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South Park’s Season Finale ‘Bike Parade’ Is Big on Laughs Despite Weak Plot

Bike Parade, tonight’s season finale of South Park, caps off the best season the show has had in years, though that compliment is a bit backhanded since recent seasons have struggled. On final reflection, Parker and Stone have found a good mix of serialized and episodic content, letting things change but still having the episodes stand on their own produces memorable episodes that feel like they take place in a world that grows and changes.

The episode starts with the boys getting their packages for the bike parade delivered, and Kenny’s dad is not happy about Kenny shopping on Amazon while he’s part of the Amazon strike. While the strike is bad for everyone, all the stress of not getting packages from Amazon has caused Randy’s weed farm to explode in popularity, eventually causing him and Towlie to fulfill orders using the e-scooters that almost destroyed the town in the Halloween episode.

The former mall employees have begun working as scabs at the Amazon fulfillment center, but it still isn’t getting the backlog of packages out to people in time for Christmas. This leads one of the episode’s, and the season’s, best jokes as Santa shows up to save Christmas then angrily storms off when he finds out Mister Hankey was banished for making offensive tweets, telling the townspeople to “enjoy sucking Jeff Bezos’s dick you bunch of cunts.” The word cunt wasn’t censored either, which was a shock to me since it’s routinely censored on The Jim Jefferies Show, which airs in the same time slot. Big day for cunt fans, basically.

I’m starting to get annoyed with Kenny now. I like the character, but having someone who mumbles unintelligibly lay expository pipe for the episode just isn’t a funny joke anymore. But the boys deciding to get the bike parade cancelled since they won’t win without Kenny is pretty funny. They lament that even though everything gets cancelled for being offensive, it hasn’t worked for them. Then they try saying the parade is out of touch with progressive values, but the town has been taken over by Jeff Bezos who doesn’t give a s**t about political correctness, just about making money. It’s an interesting comment on PC culture and the willingness to sell out to corporate interests. In the end the bike parade takes place and the PC Babies cry at it, causing Stan to say “I guess they are offensive.”

That’s basically how the episode ends, aside from everyone being too high to care if they don’t have Amazon Prime, ending Bezos’s plan. It felt like it wrapped up too quickly, and the season would have been served better by wrapping up the Manbearpig story in one episode and giving this story more space to breathe. I’m not sure they would have made a clearer point, but there were a lot of storylines that were dropped and unresolved that could have been fleshed out more, too.

Overall, it was a solid end to the season. It didn’t wrap everything up, and it leads me to believe that Parker and Stone changed gears a few times this season. Cartman trying to prove Token didn’t like Black Panther wouldn’t have been a great arc for an entire season, but it is weird the way the entire first episode was spent setting it up just it for to be dropped entirely. But it worked out, and without a season-long arc to service, individual episodes were allowed to shine more than they have in recent seasons.

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