“Four young boys in Colorado are on a trip from hell.”
It’s the last day of spring break and the boys from South Park want to do one more fun thing before school starts. Stan suggests that they go ziplining. Everyone thinks that it’s a great idea but little do the boys know, they have no idea what they signed up for.
This week’s episode, “I Should Have Never Gone Ziplining,” re-tells the harrowing tale of the Stan, Kyle, Cartman, and Kenny and their fight for survival on a boring afternoon of ziplining.
The episode begins with the boys discussing what would be a really cool activity to do before they have to go back to school. Cartman suggests that they don’t go swimming because he doesn’t want to get Kenny’s herpes, to which Kenny claims to be a cold sore. So, they end up deciding on ziplining.
Once fitted with all the gear, the four boys are as pumped up as as ever until their instructor gives them some very sobering news: “okay just follow me to the waiting room where you can wait with the others.“ Hearing those words is like a pin bursting their party bubble, but the horrible news didn’t stop there.
Next, the boys have to endure the terrible safety video, which Stan describes as “10, maybe 15 minutes of pure hell,” which then leads to the 45 minutes of waiting in the shuttle bus where all the tour members get to know each other – it truly was a decent into madness.
After a lot of waiting around, the boys eventually arrive at the ziplining station. Finally experiencing the sensation of letting gravity take them from a high elevation to a lower one, they realize that it’s nowhere near as exciting as they had hoped.
Only after a grueling 20 minutes of waiting for the rest of tour to finish ziplining did the boys realize that they wasted their time and the thought of having to go through 16 more stations drove them to take extreme measures. They had to get home, by any means necessary. To make matters worst, Cartman has been drinking Mountain Dew pretty consistently throughout the trip and the combination of the drink mixing with an Arby’s Ultimate Angus created a level 4 diarrhea situation, thus furthering the urgency to get home as quickly as possible.
“I Should Have Never Gone Ziplining” was created in the style of Animal Planet’s I Shouldn’t Be Alive, with narrator voice-overs, personal interviews, and CGI renditions of the viscera at work. The serious speaking manner of the narrator played a great foil to ridiculous notion that the boys were dying of boredom. The episode very much played out like Community’s 3-14 ‘Pillows And Blankets’ and trust me, that is a very good thing.
In a final touch, the last leg of the boys’ escape back home was portrayed by a real-person ‘re-enactment’ which was again, similar to I Shouldn’t Be Alive. Kyle, Stan, Cartman, and Kenny were played by four male actors in their mid twenties who acted and were dressed like the cartoon characters. It was a great scene and quite the surprise.
All in all “I Should Have Never Gone Ziplining” was a fun, sarcastic adventure poking fun at the popular show I Shouldn’t Be Alive as well as tediousness of being on a tour group. It wasn’t the season’s strongest episode, but I still found a lot of laughs in it.