[4.0/10] I dunno. *South Park* may have lost it, you guys. I am so tired of things in *South Park* turning out to be some cryptic conspiracy and/or mystery that the boys have to unravel. The show’s social commentary has gotten crustier and crustier over the years, and this “special event” is not exception. The faux-attempts at drama between Stan and Randy are just excruciating. And so much of the writers’ efforts to use the future to comment on the present comes off backward and sclerotic.

I think it’s telling that the only things that work here are the things that essentially have nothing to do with COVID, or the attempts at legitimate drama, or the mythos and mystery at play. The first is the singing doorbell. I don’t know why, but it’s just so ridiculous, and Trey Parker’s delivery is just so over the top, that it cracked me up. The other is the absurdity of Cartman growing up to be a rabbi and effectively trolling Kyle with his perfect Jewish life. It’s such an out there left turn, the escalation ad absurdum of Eric’s efforts to one-up his frenemy, that I can’t help but appreciate the audacity of it.

But everything else here is a turd. There’s a novelty to seeing the kids grown up, but it wears off pretty quickly after the “Hey, it’s them!” factor fades. The bit with everyone trying to convince Clyde to get vaccinated is a mild chuckle, but it’s counterbalanced by the godawfulness of Stan’s toxic relationship with his Alexa/virtual girlfriend. The whole thing’s just unpleasant, constantly tying itself in knots and spinning weak gags that aren’t worth the time.

Overall, despite the cruddiness of the “vaccination special”, I had high hopes for this one, if only for the intrigue of seeing adult versions of the kids we’ve seen for decades now. But those hopes were quickly dashed in a sea of stale humor, pointless mysterious, and unavailing drama.

Am I the only one reading in this a statement that the pandemic is never going away and each of us who still takes it seriously is crazy? The entire national guard shows up for one confirmed case, and obviously there’s the whole premise of 40 years passing. This really rubs me the wrong way since I seem to be the only person where I live who is willing to go to the extremely low effort of putting on a mask for the five minutes that I’m in a liquor store the day before Thanksgiving. Oh, and the whole old people aren’t allowed to die thing? Am I wrong that what they mean by the whole spirit of youthful optimism thing that we’re supposed to regain is actually just not giving a shit? And obviously the protracted gag about how expecting comedy to be politically correct (I’m sorry; “woke”) ruins comedy is a lazy execution on a lazy understanding of that issue.

There’s stuff I enjoyed here, like Alexa as a contentious surrogate wife who fulfills commands by physically picking up other devices and using them or Cartman possibly constructing his entire life for forty years as well as those of his wife and kids as a single mind-fuck for Kyle, but as usual there are these shitty sociopolitical messages that fill me with resentment and detract from the whole thing.