20x10 The End of Serialization as We Know It

“The End of Serializtion As We Know It,” the finale of South Park’s ambitious twentieth season, closes with a speech about restarting the whole Internet, offering a chance for everyone to start over. TrollTrace, the purveyor of the latest looming global catastrophe to confront the denizens of this surprisingly consequential Colorado town, threatened to expose everything that everyone has ever said or done online. The town’s hard fought victory against it guarantees that this exposure won’t happen, and that with the threat extinguished, everyone can have a new start, a renewed chance to go on without all the baggage they’ve accumulated from years of surfing and posting and perhaps even trolling.

It calls to mind two editorials, both of which are a few years old but feel even more relevant now than when they were written. The first is a New York Times article entitled “The Web Means the End of Forgetting.” It talks about the then-nascent emergence of social media and the way that the rise of what (in the salad days of 2010) was referred to as “Web 2.0” and the emergence of user-generated content as the engine of the Internet meant that more and more of lives were being preserved for the foreseeable future. Everything we posted threatened to become inescapable, destined to follow us and prevent us from living down our worst moments. The second, is a satirical video from The Onion that presents the same idea in a much more succinct and amusing fashion entitled simply: “Report: Every Potential 2040 President Already Unelectable Due To Facebook.”

And they, and this episode of South Park are getting at the same idea -- that even though the Internet is an incredible tool that has changed the world, helping to democratize everything from art, to business, and even politics, there are downsides to the digital lives we lead today. The way so much of how we consume media, how we work, how we learn about the world, is filtered through our screens means not only that we’re easier to rile up, but that so much of what we do is captured forever, waiting to rear its ugly head and expose our weaker moments to the world. That’s the central threat at the heart of this season finale.

Oh yeah, and it also involves Cartman’s fear that men are going to conquered by women, taken to Mars, and subjugated into mines where they’ll be milked for their semen and joke-writing abilities. It is still South Park after all, and as much social commentary is baked into this finale, and this season, it just wouldn’t feel like the show if there weren’t bizarre conspiracy theories, kindergarteners spewing curse words, and a bunch of naked middle-aged men trying to save the world through insulting people online net.

But amid that onslaught of the show’s usual enjoyable puerile humor is a strain of thought about forgetting, about letting people move on. And there’s a sense that it’s what series creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone want too. Serialization has been a shot in the arm for this show. Though the execution has been rocky at times, it’s given South Park a new spark, and made it feel more adventurous and substantive than its amusing but frequently predictable riffs on the news of the week became as the show started to stare down the barrel of completing its second decade on the air and started to feel tired.

Still, the title alone suggests that Matt and Trey are ready to forget too. They may not want to be shackled to the burdens of continuity and coming up with a story that makes sense from week-to-week, especially when having to deal with election surprises and other unexpected developments can change the game for a topical show. It’s clear that various elements of this season, from small ones like Bill Clinton’s “Gentleman’s Club” to larger ones like a focus on exposing private communications and Cartman’s fears that women would take over, would have made much more sense with a Hillary Clinton victory that Matt and Trey seemed to be anticipating. It’s not the first time the pair have been burned in this fashion (they went through the same thing when developing That’s My Bush, originally titled Everybody Loves Al), and it’s not hard to imagine they’re tired of trying to balance the competing demands of six-days-to-air topicality and longform storytelling.

South Park, despite its sophomoric sensibilities, has always been a self-reflective show, working out its creators’ feelings about the series and the issues around it -- censorship, brushes with scientology, and creative burnout to name a few -- via the series itself. So that desire to start over, to do something fresh less beholden to successes or failures or the inflammatory, embarrassing parts of what came before, seems to be coming from Matt and Trey’s own readiness to cast off the continuing storylines, with all their accumulated baggage.

It’s not hard to see why. As exciting as serialization has been, the duo have, for the third year in a row, had a bit of trouble sticking the landing. While Season 20 has been more squarely focused on the same rough collection of issues than Seasons 18 or 19 were, it’s still tough to tie all those ideas and themes together and present a resolution to them in a satisfying fashion. While trolling and the shape of our lives online get solid, if not exactly revelatory conclusions, bits like Cartman’s gynophobia and Garrison’s “that sounds like how I got elected” line feel thrown in rather than satisfying resolutions to their roles in the season, let alone the one minor appearance of the member berries.

