25x04 Back to the Cold War

[8.0/10] One of my favorite South Park episodes in a while. Both stories work on the level of pure comedy. Mr. Mackey’s 1980s throwbacks are inherently amusing, particularly the silly pieces of pop culture ephemera he chooses to lose himself in. I got a particular kick out of the Wargames homage, especially the part where NORAD is mystified by the basics of DOS because it’s so antiquated. The show does a good job of not just making these references, but using them in a sideways fashion that gets extra laughs.

Butters’ misadventures in dressage was a laugh as well. It functions well as a send-up of parents putting way too much pressure on their kids for low-stakes local sports events. Poor Butters trying to get his pony do a simple trick, while being an animal it naturally just wants to go to the bathroom and schtup other animals, makes for some ridiculous setpieces. But they work not just because of the absurd mismatch between trying to get a horse to do something controlled and elegant while it naturally just acts like an animal would, but also for poor Butters getting the blame yet again for something he has no control over.

The major thematic takeaway is here too. South Park famously skewered a culture built around nostalgia with the whole Member Berries season. But this succeeds as a strong coda to that. Mr. Mackey is sympathetic when he years for the days of the cold war, when things seemed less complicated and the good guys and bad guys seemed easier to identify. But his mom is right to point that, as is so often the case, those weren’t “the good old days.” People were scared. People died. And things were as complicated then as they were now, even if that wasn’t as easy to intuit when you’re young and the monoculture still reigned supreme.

“Back to the Cold War” does a good job of drawing a line between Mackey growing older and losing himself in nostalgia and positing that Putin is doing the same on a much larger scale. This is South Park, so of course, it’s framed in terms of “pee pee not work so good.” Still, the broader comparison about Putin’s desire to go back to the times of a Russian hegemony, and the armchair psychology about it having to do with him growing older, with Mackey’s own age-based retreat to the past, is a canny one.

And poor Butters! Again, the absurdity of him winning a dressage competition with his horse getting frisky and knocking out the poor Russian competitor is a laugh, especially when the proceedings turn into a big Rocky IV spoof. The way the episode uses that sort of stylized Jingoism to point to the absurdity of the whole us vs. them mentality in things as minor as kids pony competition, while also playing it vaguely straight in conveying the episode’s message, is quite good.

Overall, this felt like a classic episode of South Park, one that mixed demented humor with some genuine incisiveness and social critique in a way few other shows could.