The four cleverest episodes of season 13 were The Ring, Margaritaville, Pinewood Derby, and Fatbeard.
Clever Episodes
The Ring successfully pokes fun at Disney, The Jonas Brothers, Grey's Anatomy, and purity rings. The premise is that the CEO of the Disney company (Mickey Mouse) uses the Jonas Brothers' attractiveness to market them to little girls, but the band must wear purity rings so that the parents think their girls' obsession with the band is harmless. Hilarity ensues as Mickey Mouse yells curses at the Jonas Brothers for even thinking of not wanting to wear the purity rings.
Margaritaville uses the crumbling economy for the plot setting. As most people's bank accounts have disappeared and there is "suddenly no money," Randy starts preaching in the streets that people have "turned [their] backs on the economy and incurred the economy's wrath." He tells them to wear bed sheets instead of spending money on clothes and ride on camels instead of spending money on cars, creating a biblical-looking setting. Soon, Kyle starts telling people that it's okay to spend money as long as they believe in their money, and a townsperson tells Randy that "a young Jew is speaking blasphemy among the people." The episode ends with Kyle paying for everyone's debts with credit card that has no spending limit, and the media thanking Barak Obama for returning the economy to a stable state.
Pinewood Derby shows the digression of world leaders when they stumble upon what they believe to be the bank of the universe. A man dressed in a poor alien costume comes to South Park making demands, and when the town finds out the alien has a lot of money, they kill him and distribute the money among the world leaders. Two alien cops come down, ask why Mexico has suddenly built water parks around their borders, and Randy claims he has no idea. The cops eventually tell them that the money was a set up to see if the world was worthy of entering the galactic community, and leave them in their embarrassment.
Fatbeard, the last episode of the season, shows an ignorant Eric Cartman wanting to run away to Somalia to be a pirate. When he finds the pirate community and tries to train them to be more stereotypical, one of the pirates yells at Cartman for wasting his free education.
The Lesser Quality Episodes
The Coon, which came out just after Watchmen, depicts Cartman pretending to be a superhero that stalks in the night and fights crime. But another night crime-fighter is on the scene, and Cartman gets jealous and tries to duel him for the right to be the night hero.
Eat, Pray, Queef showed two women trying to empower their gender by promoting queefs in the world of humor alongside passing gas. The men of South Park felt that the women's queefs were offensive, and throughout the entire episode they refused to believe that they were in any way as humorous as passing gas was (the male equivalent to queefing in the world of crass comedy).
Fishsticks was Matt Stone's and Trey Parker's (the creators of South Park) way of poking fun at Kanye West and Carlos Mencia. A joke involving fishsticks was spread around, and everybody but Kanye West understood the joke and thought it was funny.
South Park's clever episodes of season 13 involved subplots and layers of antagonizing the same or similar subjects. The lesser quality episodes had a straight plot line that was watchable, but just didn't deliver like their others. It seems as if the episodes are beginning to polarize in comedic value.
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