Instead, “The End of Serialization As We Know It” does a better job at tying everything, however glancingly, into one big world-saving plot. Almost everyone has a part in preventing TrollTrace from revealing everyone’s online secrets. Kyle and Ike get the ball rolling in an attempt to generate so much outrage that it will overload TrollTrace’s servers. The force of the signal gets the attention of Dildo Shwaggins and his troll buddies, who help amplify it. An attempt to get into contact with Butters reveals that there’s an impressive new energy source created by Heidi (with Cartman’s encouragement), that could be the boost the effort needs. President Garrison and the Pentagon have the power to harness that energy and (through appropriately fuzzy means) channel it for use in Kyle’s efforts. And Gerald, the impetus for all of this, has a standoff with Lennart Bedrager, the creator of Trolltrace, and tries to turn off the breakers at TrollTrace headquarters, allowing the power surge to go forward. With their combined efforts, sure enough, the day is saved.

That standoff presents the heart of the episode, with Gerald and Trolltrace’s creator debating whether there’s a difference between satire and just hassling people. Gerald argues that “trolling” to be make a positive point is a good thing, while using it for pure harassment and negativity is bad, while Bedrager rejects any distinction and posits that perhaps trolling is a “post-funny” form of humor.

Their exchange walks the line between earnestness and satire itself. It’s unclear whether, when Gerald seems to accept that there may not actually be a difference between what he does and what a pure trolling anarchist like Bedrager does, it may be the creators of the show, who have been themselves accused of being trolls, admitting the same. South Park has been accused of just trolling people for years, and as much as Matt and Trey may want to distinguish themselves from scores of self-amusing, lulz-seeking, meme-wielding people online, they may be unable to sever the connection between what they do and what Internet trolls do.

Or maybe it’s just the ultimate troll. Maybe Gerald (and by extension Matt and Trey) don’t believe that, and it’s simply a ruse so that Gerald can reject the Bedrager’s nihilism, kick him in the crotch, toss him over the edge, and declare that the difference between them is that he’s “fucking funny” before throwing the last switch. Maybe Matt and Trey still think their humor is what elevates them over the rabble who throw insults and dick-humor online in a much more clumsy fashion.

One thing is clear, the folks behind South Park do appreciate the power of those trolls. The diagram President Elect Garrison’s advisor draws captures the “backlash to the backlash to the backlash” spirit of the Internet, that by the time something hits your newsfeed, every possible angle of it has already been exhausted and perfectly positioned to push your buttons. But what’s most striking is the idea at the center of it, that the troll sets out to rile one person using another and escapes being the subject or the object of the wave of anger.

It parallels the conclusion to Sheila’s part of the episode, where she represents a walking talking version of that consternation and outrage, only to discover, when she sees Ike’s clean internet history, that she’s been directing it in the wrong place. And before she has a chance to see what Gerald’s really been up to, TrollTrace goes down, taking the entire Internet with it. The trolls get off scot-free, while the people they’ve riled up rage against one another and suffer.

The end result is that the ‘net is wiped out. Sheila doesn’t find out what Gerald’s been up to online. Life seems like it will return to normal. Perhaps people can forget now; maybe they can put all this ugliness behind them, move on, and do better.

That wouldn’t be very South Park though. The last thing we see is an old man, responsible for sending the first email on the new internet. He, of course, admits that he sent his friend a picture of his penis and called him a “faggot.” That, in and of itself may be nihilism, or at least fatalism. There’s a notion at play that no matter how much we see the negative effects of trolling, regardless of whether it’s funny, human nature means people are just going to keep stirring the pot, not thinking about the way their worst selves may be preserved indefinitely in ones and zeroes.

Thus ends what will go down as one of South Park’s boldest and most ambitious seasons ever. The road was rocky, but the way Season 20 managed to balance and connect everything from nostalgia to trolling to feminism to Trump to the election to the new Star Wars movie over the course of ten episodes is still an achievement. Serialization may be at an end for South Park, in a dramatic fashion, but there’s core parts of the show, a certain view of the world, a certain commitment to ribald humor in all its forms, that will be a part of the series’s DNA, in whatever form it emerges next season, not to be forgotten.

south park used to be a comedy and also educating show. but what happened to it? i am a big fan of south park but i admit seasons number 18,19 and 20 was not a little bit funny. south park is not funny anymore. it no longer make you laugh since season 18. it's not educating as it used to be. just a simple story that is as long as 2 month. I'm not waiting for next episode because it's not addicting. if south park wanna go on like this, better to finish this show because this show is disappointing fans. if seasons 18-19-20 were the first seasons, south park never become popular. this show was in long seasons like 24 episodes that each episode was funny and had it's own story. why they didn't continue like that? do they want to say to other shows like family guy that we can make a story? why whole season follows 1 story? why not 24 different stories in 24 different episodes? why 10 episodes? i think south park can't make more stories and is going to an end but i believe better to end while you have lots fans than you end when you made your fans sick!