The Most Demented Christmas Episode Ever?!
Content Warning:
This review will discuss heavy topics (murder, cults & abortion) that are unsuitable for readers under 18 years. Reader discretion is advised for those who are 18 years and older.
PART ONE
South Park's latest episode was a Christmas special featuring a group of Satanist "Woodland Critters" that's apparently a sequel to an episode from 20 seasons earlier. I decided to watch that episode first and boy was it bizarre!
It played out as some kind of surreal parody of preschool cartoons by featuring a bunch of innocent, cutesy, semi-anthropomorphic, partially clothed and juvenile forest animals. They looked, sounded and acted more like they belonged in a blatant parody of Nick Junior cartoons (I'm looking at you Dora) rather than in an adult cartoon featuring digital paper collage animation! They even sound like Stan, Kyle, and their female classmates speaking in various American regional dialects (particularly the Southern dialects; the pregnant hedgehog speaks with an upper-class Southern accent), due to them being voiced by Trey Parker, Matthew Stone, Mona Marshall and April Stewart.
Plus, their de fact leader Squirrely the Squirrel is voiced by Adrien Beard, who also voices Tolkien "Token" Williams-Black. But I thought that Trey voiced him, that is until I looked up the voice actors, due to Squirrely sounding a bit like Stan, albeit with a thick Southern accent (Tolkien speaks in a high voice and a standardized African American accent; so his voice actor was quite hard to trace as Squirrely spoke with a high pitched voice in a regional dialect used primarily by White Americans).
Their names also sound like they belong in some twisted parody of educational preschool shows: they are just the animals' species names but with an "ie/y/ee" suffix at the end of them! These animals also have a bizarre habit of calling Stan "Stanny," rather than his full name "Stanley."
In fact, this entire episode feels like a twisted parody of Christmas themed episodes of preschool cartoons, although the fourth wall breaking comes from the narrator forcing a reluctant Stanley “Stan” Marsh to play along with the episode's intentionally ridiculous premise.
Now, where to start?
The episode features a cliched "poetic narrator" (Trey Parker) introducing the viewer to a bunch of talking, singing woodland critters who manage to convince our apathetic protagonist Stan to make a star for their Christmas tree (he made the star out of paper). The childlike animals then sing a brief Christmas song, before trying to convince a now confused Stan to dance with them around their Christmas tree. Stan politely declines and leaves.
The animals then proceed to stalk Stan, who was about to fall asleep, and talk him into building a manger. So that a "Southern Belle" accented porcupine could give birth to their "Saviour." Stan reluctantly agrees to do this, along with an extra dirty deed to kill a "villainous" mountain lion who keeps eating animals who are impregnated with the "Saviour" (even though Jesus is a grown man in this show and a resident of the titular town).
Stan murders the mountain lion, only for her recently orphaned lion triplets to reveal themselves, causing Stan to realize that what he did was completely immoral. Soon, Stan discovers that the supposedly innocent group of woodland critters are a Satanist cult, who reveal their true colours by turning the manger into a shrine dedicated to the Anti-Christ. The cute little forest animals claim that it's because God would only impregnate human virgins, in what I can safely assume is a parody reference to the Omen film series (the first movie was adapted into the parody episode Damien).
They then proceed to sacrifice an unusually gleeful “Rabbity the Rabbit” by stabbing him, drinking his blood and then celebrating with a fast-paced (and crudely animated) Satanist "blood orgy" (sex party). This scene was admittedly kind of funny, mainly because there's blood everywhere and all the cute Dora the Explorer animal companion rejects are performing all kinds of sex with each other, onscreen!
I honestly feel quite bad for the poor children who stayed up to watch live TV late at night, only to be exposed to these darkly comedic scenes which scream, "This isn't a preschool Christmas cartoon, and if you're under the age of 15... [BLEEP] off!!"
After the narrator forces Stan to set things right, the demonic woodland creatures use their Satanic powers to violently blackmail Stan into finding a suitable human host for the cult's "Saviour."
Stan decides to set things right by teaching the lion cubs how to terminate the pregnancy and put an end to the evil woodland critters' plans. But once I got to the scene where Stan (reluctantly) takes the now orphaned mountain lion cubs to an abortion clinic, I just switched off the episode to watch later.
PART TWO
South Park's latest episode was a Christmas special featuring a group of Satanist "Woodland Critters" that's apparently a sequel to an episode from 20 seasons earlier. I ended up watching that episode with an upturned nose before my mother caught me watching the show and warned me not to binge watch this "show where you don't learn anything."
Ironically, this show taught me a few things, like how during Hannukah, "you get presents for eight days."
And when I continued watching the original Woodland Critters Christmas episode, I almost didn't expect the episode to show abortions onscreen. So, when it did (an abortion being performed on Kyle by the lion cubs) I ended up covering part of the screen with my hand.
Adding on to the weirdness of the episode, there's a plot twist which reveals that the premise was taken from a Christmas-themed story written by Eric Cartman for a school project! After Kyle tells him to stop reading after he mentions the latter willingly having the Hedgehog's offspring (the Anti-Christ) inserted into his body, the other kids begged for him to continue reading, leading up to the above-mentioned abortion scene.
The episode unironically ends with all the protagonists happily celebrating Christmas, except for Kyle, who dies of AIDS (in the story). After seeing this episode, I thought to myself, what primary school student (especially in real life) would write a Christmas story like that?!
Daddy once claimed to have written demented short stories in high school, which irked his teachers, but I don't think they were this level of R-rated garbage that Cartman was aiming for with his story. How did he know of these concepts?!
But the sequel got weirder when Stan accidentally and somehow wishes the Woodland Critters into existence and they help Satan give birth to his "butt-baby." And they're still as delusional as ever.
6/10 (I didn't mind this episode)
Update: I saw the latest episode that was a sequel to this one. It's actually funnier than this episode, especially because there's a scene where a fetus somehow hangs itself (on-screen) and I ended up laughing near the end of the episode because of how the other characters later reacted to the ultrasound footage! Believe or not, it's apparently a parody of how Jeffrey Epstein killed himself.