"Spookyfish", only our second Halloween spent in the perennially cursed regions of South Park, has the distinction of being the episode to introduce the world to the terrors of "Spooky Vision", a gimmick by which every corner of your screen is always occupied by a cut-out images of Barbra Streisand, while the words "Spooky" and "Vision" are spread out down the respective sides in conspicuous lettering. I don't recall if Trey Parker and Matt Stone made this point saliently enough on any previous occasions, but they don't much warm to Barbra Streisand, and I guess they were still clearing that bile out of their system. Being a fan of Babs myself, my response ought to be, "Ha, joke's on them, I like looking at pictures of Barbra Streisand!" - except that there is something about this gimmick that has me feeling weirdly uncomfortable. It is a joke at the viewer's expense as much as Streisand herself, being a glaringly lame novelty that's intrusive, distracting and designed to try your patience. But as the episode goes on, I find that it gets to you in more unsettling ways. The static images become authentically eerie (particularly the one used in the middle act, where Babs' eyes seem completely blackened), a testament to how you can make anything unnerving by having it be this prominently and perpetually out of place. It becomes marginally less intrusive in the remastered episode, where the wider aspect ratio leaves the Spooky Vision elements more spaced out, which is why I honestly prefer watching it on the ye olde DVD. There, it's more boxed in, claustrophobic and all-round harder to ignore. In other words, the perfectly discombobulating Halloween experience. Bless you, Babs!
From my perspective, "Spookyfish" boasts a far more dubious distinction still, in that this is the first episode in which my favourite character never appears. Ah well, we mustn't be greedy about such things - on review, I'm really very pleasantly surprised at just how far Mr Garrison got into the series without sitting out a single episode (keeping in mind that he was technically in "Not Without My Anus" by way of the opening recap, which you might consider cheating, but I'm still counting it). You can correct me if I'm wrong on this, but the only other supporting character who I think appeared in all thirteen episodes of Season 1 (besides Mr Hat) was Chef, and he lost his streak very early in Season 2 with "Chickenlover", so Garrison did well to keep his going for as long as he did. But once he had lost it, he lost it quite markedly. Garrison was largely absent from the tail-end of Season 2, with "Gnomes" being the only episode from here until the finale in which he would feature. I feel a slight disloyalty in admitting it, but on my recent rewatch of Season 2 I found those three Garrison-less episodes to all be pretty strong in spite of it - yes, even the Charles Manson Christmas episode, which is the one that made me go "Huh?" back in 1999, turned out to be a whole lot better than I'd remembered. "Spookyfish" stands out as a particularly great entry; the biggest criticism to be made is that the narrative feels overstuffed with ideas (it's little wonder why Garrison isn't included - there wasn't room for him if he wasn't going to directly service the story), but they are uniformly fun ideas, and the results are lively and hair-raising in the way that the most memorable Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror" installments always were. It leans into the nightmare angle more heavily than the previous year's "Pinkeye" and brings out some genuine willies. A big part of that is down to the audio - whoever was responsible for the sound production on this episode really earned their money. The music, specifically the recurring leitmotif comprised of a banshee-like wailing, sells you on the notion that you've wandered into some Twilight Zone iteration of South Park, one that makes the regular town feel safe and friendly by comparison.
