South Park Season 5 “Cartmanland” Episode Review
The episode begins with Cartman’s grandmother funeral and Cartman inheriting $1 million dollars from her will. Instead of saving the money or investing in it, Cartman decides to buy North Park Funland from the owner Frank Fun, but the owner admits that the amusement park hasn’t been doing well financially. Cartman says he wants to buy the amusement park for himself only so he can be free of any annoyances of dealing with going to an amusement park (a reference to the Grinch special). After he signs the contract, he changes the name to Cartmanland.
After Kyle saw Cartman with the money, he starts to question his faith in God and why he allowed a terrible person like Cartman to inherit a million dollars while other people are suffering in other countries. He gets an inflamed hemorrhoid from stressing about this discovery. The next day when Stan and Kyle see a commercial where Cartman says that no one can come into the amusement park along with mocking Stan and Kyle in the commercial, Stan decides that both of them should sneak into the amusement park, but later on that night after an unsuccessful attempt to sneak in since Kyle’s hemorrhoid popped after climbing a fence and causing him great pain.
Kyle ends up in the hospital and his parents tell him a bible story about a man named Job who lost everything and still kept his faith in God, but they left out the ending with he becomes a wealthy man and has a happy family and Kyle becomes distraught that God would allow a good man like Job to suffer so badly just to settle a bet with Satan.
Cartman hires a security guard to prevent anyone from sneaking into the amusement park and wants to pay the security guard in free rides but the security guard explains to him that he doesn’t like amusement parks and needs to be paid a salary. Cartman has no other choice but to let a few people in each day to pay for the guards salary along with paying for other amusement park expenses.
Meanwhile, Kyle’s still in the hospital and sees on TV that business experts misinterpreting Cartman’s attempts to keep people from entering the park as a genius ploy and say that other businesses are adopting the same approach to their business. After watching this, Kyle falls into deeper despair and falls into a coma and starts losing his will to live and losing the will to fight off his infection.
Cartman gets agitated by how many people he has to let into the amusement park to keep it running and he decides to sell the park back to Frank Fun and get his $1 million dollars back, but when he leaves the amusement park, he’s confronted by the IRS who take the first half of his money for taxes /penalties and the second half of his money since Kenny’s parents sued him for letting Kenny get killed on one of the rides and he’ll have to pay for their legal fees. Cartman begs Frank Fun to return the amusement park back to him, but he refuses since it’s more successful now.
After hearing this, Stan goes back to the hospital to tell the doctor to bring Kyle to the amusement park to see Cartman being miserable. After seeing Cartman throwing rocks in anger along with the security guard he previously hired pepper spraying him, Kyle starts to recover from his hemorrhoid and his faith in God along with his will to live is renewed.
This is a pretty funny episode with Cartman being a brat and trying to keep everyone out of his park but has no choice but to do so, but it’s also an interesting but funny look-through into Kyle’s religious beliefs being questioned.
