The End of Serialization as We Know It

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"The End of Serialization as We Know It"

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"The End of Serialization as We Know It"
Episode no.	Season 20 Episode 10
Guest stars	Elon Musk
Production no.	2010
Original airdate	December 7, 2016
Episode chronology Previous Next "Not Funny" "White People Renovating Houses"
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"The End of Serialization as We Know It" is the tenth and final episode of Season Twenty, and the 277th overall episode of South Park. It aired on December 7, 2016.

Synopsis

Cartman finally understands why Heidi wants to get him to Mars.

Plot

Spoiler warning! Plot details follow.

SpaceX has finished using Heidi Turner's research to create a massive source of energy that can easily propel transport to Mars. But after realizing that Heidi intends to break his heart (according to his skewed perception), Cartman tries to convince various SpaceX staff to cancel the Mars project by explaining that his visions of life on a Mars colony ended with the enslavement of men.

Kyle and Ike have recruited all of their remaining classmates to restart S****hunt42's troll network. However, their mother, Sheila Broflovski escapes from the pantry she was previously locked in, forcing Kyle and Ike to escape using a Fulton system. As she searches for them across a crumbling South Park, Sheila ends up at the Tuckers' house where a distraught Laura Tucker reveals that she has already used Troll Trace to reveal her husband Thomas' Internet history and invites Sheila to do the same. Sheila searches Ike first and discovers that he is innocent, but cannot bring herself to search Gerald.

At The Pentagon, the US government realizes that the only way to stop TrollTrace is to overload the Internet with trolling to the point where it shuts down and resets itself. They coordinate with the trolling team in Denmark as well as Kyle and Ike to overload the system, but their effort cannot beat the now-active Troll Trace without a massive source of power: the Mars power source at SpaceX.

In Denmark, Gerald Broflovski escapes from the control room with the help of both the troll team and the betrayed Troll Trace workers. He is guided across the facility to overload TrollTrace's operations, attracting the attention of TrollTrace CEO Lennart Bedrager. Bedrager confronts Gerald on a bridge leading to the final overload switch, resulting in a debate over the nature of trolling that Gerald "wins" by kicking Bedrager in the crotch and throwing him over a railing to his death. At the SpaceX facility, Cartman evacuates Elon Musk and the workers with a fake bomb threat from NASA before distracting Heidi long enough for Butters and an allied SpaceX employee to rig the Internet to the Mars power source.

The combined effort to shut down the Internet works, destroying SpaceX and interrupting Sheila before she can complete her search for Gerald. Life returns to normal across the world as President Garrison takes his seat in the Oval Office before an assembled army of member berries. Gerald returns home to an oblivious Sheila and a furious Kyle and Ike. An old man in Florida sends out the first e-mail in the "new Internet" – to troll his friend.

Critical Reception

AV Club gave "The End of Serialization as We Know It" a "C" rating saying: "That’s not much of a grand statement for a season finale of South Park. It ultimately amounts to little more than "People are shitty and will always be shitty and the internet makes them more shitty or at least reflects their shittiness." The show’s already explored all of those ideas before in more interesting (and funnier) ways. It all points to Parker and Stone being thrown for a loop by the election results, never being able to fully recover. Part of why there’s not a strong final thesis for season 20 is because they’ve gotten so bogged down in plot, they haven’t had time to focus on a coherent theme.

Even worse, they never circle back to the season’s funniest gag: the Member Berries. South Park has always had the luxury of being able to fall back on a good joke when the message falls flat, but here, the berries only get featured in one brief shot, and with no lines. What happened with the older Member Berries from the 1940s? What was their final plan? Where’s Caitlin Jenner? Featuring any of these things would automatically make "The End Of Serialization As We Know It" funnier, and yet it all remains mysteriously absent."

IGN gave "The End of Serialization as We Know It" a "6.6" rating saying: "This isn't the first time a season of South Park has failed to stick the landing, but it's still disappointing that the show's most continuity-driven season wrapped on such an anticlimactic note. There were plenty of funny moments along the way, but also a lot of plot threads left dangling and a generally anticlimactic conclusion to the TrollTrace storyline."