"Spookyfish" opens with a cheeky bit of misdirection, through a drawn-out sequence that has us anticipating that the plot will revolve around an Xenomorph-type alien turning up in South Park and creating havoc over Halloween. We follow the alien as it approaches Earth (in a shot that parodies the opening of Independence Day), hones in on Colorado and touches down near the bus stop. It emerges from its interplanetary craft, hissing malevolently, whereupon it steps into the road and is immediately crushed by the wheels of the school bus (it turns out that the alien was not much bigger than a house cat, recalling the twist ending of a certain Tony Ross book), abruptly shutting down that prospective narrative thread. Instead, we catch up with Stan, Kyle and Kenny, who are planning to acquire a pumpkin so that they can enter a local carving contest. Cartman shows up with a ridiculous fake beard and, even more alarmingly, an impeccably polite demeanour; he explains, without a hint of irony, that he wasn't in school today because his mother was unwell and he wanted to stay home and do chores for her, but he's eager to know if they were assigned any homework for the evening. This perturbs the boys, who can tell straight off the bat that something within their universe is drastically out of whack. Stan returns home, but he isn't finding any refuge there either. His mother Sharon's Aunt Flo has come to visit, as she does every month, and she's brought him a present in the form of a pet goldfish (the fish is never formally named, but we'll call him Spooky). Stan is unnerved by this new addition, which has a tendency to stare at him with a chilling intentness, like it knows something he doesn't, but his family don't believe him when he insists that the fish is working to some sinister agenda. At most, he gets Sharon to notice when the bodies of random townspeople start appearing at the foot of his bed, only for her to assume that her beloved boy has taken to murdering and to hastily conceal the evidence on his behalf. Meanwhile, confusion abounds over Cartman's alternating disposition - the familiar mean-spirited Cartman (who's become extra insufferable ever since he added the word "hella' to his vocabulary) has clearly not gone away, but every now and then he'll apparently don the beard and transform into a kindly soul with a propensity for breaking out into Barney The Dinosaur-esque sing-songs about how much he cherishes his friends. The boys eventually put it together that there are two Cartmans in town, one of whom (the one with the beard) is an interloper from a parallel dimension. From that, they're able to determine the spine-chilling connection between Cartman's doppelganger and Stan's homicidal goldfish, but not before it brings tragic consequences for Kenny and Aunt Flo.
As a kid, I'll admit that I only half-got the joke with Aunt Flo. I realised that her presence in the Marsh residence was being used to make a bunch of allusions to Sharon's menstrual cycle - the humor in her being repeatedly referred to as Sharon's "monthly visitor" did not go over my head - but since I was totally unfamiliar with the euphemistic origins of the name "Aunt Flo", I didn't quite appreciate that she WAS the menstrual cycle, personified. Nor did I grasp the real underlying significance of Sharon's muted despair at the prospect of Aunt Flo no longer coming to visit her. Back then, I was more inclined to take the scenario at face value, as a strange tale of an intrusive relative who'd attached themselves to one member of the family, but whose visits were always an intensely awkward experience for everyone else. Whereas nowadays, to these adult eyes and ears, the metaphor really has all the subtly of a rabid hedgehog traversing a balloon factory. Aunt Flo has red hair and wears a pink and brown cardigan, she comes to visit Sharon once a month and sticks around for five days or so, during which she creates endless discomfort for the boys of the household, who aren't thrilled about having to put up with her, or her influence on Sharon's emotional state (Shelley comes off as a mite more accommodating). And then when she's removed from the picture permanently, that's our indication that Sharon has hit the menopause.
Now, for as much as Stan and Randy dread Aunt Flo's visits, she honestly doesn't come off as that unpleasant a character in person. In fact, most of the ways in which she's an imposition we only hear about second-hand from Randy - she'd reportedly object to Stan being permitted to sleep with the light on, on the grounds of it being a waste of electricity, and Randy gets banished to the couch while she's around. But whenever we see her in the flesh (and blood), Flo generally seems very nice and well-intentioned. For one thing, she buys the kids such cool and generous gifts. A goldfish would make for a thrilling present, if it didn't also happen to be a serial killer from a parallel dimension. When Flo learns how strongly Stan dislikes the fish, she takes it pretty hard but she doesn't take it out on Stan. As for her turning Sharon into a total bitch, if you ask me Sharon was a lot more openly callous toward Stan in "Clubhouses", when Aunt Flo wasn't in town (if nothing else, "Spookyfish" does make it clear how very important Stan is to Sharon, something she herself had openly undermined in "Clubhouses").
