23x01 Mexican Joker

[6.4/10] I really hope this is part of some larger arc that the South Park team has planned, because otherwise it feels incomplete. But even if that’s the case, this isn’t a great start to a story or a season.

Randy getting mad and retaliating against the home-grown pot people feels like a reference to something that just went over my head. That’s not a big issue, except that the storyline feels a little empty without the natural fill-in of real life events. There’s a standard South Park hypocrisy angle, and some amusing absurdity at Randy’s deep-seated offense to being called a towel, but that’s about it.

It connects to the whole “what if this is how you create the Joker” bit in the episode, which is a funny enough idea, but probably not enough of a concept to build a whole episode around. Randy turning into some sort of Towel Joker had its moments, but feels undercooked. And the ICE agents worrying that they’re in the flashback to the scene that creates Mexican Joker and trying to stop it was funny enough for a scene, but didn’t really gain much from repetition.

The strongest material in the episode was Kyle (and eventually Cartman) getting deposited in the detention centers. The show’s pointed social satire comes through in the kicker, with Kyle’s aluminum foil stunt showing how much we’d freak out if the government were rounding up Jews, but how we’re apparently fine with it as a country when the detainees are latino. But even then, too much gets wrapped up in the whole Mexican Joker thing. That said, Cartman getting hoisted by his own petard here is a laugh.

Overall, this is a wobbly, uneven episode that has a couple of good ideas but can’t quite seem to deploy them well.