The once biting satire and gut punching seems to have turned into weak slaps in the vague direction of issues anymore. The Olympics weeks later, Indiana Jones months later, High School Musical which is such a non entity in the lives of South Park’s target audience and now a non-Twilight vampire story? Snore.

Unlike the story ending Hot Topic torching and victorious speech from the Goth Kids, I am left wondering what is going on in the South Park offices because for the first time in twelve years I’m not really counting days until 13.01.

Rating: 5