This season’s premiere of South Park, “Go Fund Yourself,” saw the boys quit school so they could create a startup called “Washington Redskins” and make money via Kickstarter. Their plan nearly worked, until too many people complained about the offensive name, leaving them with no choice but to go back to school. At the time, it seemed like that would be the last we would hear about this. This is South Park, after all, a show that normally resets after every episode. I mean, how many times has Kenny died only to be brought back to life? Seriously, I lost count.
So, imagine our shock at the beginning of the next episode, “Gluten Free Ebola,” when the boys were pariahs throughout the halls of South Park Elementary, their friends enraged at their arrogant behavior after they abandoned school for the world of tech startups. Wait, the plot from last week was going to stick? That never happens. In an excellent bit of meta-humor, Stan seems just as stunned by this development as we are:
By the time the episode was over, Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Cartman had smoothed things over by throwing a party. Since they couldn’t get Lorde in time, Randy Marsh took the stage impersonating her. No one seemed to notice.
Everything was back to normal at South Park Elementary, and the internet had a brand new meme. This might have been the point where South Park‘s serial storyline experiment had stopped if not for a 200-word article posted at Spin the next day. The writer missed the point of Randy-as-Lorde, and seemed way too offended by South Park, a show that thrives on having fun at the expense of others.
Rather than letting this silly little article stand, in the following episode we were introduced to a Spin reporter who was doing a report on Lorde, and was nervous that “someone might be having fun at her expense.”
Shortly after this, the biggest bombshell of the season would drop: Randy Marsh wasn’t impersonating Lorde; he WAS Lorde. All this time, he had been writing songs — heavily altered by auto-tune — and releasing them under the name Lorde. You have to wonder if this was Matt and Trey’s plan all along, or if it was a reaction to the Spin piece. They might have originally intended to have Randy-as-Lorde be a one-off joke, but the article emboldened them to go a few steps further and reveal Lorde as the secret identity of Randy Marsh. Either way, South Park‘s experiment with episode-to-episode continuity had now lasted for the first three episodes of the season.
In the episodes that have aired since, the serial storylines have died down considerably, but not completely. The “Handicar” episode saw Randy/Lorde drive by on a Handicar singing “Ya Ya Ya/I Am Lorde,” perhaps as a hint that even though that particular episode would be focusing on minor characters, the storylines we had seen explored earlier might not be over just yet.
Last week’s episode, “Freemium Isn’t Free,” made more references to this season’s ongoing continuity, including this exchange after Stan racked up a $26,000 bill playing the Terrance and Philip freemium game:
Randy: Do you know many songs I have to write to pay for this?
Stan: One?
Randy: That’s not the point!”
That would be a strong hint that Randy-as-Lorde will continue to be a factor in the future, or at least that the writers haven’t forgotten about it. The episode also made references to Randy’s alcoholism — a recurring theme in the past — and revisited the heavy emphasis on gluten-free everything that arose earlier in the season:
After three consecutive episodes that more less ran into each other, the show’s episodes have started to feel more separated over the past few weeks, but there are still multiple hints that episode-to-episode continuity will continue to be a part of South Park‘s format in the future. This has the potential to change the show pretty radically. We’ve seen two- and-three part sagas before (“Black Friday,” “Imaginationland”), but the idea of individual episodes that loosely connect to each other is a new concept for South Park, one that could keep the show fresh as it moves ever closer to two decades on the air.
How will these developments work out? Will Randy continue to be Lorde, or will there be a drastic new revelation that changes that story yet again? Will Randy/Lorde’s alcoholism be a major storyline? Will gluten ever stop making your d*** fly off? The fact that we even get to ask these questions proves that South Park has thoroughly re-invigorated itself, and should be intriguing to follow going forward.
