South Park Season 23 Episode 8 “Turd Burglars” Review

Yo Ho! Nightrider here!

It’s looking like South Park’s opening themes are a gag in themselves as we went from a Randy miniseries to PC Babies and now “One For the Ladies.” So technically, we have had three “spinoff series” this season. Only now, South Park went back to their roots with shit, literally.

Beware of Spoilers Ahead

As Sheila Broflovski delivers a speech about how the women of South Park should be treated like the men, she vomits and defecates violently in front of the women. The doctor tells Ike and Kyle that their mother has C-diff (Clostridioides difficile infection), a bacterial infection that causes her good bacteria in her stomach to be overrun by bad bacteria. The solution: a fecal transplant to replace her microbiome (it’s a real thing, look it up).

As Ike and Kyle swore to keep this a secret to not get ripped at school, Sheila tells all the healthy benefits of getting a fecal transplant to her friends Harriet, Laura and Linda Stotch. As Kyle gets paranoid about microbiomes and how everything has or is constituted by bacteria, his friends stop themselves from ripping on Kyle and focus on their prize: a copy of the new Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order if they get a stool sample for Harriet.

When Sheila spoke about how the women of South Park should be treated like men, I look at it as a humorous foreshadowing about the women of South Park being just as irrational as the men of South Park. Sheila didn’t want to give her stool sample and all the women fight for a piece of shit, Sheila’s to be exact. They paid for it dearly near the end of the episode because C-diff is a very contagious and serious infection that can lead to sepsis and other horrors.

Tom Brady’s shit is the cure to save the South Park infections with Kyle searching Brady’s bookcase to discover that Brady secretly hides his shit to avoid having his plumbing pipes cut. 1984’s Dune is the major reference here as Kyle has dreams about the microbiome, Brady’s bookcase and his blue eyes enhancing his vision. The inner monologues about the “Spice Melange” was hilarious.

In the end, the town is saved with Kyle learning to trust his gut more. The episode ends like a sitcom with a punchline about the title.

To be honest, I thought this episode tackled the topics of envy, consumerism, Dune, and the importance of keeping a healthy diet to support a healthy microbiome. Since this episode aired the day before Thanksgiving, turkey basters are a useless topic to consider. But then again, the basters have been collecting bacteria for 364 days out of the year.

So who will get a “spinoff” episode this season? I can’t wait to see who will get to be a star, even if it lasts an episode.