South Park Going Native

South Park "Going Native" Review

Every once in awhile South Park breaks it current trend and goes for a non parody approach that is built on jokes and a story line involving its characters, and they did so in this episode.

The episode started off very strong with Butters insulting the other boys and channeling his inner Hawaiian for rage. I do wish we could have seen the fight that started it all though but oh well every line he delivered was spot on. 

The episode then transitioned to what I thought were funny bits involving his family, especially on the correct pronunciation of Hawaii. Also the whole refusal to allow him on the plane was hillarious,not because he was a child but because they thought he was intoxicated.

The Hawaii scenes did not play out as well as I had hoped however, it all centered on one joke really and that was these people being natives. It might have clicked for others out there but it did not really register with me aside from the first time. SP does this a fair amount and sometimes it works really well, for instance in Sarcastaball or the shake weight, and sometimes they fall short like here. The parts where they fought with the Coast Guard were funny, and I cannot believe Butters killed all those people!

I did enjoy Kenny's subplot though, it was nice to see him get a notable inclusion in the episode and his letters back home were funny, in my opinion anyways. I thought he died and was surprised to see him wake up in the Elvis place, it was nice he saved them all though.

The ending was good as it showed Butters' main angst came from being jealous of Ben Affleck, a nice way to end the show.

I did like that South Park got away from the parodies and went back to what got them here, an episode with no real parodies and an episode built around Butters who has become arguably their 3rd most popular character for carrying episodes behind Cartman and Randy.

Overall I thought this was a solid episode and would watch it again, however it did not stand out so much and will not go down as one of the season's stronger episodes. With comedies it is often hard to rate them, however I will attempt to use a 10 point scale for them as well when taken into account how easy it is to recall the episode later on. Will I remember this episode greatly if someone mentions Butters in Hawaii I probably will not recall it that fondly, as I would say Sarcastaball.

Overall, I give this episode a 7.5, it delivered enough to be a passable episode but did not break through to that great territory.