YMMV / South Park: The Pandemic Special

• Critical Dissonance: Many critics sites gave the Pandemic Special lukewarm reviews, with IGN giving it a 5/10. However, audience gave it a much better reception having a review score of 8.6/10 at IMDb; It's currently the highest-rated South Park episode in seven years and the number one rated cable broadcast on the evening of September 30, 2020.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Yates saying "Got him!" after shooting Tolkien in the arm.
  • Yates and his crew using tanks to take down the kids who escaped the school (including Kenny), with the tune of Mötley Crüe's "Kickstart My Heart".
  • President Garrison using a blowtorch against the pangolin and the scientist holding it.
    Garrison: Don't forget to get out and vote, everybody! Big election coming up.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • President Garrison fully intends to let the Coronavirus spread so he can kill all the Mexicans and then delays having a vaccine made by killing the scientist and the pangolin at the end of the episode. A day after the special aired, Donald Trump was diagnosed with the Coronavirus.
  • During one of the hospital scenes, Mrs. Nelson could be seen amongst the patients in the waiting room having Randy's mustache and a horrible cough. In South ParQ Vaccination Special, she would later catch COVID-19 and die from it.
  • The ending shows a forest fire raging in the hills outside of town. Just a few weeks after the special aired, the two largest wildfires in Colorado's history, the Cameron Peak Fire and the East Troublesome Fire, roared out of control and devastated huge swathes of the state, destroying hundreds of thousands of acres of forest and forcing entire mountain towns to evacuate.
• He Really Can Act: Trey Parker surely knows how to do Stan's breakdown realistically.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Even for those who don't watch South Park, a lot of people tuned in to see this episode simply because of its longer running time and what it had to say about COVID-19 and 2020 in general.
• Moment of Awesome:
  • Stan calling out Yates for shooting Token. While Yates still refuses to acknowledge what he did and claimed what happened to Token was 'COVID-related', it takes some true guts to stand up to someone who would find any reason to harm you.
  • Timmy breaking the lock saving all the kids.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • President Garrison makes it clear that he intends to do nothing about the pandemic because it was disproportionately killing Hispanic Americans coinciding with his promise to the American people on how he would get rid of the Mexicans if he were elected. Worse, when Cartman relents and spares the pangolin, Garrison sets the pangolin and scientist on fire condemning South Park to an unforeseeable future of lockdowns and raging fires with untold casualties.
  • Yates and his crew were already corrupt from the beginning, but they finally cross the line here by committing mass murder on multiple children.
• Signature Scene: Stan's breakdown at the end is the most well-known moment since it captures the despair wrought by the pandemic.
• Squick:
  • Cartman treats his bowl of Cheesy Poofs as cereal by pouring milk inside. Even worse? This was based on one of the employees’ kids doing the exact same thing.
  • Randy having sex with a bat and pangolin, the latter of which caused the COVID-19 Pandemic to happen.
  • Randy's "cure" for COVID-19 — having people smoke marijuana mixed with his semen.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Tolkien getting shot in class by Sergeant Yates. This could have been South Park's way to satirize the issues of systemic racism, Police Brutality towards black people and the Black Lives Matter protests, but after a gag on how the police views it as a COVID-related injury, the incident is forgotten and Tolkien is not seen or mentioned again in the episode.
• The Woobie:
  • Stan. The isolation and stress of the lockdown brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic has clearly taken its toll on him, culminating at the end of the episode when he has a mental breakdown when he is unable to work the controls at Build-A-Bear. Even Cartman feels bad for him.
  • Tolkien. He’s shot because of Kyle and Cartman fighting and he’s never seen after that. While it’s likely he survived being young, it’s also likely he had to go to the hospital to get the bullet out and seeing what awful shape the hospital was in makes an awful situation (that’s happened to him before) even worse.
  • The kids in general are considered to be this. They are all stuck in quarantine due to the cops' incompetence, and when they all break free, the police chase after them with lethal force.

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