And yet I have to admit that I don't completely trust Aunt Flo. It isn't explicitly borne out by any of the story's developments, but I've somehow always gotten the impression that she knows more about the situation than she lets on. There is a small, ostensibly incidental moment that seems to frame her in a knowingly sinister light, when a blood-stained Sharon steps back into the kitchen, having buried the first of the fish's victims in the yard and Aunt Flo (appearing in silhouette) catches her off guard. Sharon expresses surprise that Flo would be up at this time, but what Flo is doing up is never explained. Instead, she regards Sharon fondly and remarks, "Look at you, with your little shovel. Just like when you were 12!" In the original script, their interaction goes on a little longer, with Flo attempting to remove a loose eyelash from Sharon's eye and repeatedly poking her due to her trembly hand movements (later revealed to be caused by Parkinson's Disease), but in the episode itself it ends more abruptly, putting the emphasis squarely on Flo's contextless observation. It is a strange scene, touching on some common knowledge between Sharon and Flo that is not brought up again, or explained to the viewer. It colours their interaction with an unsettling ambiguity. Do we interpret Flo's observation as cheerfully oblivious, or is she indicating to Sharon that she understands what's going on? Does she genuinely not notice the blood on Sharon's clothing and on the tip of her shovel, or is she merely unfazed by it? Would we even expect Aunt Flo to be fazed by the sight of blood, given that it's what she herself deals in? And what meaning are we intended to read into her words? Is the implication that Sharon participated in a similar kind of backyard burial when she was a preteen? Are we to suppose that she potentially murdered someone at the aforementioned age, and this is why she's so quick to jump to conclusions about Stan being the killer, since she's assuming that the apple hasn't fallen far from the tree? Or might that be a hyperliteral interpretation of what Flo is insinuating? I think the really critical clue is in the specification that Sharon was 12 at the time that she previously played around with a shovel...12 being the average age when menstruation begins.
You know what? I think we can figure this one out. Flo is reminding the blood-stained Sharon of how things went down on her first visit, and of the origins of their monthly relationship. It creates an implicit connection between the fish's activities in the present and Sharon's preadolescent fear and revulsion at her changing body. Am I proposing that the 12-year-old Sharon grabbed a shovel and buried the evidence of her menstruating in the back yard? Again, that might be a hyperliteral way of interpreting things. I think it's more that Sharon was faced with the problem of concealing what her body was doing and of keeping the flow of blood contained. Covering up her son's perceived new penchant for making blood spill is but a variation on what she's adapted to doing every month of her life for the past three decades or so.
I'll confess that there was one aspect of "Spookyfish" that had, up until now, never quite satisfied me - the revelation that Stan's goldfish came from the same "evil, opposite" universe as the bearded Cartman. The two don't exactly feel as though they're cut from the same malevolent cloth, with the specific brand of evil manifested by Spooky the fish being on a whole other level to that of the mirror universe's human denizens, and even that of the other pets that appear in the final act. Basically, we get three distinct types of menace that are all tied up with the same convenient narrative bow, which seemed like kind of a slapdash solution (not that I suspected Parker and Stone of harbouring any pretences to the contrary). In the case of the mirror humans, the term "evil" is, for the most part, humorously misapplied. It's not that the mirror world is inherently evil, just wrong in terms of how it compares to the workings of the regular South Park universe. The character dynamics have been rearranged, and in some cases swapped out altogether. Evil Stan and Evil Kyle are disagreeable thugs, Evil Cartman wouldn't hurt a cockroach, we never meet Evil Kenny (my guess is that he's also dead in the parallel universe by the time Evil Stan and Evil Kyle cross over), but from the sounds of it he's got deep pockets, and Chef's evil counterpart is a skinny white insurance salesman (it leaves you wondering what the rest of the evil universe must be like - I'll venture that Evil Garrison really is the shameless womaniser that our Garrison so desperately wants people to believe he is, and Evil Mackey is a drug dealer). With the animals, you could argue that they ARE opposites, in the sense that pets are supposed to be domesticated and non-threatening, only their natures don't seem so much inverted as corrupted, in a way that recalls the situation in Pet Sematary - it seems enough to assume that the pets have turned homicidal because the ground on which they dwell has gone sour. Spooky, though? Pardon the pun, but he's a whole other kettle of fish. The other evil pets are savage little monsters with demonic red eyes and an insatiable taste for human misery, but appear no more intelligent than their regular, non-evil counterparts. Whereas Spooky is clearly sapient and conniving (he's also educated enough to write messages on the side of his bowl), and seems to get no shortage of kicks out of actively taunting Stan. There does appear to be a certain kind of calculated method to the fish's madness, even if it's not altogether clear what that might be. As a villain, I always thought he warranted a slightly more in-depth backstory than simply being from the same generic plane of evil as every other threatening thing in this adventure.
