19x07 Naughty Ninjas

There was a lot to unpack here. I'm not entirely sure what message Matt & Trey intended to convey. The broad strokes seem to be something along the lines of people criticizing the police on the one hand, but lamenting what happens when the police don't do their jobs on the other. But the other side of that coin is that the activities they show the police doing -- shooting kids, beating up homeless people are pretty repugnant. As it often does, South Park is pointing its finger at the public writ large, the one that wants to be able to enjoy its swanky, yuppified, hip suburban neighborhoods, but doesn't want to countenance the unpleasant dirty work necessary to make that happen.

It's notable that the area around Kenny's house, once the hot part of town, is now worse off than before Randy & Co. built it up, and now he and his cohort are all too happy to let the homeless "relocate" there where they are out of sight and out of mind.

And yet, the show doesn't give a sterling view of the police either. While the episode goes out of its way to make Barbrady sympathetic, longtime watchers know that he's an officer from the Chief Wiggum school of policework -- dim-witted and incompetent. It's sad to see him with his sick dog, but he really shouldn't be a police officer, no matter how much he wants to help. But maybe that's part of what's ugly about it, at the end of the day he's really just a tool of Randy and The Mayor and others, who want to use him to get rid of their problems and then throw him out when he becomes inconvenient.

Despite the show's typical, interesting social commentary, there was also a lot of good, simply silly humor in it. The boys' ninja routine, with Cartman trying his Machiavellian best to convince his compatriots that it was Kyle, not him, who said ninjas were gay, was a great bit, and the running joke of him not being able to tell his schoolmates apart with their ninjas outfits was funny every time. In the same vein, the "fuck the police" montage was humorous in how ridiculous it was, as was Cartman's excitement that the terrorist leader confirmed that Jews in their organization were concerning. There's enough societal criticism to unwind for days, but sometimes the most entertaining parts of these sorts of episodes is just the silly, sometimes nonsensical jokes that make you laugh independent of how you feel about police or gentrification.