South Park: Whale Wars

When I see episodes of South Park like "Whale Whores" I wonder if Parker and Stone are running out of ideas, or if I'm just out of touch with certain strands of pop culture. Basing an entire episode around The Discovery Channel's Whale Wars TV show was a fairly typical thing to do for this show, but it also wasn't exactly a finger-on-the-pulse moment, either. I've never been a fan of reality shows, so that whole segment of TV is a bit of a blind spot for me, but still I think it's telling that neither I nor anyone I know has ever even heard of Whale Wars. It's possible that a program derivative of The Deadliest Catch may just be the lowest of the low-hanging fruit when it comes to television.

So, let's get our basic premise out of the way first. Stan gets riled up about the Japanese whaling industry and decides that he needs to be a crusader for the anti-whaling cause. When he tries to enlist his friends in the fight, they end up responding with various degrees of apathy or, in Cartman's case, outright contempt. In short order, Stan finds his way onto the crew of the official Whale Wars ship where he discovers (as Parker and Stone presume their viewers have) that nothing actually ever happens there. The crew certainly aren't the bad-ass pirates they claim to be in front of the cameras.

In recent years, South Park has leaned very heavily on ultra-violence for its shocks and laughs. The show was never clean and cuddly, but the deaths are becoming more frequent and significantly more graphic. A lot of the time it's just gratuitous like the death of the psychic in the first episode of the hemi-season, other times it serves the plot and acts as a kind of catharsis. When confronted with an actual Japanese whaling boat, the Whale Wars captain promptly gets a harpoon to the head, causing Stan to retaliate with a flare to the whalers' fuel supply. From then on, Captain Stan turns the show into a real, hardcore fight with whaling ships.

After some pretty boring bits about ratings and the TV business, the plot thankfully takes an absurd turn followed by several more absurd turns. After Cartman and Kenny pop in to grab some of the media attention, the crew of The Deadliest Catch shows up to fight for their own ratings, only to be ferried from the battlefield by sapient whales. The whales are then assaulted by kamikaze fighters and the boys are taken to prison in Japan where the Prime Minister explains that Japanese hate whales and dolphins because of a photograph depicting them dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

In a final, perplexing twist, Stan gets Kyle to doctor a photo depicting cows and chickens dropping the bomb instead, followed by an off-hand comment that actually likened whaling to the regular American consumption of beef and poultry. Usually South Park has a nice satirical bite, but this one just doesn't make any sense. Maybe it would if beef and poultry weren't also regular parts of Japanese cuisine, or if whaling involved some kind of farm-raising system, but as it stands tonight's satire just didn't make any sense.

Best Moment: The kamikaze planes chasing whales under the water and exploding below the surface. It was unexpected, surreal and clever.

Biggest Laugh: Cartman singing "Poker Face". I know it had nothing to do with the rest of the episode, but it was still hilarious.

Episode Rating: 3/5- Nonsensical satire aside, the episode was still entertaining and visually engaging. Given what did and didn't work about this episode, I think I'd like to see a solid episode or two of South Park that didn't attempt to be satirical at all. Just give me some old-fashioned absurdity about aliens or something.