I do of course get what the parallel universe is really about. Primarily, it's to pay homage to the "Mirror, Mirror" episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, in which we got acquainted with the Enterprise's evil counterparts from a darker dimension. Hence why the interlopers here all have those ridiculous-looking goatees - it's a nod to the mode of facial hair favoured by the mirror Spock. To fortify the Star Trek allusion, an image of William Shatner even works its way into the story, albeit as a live action photograph (remember, he's Canadian, so the South Park style would in theory have called for him to have the flapping head and beady eyes). As the story develops and we end up at the Indian Burial Ground Pet Store where Flo purchased the fish, the hellish portal from Poltergeist (1982) also becomes a part of the explanation; as with Tobe Hooper's film, its presence is a retribution, brought about by the desecration of Native American land and culture in a way that goes far beyond what the store's moniker implies (the pet shop boy in charge admits that he exhumed the corpses, pissed on them and then buried them again upside down. Why did he do this? "I don't know, I was drunk?"). What my mind inevitably wanders back to, however, is the classic Twilight Zone episode, "Mirror Image", in which Vera Miles is at risk of being replaced by her evil double from another dimension. The evil Vera Miles, much like the Evil Cartman, either can't return to her own world or has no intention of returning, and to survive her only recourse is to supplant the Vera of this one. Despite his genial nature, the Evil Cartman poses an innate threat to the regular Cartman, in that the two of them cannot coexist in the same reality. This is reinforced in a subtle running gag, whereby whenever the two Cartmans are seen together there is a visible split down the middle of the screen (although curiously not while Kitty is in frame), evoking the sensation that we are in fact watching the same "actor" in a dual role that's been spliced into a single shot in the crummiest of fashions. This is especially prominent in a shot where Kenny is standing behind the two Cartmans and is effectively cut in half by the splice line (actually, it's too bad that the fish doesn't similarly bisect him, or that would have been the perfect precursor to the Final Destination style of foreshadowing). For all intents and purposes, there can be only one Cartman. Evil Cartman seems to have no difficulty assuming the life of the regular Cartman; he admits to being confused by the arrangement, but is still quite happy to treat the regular Liane as if she were his own mother and the regular Stan, Kyle and Kenny as if they were the same people he's being hanging out with all his life. The danger of displacement facing the regular Cartman is explicitly realised in the third act, when the Evil Stan and Evil Kyle emerge from the portal with the intention of reclaiming the Cartman of their universe. Regular Stan and Kyle, having decided that they prefer Evil Cartman to their own (not so much because he's kind and helpful, but because he lacks Cartman's annoying habit of saying "hella" all the time), are prepared to betray regular Cartman so that they can hold onto his counterpart. Does that make the regular Stan and Kyle the truly evil ones? Or do we not blame them one iota?
