In South Park: Post COVID: The Return Of COVID, the villains don’t know that they’re villains

As an animated sitcom, the primary goal of South Park is always going to be making the audience laugh. But as a show that’s been on for nearly 25 years, it’s only natural that its viewers eventually become invested for reasons that don’t always have to do with comedy.

And that’s where the gold lies in South Park: Post COVID: The Return Of COVID—not necessarily in the audacity of its jokes, but in the surprising direction it takes some of its longest-running characters. While the successful running gags are still there (pound for pound, South Park’s second made-for-TV movie on Paramount+ has more laughs than its predecessor), the most memorable moments come from the arc of the special’s villains.

Picking up where November’s Post COVID left off, The Return Of COVID finds South Park’s grownup kids in full Avengers: Endgame mode, trying to figure out how to travel back in time to reverse the shitty present in which they currently live. If that sounds like an overly basic distillation of the plot, that’s because, like the first movie, The Return Of COVID complicates the story with subplots that sometimes make the core narrative feel like it’s stalling. Granted, these threads justify their existence by coalescing in the end (even Randy’s last Tegridy Farms marijuana plant ends up playing a pivotal role), but with the promise of time travel at the end of the last installment, there’s an urgency to get back to the past that doesn’t become fully realized until the third act.

The main conflict stems from Cartman not wanting the present to change. Unlike his friends, he’s more than content with where he’s at. I honestly thought this week would reveal that his supposedly blissful family life was all some elaborate plan to get revenge on Kyle, but The Return Of COVID shows that Cartman’s love and fulfillment are genuine. Even when he does return to his villainous ways toward the film’s middle, the reversal comes more from an authentic fear of losing his loved ones than a desire for cold-blooded vengeance. And that feels so much more satisfying than if Cartman had been pulling a fast one on everybody this whole time. It shows that he’s capable of empathy and, more importantly, capable of great change.

By the time Trey Parker and Matt Stone have cut to the credits right after The Return Of COVID’s cruelest—and funniest—joke, it’s Cartman who’s made the biggest sacrifice and, as a result, lost everything he has just as he expected (no spoilers on the specifics here). And given Stan and Kyle’s squabbling and pettiness throughout both movies, you’re left wondering if they’re the ones who have become more villainous along the way.

Equally surprising is the reveal of The Return Of COVID’s primary antagonist, Victor Chaos, who of course turns out to be none other than one Leopold “Butters” Stotch. At the end of Post COVID, we were left in the dark about what Butters had aged into. Would he simply be an adult version of his Professor Chaos alter ego? A reversion to his Gollum persona from “The Return Of The Fellowship Of The Ring To The Two Towers”? Something else entirely?

No, it turns out that the true villain of the future is an oily, overly enthusiastic NFT salesman, which feels pitch-perfect for our current era. In keeping with the character’s history, Butters’ transformation occurred when, in the wake of COVID, he endured an inhumanely long grounding from his parents.

As funny as it is to see Butters blaze a path of physical and psychological destruction with his promises of non-fungible tokens, Parker and Stone never give him the mustache-twirling quality of countless other cartoon villains. Like so many people embedded in NFT culture, Butters is convinced that what he’s doing is actually helping artists and, by extension, society at large. That doesn’t excuse his behavior, but like Cartman’s heel turn (and, if we’re being honest, Stan and Kyle’s), it’s so much more compelling when we truly understand where the villains are coming from.

This sympathetic approach to everyone’s questionable behavior reaches its apex in The Return Of COVID’s climax. After a couple of gut-busting action sequences that borrow heavily from both The Terminator and Blade Runner, we’re left with a final can’t-we-all-just-get-along message. At first, it feels almost like an over-simplification of the fraught times we’re in, especially when South Park has been so sharply critical this past year of groups like QAnon.

But then that final unforgiving moment with Cartman hits, and it’s clear that, in the world of South Park (and our own), there’s no perfect solution to any of the issues the show has tackled since the onset of the pandemic. In the end, someone’s always going to get screwed. Here, it’s the show’s most unsympathetic character, and the fact that Parker and Stone actually make us feel bad for him is a truly impressive trick.

Stray Observations

• It’s refreshing to see South Park continue to take advantage of showing full-frontal male nudity on the show. And it was even more refreshing to see that adult Butters still drops trou and lifts his shirt up at the urinal to pee.
• There was really no good reason to have Randy quote Roy Batty’s “tears in rain” monologue from Blade Runner, but boy did it make me laugh.
• It’s eerie how, almost immediately after the first film aired, the world found itself dealing with another COVID variant.
• While these South Park TV movies exist in this weird space between regular episodes and feature-length films, I think having the extra time to work on them benefits Parker and Stone. They were able to crank out a good Omicron joke while also delivering a story with multiple threads that mostly holds together.