South Park’s Season 23 Premiere: Mexican Joker

Yo Ho! Nightrider here!

Here we go with a new season of “South Park” and their newest season opener called Mexican Joker.

Beware of spoilers ahead!

This time the subjects of Mexican Joker involve ICE and their operations against immigrants, the effects of what incarceration has on children and a possible creation of a Mexican Joker (from the upcoming Joker film starring Juaquin Phoenix). Mexican Joker also shows another theme: Randy’s problems with decreasing demand from his Tegridy Farms products due to people setting up their own marijuana plants.

On one hand, this season opener is a Randy episode. Randy wants to be the only supplier of legal marijuana to South Park and does not understand that he could gain positive competition from the townsfolk growing their own marijuana products. He gets his son Stan to plead with the city council to ban private marijuana farms but fails; Randy then denounces South Park. To make matters worse, he goes behind Towelie’s back and teams up with two representatives from MedMen. Towelie angrily tells off Randy that marijuana should be enjoyed by everyone and not be used for corporate gains; he then proclaims that Randy is becoming a towel, which bothers Randy throughout the episode. Randy then has a solution: blow up the private marijuana fields and then celebrate his regained profits.

On the other hand, Kyle’s ordeal may lead to something big later in the season. After Cartman sees Stephen Stotch’s gardener getting separated from his family by ICE, he realizes that ICE can separate families and ship them to detention centers by making an anonymous tip. So, he uses it on Kyle after threatening him. When the detention center staff find out that Kyle isn’t from El Salvador and is Jewish, they panic and try to let him go just so they won’t be seen as racist. When Kyle asks about the fates of the other kids in the cage, the staff tell him they are just doing their jobs. This prompts Kyle to mention (via superhero movies because that’s the only thing ICE does understand) that the trauma and anxiety caused by forced incarceration will create a possibility that one of the immigrant children may turn into a Mexican Joker. Eventually, Cartman gets sent to Kyle’s detention center and feigns ignorance to his surroundings and connecting Kyle’s being Jewish to Nazi concentration camps. Kyle hatches a plan to escape with the kids, but the plan backfires as the head of the staff goes insane, kills his fellow agents and leaves Kyle and company locked in their cage. As this happens, the news puts the marijuana bomber’s identity as the Mexican Joker and people are freaking out.

This is a good opener for South Park’s 23rd Season. It critiques ICE’s methods of detaining people (regardless of their immigration status) and their intelligence. It also provides a social commentary on how Americans view the detention camps differently from the rest of the world; Americans haven’t learned their lessons about the dark moments in US history. As for the marijuana issue, this could become a big problem if corporations corner the emerging marijuana scene.