The animals from the parallel universe differ from the humans in that they don't have mirror counterparts. Actually, that's not strictly true - the evil menagerie DO have counterparts, in that their designs have been largely recycled from animals seen elsewhere across the series. I'm pretty sure there's an evil Sparky, an evil Rex (the whippet-type dog belonging to Clyde), an evil version of the scruffy gay mutt from Al's sanctuary, an evil gaggle of gay gooses, and an evil ferret that's really Mephesto's four-assed mongoose with its extraneous asses removed. But with the animals, the feeling of tension between two opposing worlds becomes more figurative. As noted, the Indian Burial Ground Pet Store evokes Pet Sematary, where the reconfiguration of a docile family pet into a monstrous beast (through an association with soured Native American land) was linked to the displacement of childhood security. Located behind a door at the back of the store is the portal from Poltergeist, an opening that allows children to be abducted from their carefree suburban existences and whisked away to a more ghoulish plane of being.
At long last, I think I've happened on a connection between the bearded denizens of the mirror universe, Spooky the murdering fish and Aunt Flo that satisfies me. Nowadays, I'm inclined to read the whole of "Spookyfish" as an analogy for the horrors of puberty.
To explain this, it's necessary to think about what it is that Aunt Flo actually gives to Stan through Spooky the fish and why she gives it. Within the script, Flo's Parkinson's Disease plays as a largely incidental detail, amounting to nothing more than a spectacularly bad taste joke when the regular Cartman hops onto her trembling lap and observes that "You don't even have to put a quarter in her!" But the fact that Flo is not in the best of health might be taken as an indication that Sharon is already in the perimenopausal stage. Flo is aware that her visits to Sharon are nearing their end, and in light her presents to the children can be seen as parting gifts - gifts that, in actually, serve as warnings that the cycle is merely gearing up to begin anew and that they will be next to begin their slow and painful initiation into the messiness of adulthood (or at least to Stan; Shelley seems to be off the hook, but only for now). Stan is of course incapable of menstruating - he'll learn that the hard way in the following season's "Are You There God? It's Me, Jesus" - but what he gets with the fish is a horrifying window into the menstrual process. Keep in mind that, for Spooky's initial victims, we don't actually see how he pulls off the murders. Later scenes confirm that the fish is capable of leaping out of his bowl and mauling anybody who stands nearby, but it remains unclear how he managed to get out of the Marshes' house, kill two random outsiders and bring their bodies back into Stan's bedroom. For all intents and purposes, the fish simply makes the messy corpses materialise, leaving Stan to experience the terror of awakening and being confronted with the sudden appearance of blood. That is the real curse of the Spookyfish. A figurative period.
I am suggesting that the fish and Aunt Flo are effectively one and the same, which might seem at odds with the implication that Spooky later kills Flo, preventing her from sharing the location of the Indian Burial Ground Pet Store. But again, we don't actually see how Flo's demise plays out. The kids simply return to find her unresponsive, lying in a pool of the crimson fluid she was in the business of bringing forth into the world. This is the point at which one door closes while another creakily opens. One way or another, Flo's time has come, while the fish stays behind to continue her messy work with the incoming generation of prepubescents.
What's interesting is that this fear of puberty is most vocally articulated not by those on the cusp of experiencing it, but by an adult character, Sharon, who has already been there, done that and learned to accommodate Aunt Flo's monthly appearances for all these years. She sees the disturbance in Stan's bedroom and immediately thinks she understands what's going on and how to deal with the problem (namely, to conceal and contain). Her complicity in her son's apparent killing spree enables her to relive the horror of her own pubescence, but what really terrifies her is the prospect of losing her good and handsome boy, as he threatens to morph into something monstrous and beyond her control. She attempts to keep him grounded in the realm of childhood, by singing him a modified version of the traditional lullaby "Hush Little Baby" (in which she promises to bury any non-compliant mockingbirds in the back yard). Her protective urges reach their peak when Officer Barbrady calls around to ask if he can make a routine inspection of the Marshes' yard. He's investigating some missing persons (all of whom are victims of the fish, except for Shatner), and has a hunch that they might show up hiding out in somebody's bushes. He steps into the yard and sees evidence of the hastily buried corpses (we get a rare cameo from Sparky the gay dog - his only appearance of this entire season, in fact - claiming one victim's limb for a chew toy), prompting Sharon to knock him unconscious and imprison him in her basement. She needn't have bothered - we noted in our coverage of "Weight Gain 4000" that Barbrady has this astounding ability to miss what's directly in front of him, and that isn't any different here. Even when Sharon has him chained up and naked from the waist down (for reasons that are never explained), the reality doesn't seem to fully register for Barbrady. He at least cottons on to the likelihood that Sharon is hiding something, stating that he'll have to ask her a few questions, but is otherwise fairly impervious to his situation, singing "Jimmy Crack Corn" and casually greeting a flabbergasted Randy, when he goes down into the basement, as though he were passing him on the street.
