South Park’s age is nothing if not impressive. While this season has yet to churn out a “Broadway Bro Down” level stone cold classic, the fact that the show is still putting out anything even remotely worth watching is remarkable. So an episode as out and out awful as “I Should Have Never Gone Ziplining” is hardly an indication that the show is thrashing around in the throes of mediocrity. Sure, it’s thirty minutes of my life I desperately wish I could get back, but Tony Award winners are allowed an off day or two.
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There are a number of things wrong with “I Should Have Never Gone Ziplining,” but the biggest reason the episode doesn’t work is its soft premise. The boys decide they don’t want to waste their last day of spring break watching TV and playing Xbox, so when one of them suggests a zip-line tour as a possible wild adventure, they all jump at the idea. Presented like an episode of I Shouldn’t Be Alive, the boys come to the crushing realization that zip-line tours are an overly sterilized and immensely boring waste of time, filled with the kind of yuppies that ask questions about tree types and frequently misuse the phrase “to make a long story short.”
That’s not really a solid foundation for one of TV’s sharpest satires. It smacks of Matt and Trey having a bad experience on a zip-line tour and deciding to make an episode out of the ordeal. Maybe it’d make for a decent SNL sketch, but the disingenuousness of zip-lining and other so called outdoor “adventures” is hardly able to support an entire half hour of television.
Nowhere is this more apparent than at the episode’s midway point, when things abruptly shift into a live action “reenactment” that’s jarring both for the creepy twentysomething real life stand-ins for the boys and the fact that it goes on for so long. After trying to escape the endless monotony of the zip-line tour, the four find themselves stuck on a boat that can’t go more than 5mph. Kenny slowly dies of boredom, Cartman battles diarrhea from all the Diet Double Dew he's been drinking, Stan reveals he’s the one who suggested they go zip-lining because he got a 5th generation iPod nano out of the deal, and everyone catches herpes. All of this is rendered with the sort of artful craftsmanship that’s usually reserved for a high school video project.
It’s a bizarre, nonsensical sequence, and while those words can usually be used to describe South Park as a whole, the live action scenes play out more like the show having no idea how to spend the last half of the episode. It has no real point beyond the sheer weirdness of seeing real life versions of the characters, and it devolves into the mother of all poop jokes when Mr. Hanky shows up to save everyone in his magical Helicrapter, Seven-Turdy-Seven, and Poo-Choo Express, respectively. As a result, despite getting some nice digs in on self serious survival shows and the difference between a cold sore and herpes, “I Should Have Never Gone Ziplining” is one of the show’s more aimless, unfunny outings in recent memory.
SumOlogy: I’m pretty sure I could have gone my entire life without seeing those super detailed representations of what’s going on in Cartman’s gastrointestinal system. Thanks, South Park.
Grade: C-
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