Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | November 13, 2025
This week’s South Park is … a lot. Matt Parker and Trey Stone went to extreme lengths to make a point about the world we live in now. I’m not sure they needed to go quite that far, but the point lands. It’s also an episode you can’t unsee, and I really need to unsee it.
I’ll keep this short, and I’m not about to spell anything out. To get back at Red for manipulating him into buying her a Labubu doll, Butters uses Sora 2 to create a, uh, wildly inappropriate AI video featuring Santa Claus and Red. Red fires back with her own wildly inappropriate AI video of Butters and Totoro, the Studio Ghibli creation. It escalates into a back-and-forth of wildly inappropriate clips involving the South Park kids and various well-known characters — Rocky and Bullwinkle, Bluey, Droopy — sending the owners of some of those properties into a fury.
The police see these clips and believe they’re real, so they launch an investigation into what they think is a criminal ring involving cartoon characters doing wildly inappropriate things with kids. At one point, they even dress (badly) as Rocky & Bullwinkle to lure in Peter Thiel and arrest him, convinced he’s behind a real Pizzagate-like conspiracy. They have no idea any of it is AI.
Meanwhile, the President and JD Vance bond intimately, so very intimately, in ways I never, ever want to picture again — complete with facial expressions, rolled-back eyes, and the music of Foreigner — and all of it is captured by surveillance cameras Peter Thiel hid around the White House. When the footage leaks, Fox News personalities melt down until the President calls in and insists it’s all fake, an AI fabrication.
Got it? South Park is making a point — in the most lurid, unwatchable way possible — about a world where we can’t tell real from fake. Authorities panic over AI-generated clips that look authentic. At the same time, the public convinces itself that what’s real must be fabricated.
And the real victims here are anyone who watches this episode. Now I need to find an Osgood Perkins horror movie to clear my brain.
