While South Park: The Streaming Wars was a solid special for the long-running animated comedy series, it is not one that necessarily needs a sequel. South Park’s historic 2021 deal with Paramount+ means the series will produce 14 feature-length movies for the streaming service, the fifth of which was recently released. Following on from The Pandemic Special, South ParQ Vaccination Special, and the two-part Post-Covid saga, South Park: The Streaming Wars took serialized story elements of season 25 and ran with them.
Cartman’s struggle with living in a hotdog resulted in an unlikely surgery, Stan and Tolkien became involved with numerous “streaming services,” and the water supply of South Park became the subject of a life or death battle between monied interests. The complicated plot of the special eventually left Tolkien’s father missing, a minor character death, and the fate of South Park looking grim. Despite this, though, South Park: The Streaming Wars doesn’t need a Part 2.
The latest South Park special ended on a downbeat note, feeling like the first half of a two-parter that would soon have a more optimistic ending. However, most of the plots left dangling by the ending of South Park: The Streaming Wars (Pi Pi’s alliance with ManBearPig, his control of the town’s water supply, and the continuing environmental impact the streaming wars had on South Park) could be carried into the next season. Meanwhile, the special’s message (that climate change is exacerbated by companies hoping to profit off water scarcity) doesn’t need to be undone with a happy ending. If anything, South Park could prove that the show is serious about addressing the effects of climate change by not giving an easy answer to this dark, bleak story.
As a comedy show, South Park has an almost inevitable tendency to tack on happy endings even when they don’t fit the story being told. While there is nothing wrong with a show as gleefully silly as South Park featuring unrealistic endings, this latest special wouldn’t particularly benefit from one. It was a daring choice to bring back South Park’s biggest mistake, ManBearPig, in a plot that depicted just how big an issue water scarcity is. South Park would only end up undoing the harsh but truthful satire and softening its blows by having everything neatly fixed in South Park: The Streaming Wars Part 2.
Many of the times that South Park has kept ongoing plot threads going across numerous seasons have resulted in mixed reviews. The tiresome Tegridy Farms gag is proof that not every joke needs multiple episodes dedicated to it, while the PC Principal saga was an infamous case of serialization building up to an ending that was less than the sum of its parts. The best way for South Park: The Streaming Wars to avoid South Park's Tegridy Farms problem is by not returning to the story of the special at all, but instead implying that the town will need to deal with Pi Pi and ManBearPig’s scheme going forward. This ending would show how real-life communities also have to combat companies promoting climate change, as well as avoid South Park’s tendency to wrap up messy real-world events with tidy, glib endings.