Warning: This article contains full spoilers for South Park: Season 28, Episode 3!
It’s usually a good sign when I finish a new episode of South Park by asking myself, “What the hell did I just watch?!?” Season 28’s third episode is easily one of the most bizarre installments of the series in a good, long while, with the South Park Elementary kids flooding the town with deepfake revenge porn videos and the White House becoming embroiled in a torrid new love affair. It’s weird, it’s a little messy, and it ultimately all ties together in a fun and zany way.
One of the common threads tying Season 27/28 together is this profound sense of disillusionment about the current state of the world and the way the inmates are running the asylum. With that in mind, it only makes sense for the show to tackle AI along the way, specifically Sora and its downright frightening ability to generate fake videos. The fact that this new storyline centers around Butters and the hilariously inept South Park P.D. detectives is just icing on the cake.
“Sora Not Sorry” should go a little way toward placating those who feel the South Park Elementary kids haven’t been featured enough this season. Sure, maybe it’s not fair that Butters gets the spotlight again so soon after that whole Labubu debacle, but he’s Butters. When is more of him ever a bad thing? If anything, I wish this episode had kept him in the spotlight a little more, as it does start to lose focus on the kids towards the end.
The real highlight of “Sora Not Sorry” is definitely the AI deepfakes themselves. Scenes like the Butters/Totoro affair and Droopy Dog defiling Kyle are nice reminders that the series still knows how to push the boundaries of propriety and good taste after all these years. And they serve as fitting metaphors for what AI deepfake videos are - cheap, disposable trash that defiles and disrespects the people and characters involved. It’s an especially nice touch bringing in the vehemently anti-AI folks at Studio Ghibli to repeatedly slam Sora in no uncertain terms.
Watching the South Park kids wage digital war against one another is great on its own, but this episode also provides some nice commentary on the confusion inherent in trying to exist in this AI-soaked landscape of 2025. Never the brightest bulbs on the best of days, the South Park detectives are completely in over their heads trying to wrap their minds around the situation, much less actually deal with any crimes. The kids understand AI and how to weaponize it. The adults are just profoundly clueless. Yet, somehow, they still bumble their way into rescuing Cartman and arresting Peter “I Know About the Antichrist” Thiel in the end.
Initially, I was a little concerned about how this episode would weave the Trump/Satan/Antichrist storyline into everything else. It’s hard not to be after the misstep that was Episode 2. While these two seasons have generally been pretty great about weaving a coherent narrative out of all these moving parts and rapidly evolving headlines, “The Woman in the Hat” showed there are definite limits. My concern is that the writers are now basically spinning their wheels until it’s time to enter the endgame with the Antichrist being born.
All that being said, “Sora Not Sorry” recaptures a lot of that lost momentum on the Trump front. Vance makes his big power play, leading to a gratuitous, “oh so wrong” sex scene that I’m sure is making headlines right now. Those facial expressions the animators used are… something else. The Trump administration has mostly quieted down on attacking the series following those first couple of chapters of Season 27, but it should be very interesting to see how they react to this one.
And more than just another attempt at baiting Trump, that sex scene helps tie everything in this episode together. We get the highly amusing look at Fox News collectively reacting to the leaked sex tape, only for the correspondents to immediately cling to Trump’s familiar refrain that it’s all fake news. In an age when the lines between fantasy and reality have never been blurrier, a lot of people just want to cling to whatever makes them feel vindicated. The series really whiffed the ball when it came to lampooning crypto scams last time, but it’s dead-on with its attack on AI and the disinformation age.
Can the series keep rebuilding its momentum in the final two episodes of Season 28? The hope is that “The Woman in the Hat” will turn out to be just a fluke, a reminder that no series can fire on all cylinders every time. I do have some concerns about the way “Sora Not Sorry” leaves the Peter Thiel/Cartman subplot, however. What exactly was the point of this thread if Cartman was just going to be rescued before leaving South Park? But if this winds up leading Trump and his newest lover to the town of South Park in these final two episodes, then maybe it’ll all be worth it.
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