The law may be beyond useless, but the threat of losing your child to the march of puberty is very much real. It is depicted here as something that will either destroy the child or steal their soul, with the former scenario being borne out when Kenny (naturally) falls victim to the fish, prompting Sharon to bury him in the yard (all while fighting off the hungry rat pack, who would have happily disposed of the body for her). Carol McCormick appears at the house to ask Stan if he has any idea what happened to her son, in a scene that always gives me the goosebumps. It's a rare thing for Kenny's death to be treated as a serious matter, even in-universe - usually, Stan and Kyle will react to it in the moment (although curiously not in this instance) and then move right along, as though they didn't just witness something that should by all counts have scarred them for life. We the audience are well aware that Kenny will be back next week as if nothing happened, and for the most part the show isn't looking to kid us otherwise. So it is genuinely startling on the sporadic occasions where it does have something resembling genuine consequences within the space of the individual story. Here, Carol is shown to be distraught at Kenny's disappearance and is drinking to numb the pain (and I feel so bad for her that I'm willing to overlook that she hit Kenny in an extremely rough-looking manner in an earlier scene). Meanwhile, Cartman is at risk of being abducted and permanently banished into the mirror world, on a case of mistaken (and then not-so-mistaken) identity. The portal behind the pet store, from which Spooky the fish originates, becomes the dividing line between childhood security and adolescent chaos - on the other side, the boys discover, is a world populated by distorted versions of themselves who all have facial hair (the beards might be a Mr Spock reference, but they are also signifiers that the transmutation into adulthood is well underway). Once Cartman has traversed that line, his childhood will become forever inaccessible to him, and the petulant brat his world has known will in effect have been erased and replaced with a humbler, maturer version of himself. Which is an outcome that few would find at all disagreeable, although the Evil Stan and Evil Kyle also show up to put a more unsightly face on this coming of age process and its potential to warp a person beyond recognition, in being contentious little hooligans. The Evil Stan and Evil Kyle certainly see themselves as more advanced than their regular counterparts, whom they each individually talk down to by calling "kid".
But there is clearly something more that's bothering Sharon about the prospect of her son hitting his metaphorical puberty, the question of what he is becoming and the possibility of distance (whether emotional or physical) being imposed between them. Watching her son come of age is a reminder that she too isn't getting any younger, and that there are further incoming changes she'll have to contend with regarding her own body. Aunt Flo might have been an alarming intrusion in the beginning, but her appearances have since become what's normal and familiar for Sharon, and the loss of Flo leaves her feeling broken and deflated. Once the line between the two worlds has been crossed there is no going back - the ceasing of monthly visits will not signal a return to the carefree days of prepubescence, but a disconnect from youth and fertility. It's here that the script is able to figure in a dash of quiet pathos, in a scene where Sharon attempts to open up to Randy about her grief at Flo's departure, only for him to struggle to relate to the issue on any level, dismissively suggesting that she should not see it as an ending, but as a new beginning (of course, he is also understandably distracted by her preceding admission to having falsely imprisoned Barbrady and buried a load of bodies in the back yard).
