Streaming on Paramount + - Rod Bishop dives deep into SOUTH PARK: POST COVID – THE RETURN OF COVID (Trey Parker, USA, 2021)

Everything that follows is spoiler, including the excess of subplots and the confusing time-travel 

PART 1 POST COVID

It’s been 38 years since Covid started and the South Park boys are now middle aged. 

Stan is an online whiskey consultant and co-habits with his Amazon Alexa, a hologram assistant with a serious relationship attitude. Stan can always turn her off and on.

Kyle, now a guidance counselor at South Park Elementary, has summoned Stan and the rest of the gang back to South Park. Kenny grew up to become a famous wealthy physicist, but he really has died this time.

Jimmy has become a late-night talk show host - “the king of woke comedy” - and his material is so lame, there are no jokes, no punchlines, just forced canned laughter from his woke audience. Jimmy, too, heads for South Park cancelling his scheduled guest, the “First Lady Tom Kardashian”.

And Cartman? He’s converted to Judaism, with his trademark beanie turned into a yarmulke. Insisting on being called a rabbi, he arrives with his Jewish kids and smooching over his Jewish wife.

At Kenny’s wake, we see Token Black (now a cop) and Clyde who is refusing to get vaccinated, thereby causing the military to quarantine the town.

Clyde: I can’t get vaccinated because I’m allergic to shellfish

Wendy: Clyde, there’s no shellfish in the COVID vaccine

Clyde: I know, but I read sometimes in the lab where the vaccine is made, if somebody ate shellfish, then it can get cross-contaminated and leave left-over residual shellfish-ness

Jimmy: So, you’re saying you won’t get the COVID vaccine out of shellfish-ness?

Clyde: Yes, that is correct. Just a general sense of shellfish-ness

Kenny has supposedly died of the Covid Delta+ Rewards variant, but the boys decide he was really killed trying to investigate the origins of the virus and they set out to expose the truth.

Stan confronts his dad, Randy (formally South Park’s No 1 marijuana dealer) at the Shady Acres Retirement Community, now tricked up to look like a set from Bladerunner.

Randy: When the pandemic started you were only a kid. You don’t remember the pain we all went through…we as Americans went through so much. First, that incompetent jack-hole was elected President. Then the pandemic came and then the race wars. And then just when it seemed like we’d turned a corner,Space Jam 2came out and we all just kind of gave up.

Randy then admits to having started the virus when he had sex with a pangolin in China, but his new conspiracy theory blames China for setting up the pangolin sex in order to steal the USA of its “tegridy” - Randy’s own propriety dope crop.

The gang retrieve a USB stick from Kenny’s corpse – it’s up his bum – and watch a video of Kenny attempting time-travel to stop the pandemic. 

In a cliffhanger ending, we are introduced to Kenny’s assistant Victor Chouse at the South Park Mental Asylum Plus. But we see it’s a mispronunciation: Victor Chouse is really Victor Chaos…it’s Butters!

 

PART 2: THE RETURN OF COVID

A new Covid variant, called the Kenny McCormikron, has all of South Park quarantined behind wire fences. 

It’s a rain-soaked Bladerunner set and “nobody is allowed in or out for the next 20 to 30 years”.

Randy March has escaped from the Shady Acres Retirement community, clutching his last Tegrity Farms marijuana plant. After beating up some Shady Acres workers who have tracked Randy down, Token Black (flashing his badge) takes Randy to Kenny’s lab. There, with Kyle, Stan, Wendy and Jimmy, they find Kenny’s computer can’t be opened without a voice command from Kenny’s partner Victor Chouse, now in the South Park Mental Asylum Plus. 

To make matters worse, how can they find the aluminum foil they will need for time travel? All supplies are stuck on cargo ships off the Long Beach coast.

At the Asylum, they find Victor Chouse is really Butters, who has been calling himself Victor Chaos ever since his parents accidently grounded him 16 years ago. Butters is also a full-on NFT (non-fungible tokens) snake-oil salesman and is financially ruining his victims with unique digital art tokens that operate on cryptocurrency platforms.

In the lab, Randy is growing marijuana plants, believing this will save the world. The others, however, plan to time-travel Kyle and Stan back to China to stop Randy having sex with the pangolin, thereby stopping Covid before it started.

Randy: I’m sorry, but focusing on who started the pandemic is racist…you people need to stop trying to change the past. COVID happened. Space Jam 2 happened.

Later, Randy is sitting in a Bladerunner rain:

Randy: The pandemic happened and they made Space Jam 2…soon there will be a Space Jam 6 and 7 and 8…Like tears…in rain.

Rabbi Eric Cartman, with his wife Yentl and their three children Moisha, Hackelm and Menorah, use the South Park Church for his Foundation Against Time Travel (FATT) designed to prevent Kyle and Stan from stopping Covid and thereby depriving Cartman of his new, idyllic Jewish life and family.

Cartman starts his Foundation, recruiting Butters and the unvaccinated Craig (“the vaccines grow titties on your head”). Having stolen the time travel equipment and set it up in the Church, Cartman reveals his plan to send Clyde back in time to kill Kyle before he grows into an adult and then time-travels back to stop Covid.

Partially wrapped in aluminum foil, Clyde, Stan, Kyle and Cartman all time-travel to the past where Clyde tries to shoot the young Kyle, but instead is shot by a reformed Cartman who sets about restoring his friendship with his friends before they travel back to their adult lives.

Randy, meanwhile, has grown a new marijuana crop and gives it away for free. It’s so good, everyone starts forgiving everyone for the way they treated everyone during the 38-year pandemic. 

This even includes the rioters who attacked the Capitol Building who now stand holding signs OUR BAD, WE WENT A LITTLE BONKERS, OOPS, WE ARE Q AND WE ARE SORRY TOO

Rioter: We were like, ok, let’s storm the Capitol! And that was just a bad idea, you know, we were just going a little bonkers there. We shouldn’t have stormed the Capitol.

The listening crowd cheer and hold up signs WE ALL MAKE MISTAKES, NOBODY’S PERFECT, CAN WE START OVER?

The basketballer LeBron James is on a film set: I’m sorry, I’ve thought about it and I just can’t do Space Jam 2. I just can’t support Chinese censorship. 

Producer: Oh, yeah? Well, if you’re not gonna make Space Jam 2, then I’m not gonna make Space Jam 2! And nobody’s gonna make Space Jam 2!

The film crew cheer and throw scripts into the air.

And Cartman? Last seen drunk and homeless on the street, screaming: Fuck you guys!...Fuck you, Kyle! Fuck you, Stan! Fuck you, Butters…