South Park: Season 22 Episode 9 "Unfulfilled"

"Without his Amazon Prime status, he fluctuates between being and non-being."

-Jeff Bezos

The company Amazon creates a fulfillment center in South Park and many residents get jobs there, including Stuart McCormick and Stephen Stotch.  After an employee is injured in a workplace accident, which Amazon blames on the employees, Stuart leads the Amazon employees on a strike.  Stephen is the only one who doesn't want to strike as he wants to help Butters win the upcoming bike parade and eventually crosses the picket line and returns to work.

Stan, Kyle, Kenny, and Cartman decide to work together and do a group theme to win the bike parade, but are unable to get the stuff they need due to the strike.  With limited time and options, the boys travel to the abandoned shopping mall, where the few remaining employees have transformed into zombie-like creatures just wanting to work and help customers.

Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos, arrives in South Park and is very displeased with the strike.  He reduces all of the strikers Amazon Prime memberships, but this only gets Stephen back to work.  Frustrated, Jeff receives a call from the boys who offer to bring the zombie-employees to Jeff in return for their bike parade stuff.  The strikers prepare for battle as the zombies make their way to Amazon.

What Works:

There were a lot of little moments sprinkled throughout the episode that were funny.  The injured employee, Josh, being trapped inside an Amazon box was great as well as the reporters asking him questions.  The song "Unfulfilled" had some great lyrics.  Stephen saying the bike parade was more important than Josh was my favorite line of the episode and I liked the overgrown look of the South Park Mall.

The cliffhanger for the next episode is pretty solid.  I was a bit disappointed that they didn't wrap up this storyline in one episode, but this set-up gave us the potential of an epic conclusion next week.  We'll see if it pays off.

What Sucks:

I gotta be honest, I know a lot of people were digging this episode, but I really wasn't that into it.  I thought all of the storylines were pretty uninteresting.  Parts of the Amazon storyline we've seen before and done better in "Something Wall-Mart This Way Comes" and the unionizing and protest aspects of the episode didn't engage me at all.  I've been part of a few unions and have had some very negative experiences with them, so union and protest stories generally just annoy me.  There were a few funny moments, but I didn't really care about this plot.

I know some people were really excited for the four boys having a story together, but that story didn't do much for me either.  I'm not one of the people clamoring for more old school episodes.  I'm up for pretty much whatever, but again, I didn't find the bike parade plot all that engaging.  It became more interesting once the boys got to the mall, but before that I wasn't very interested in their story.

Finally, while Jeff Bezos' design was funny, I don't think they went far enough with him.  I compare it to the parody of Mark Zuckerberg from last season, which I loved.  That character was just bonkers crazy and I loved every second he was on screen.  They just didn't do enough with Bezos here to match the Zuckerberg levels of entertainment.  Maybe that will change in the second part of this arc, but for now, I was disappointed.

Verdict:

"Unfulfilled"  had a few funny moments throughout the episode and a solid cliffhanger, but I didn't find any of the stories interesting and one was somewhat annoying.  I was pretty unfulfilled by this episode, but hopefully part 2 can bring it up a few notches with a fulfilling conclusion.

 6/10: Okay