It may be too late for Sharon, but the boys still have the option of remaining children, with the episode climaxing in a thrilling showdown between growth and immaturity. The Evil Cartman proves an asset to the gang when he's able to diplomatically resolve the problem with Spooky the fish by talking the pet store owner into accepting a return. Stan and co will resist getting drawn into puberty's little tortures for now, thank you very much. Unfortunately, the mirror universe has other ideas - soon after, the Evil Stan and Evil Kyle arrive on the scene and attempt to coerce the owner into revealing information on the Evil Cartman's whereabouts by trashing the store with baseball bats, freeing the homicidal animals from their cages in the process. Their search takes them to the regular Cartman, whom they initially try to zap back to their reality, by way of a space age device called a "gingification gun", only his unpleasant temper quickly clues them in that he's not the Cartman they want, and he agrees to lead them to his doppelganger. Elsewhere, Stan, Kyle and Evil Cartman, having discovered what a brilliant team they make, decide to enter the pumpkin carving contest using the butternut squash Kenny had supplied earlier (since he couldn't afford an actual pumpkin) and manage to make the best of it and produce the winning entry. Mayor McDaniels is about to award them their prize of a Halloween chocolate (salty?) ball when they spot the Evil Stan, Evil Kyle and regular Cartman advancing in their direction. Worse still, the evil pets also arrive at the town square and begin massacring the townspeople (seriously, where are Jimbo and Ned when you need them?), although this much works in the boys' favour, as amid the confusion regular Stan is able to get hold of the gingification gun and use it to send the Evil Stan and Evil Kyle back to their universe. He then points the gun at the regular Cartman and gives him the bad news - he and Kyle prefer the Evil Cartman who doesn't say "hella" all the time and give zero fucks about cutting him loose. Thinking on his feet, Cartman gets into a tussle with the Evil Cartman and rips off his beard, meaning that Stan and Kyle can no longer tell which of them is which. One Cartman - the one on the right - pleads that the only course of action is to use the gun on both of them, to be sure of eliminating the Cartman they can't stand. Stan promptly fires on the Cartman on the left, sending him screaming into the mirror world, and assures the Cartman who remains that the choice was obvious as there was no way that their Cartman would have proposed anything so self-sacrificial. Then comes the taunting response: "Hahaha! You guys are hella stupid! I knew you would fall for that!" On this occasion Cartman has outwitted them (whatever else you can say about Eric, he is nowhere near as dumb as he looks), and the spirit of unabating immaturity has prevailed. Of course, Stan does still have that teleportation gun at the end, so in theory there would be nothing to stop him from zapping Cartman into the other reality out of spite, but from the looks of it he isn't actually that petty.
Meanwhile, the narrative thread with the evil animals goes unresolved. In the final sequence we see that Barbrady has been freed by Randy, who apologises for Sharon's behaviour and explains that she's been having a hard time with her Aunt Flo having permanently left her. Barbrady is happy to let the matter slide, since he recalls that his wife went through something similar when her monthly visitor stopped coming (the younger me saw this as a humorous misunderstanding on Barbrady's part, thinking that he meant periods while Randy was talking about an actual person, although given that Aunt Flo is the personification of menstruation, who's to say that she wasn't calling on Mrs Barbrady in a similar form too?). Barbrady walks over to the townspeople being savaged by the pets and attempts to restore order, still naked from the waist down, and we leave with the massacre still in progress. We're given no reassurance that equilibrium will be returning to South Park any time soon, although the closing chaos does at least bring a moment of personal clarity for Sharon, who witnesses Spooky jumping out of his bowl and lunging at a man's jugulars, and considers that she was perhaps a little too quick in leaping to conclusions about Stan.
I wonder whatever happened to Spooky the fish? As horrifying as he was, I have to admit that the little murdering shit grew on me. He was a fun and memorable Halloween villain, and I like to think that he went back to his own universe, along with the other evil pets, to patiently await the next occasion when Aunt Flo will require his services. Because make no mistake, Flo isn't really gone. Her relationship with Sharon might have concluded, but her work at the Marsh household is far from over, and I've a feeling that she'll be back at their door before very long. Keep in mind that Shelley is 12 years old. Flo might not have targeted her on this occasion, but maybe that's because she knows that she'll have plenty of time to play around with her later. Good curses never die, they merely get passed along.
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