Mr Hat's Second Biggest Mystery (South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut)

 

The single biggest mystery surrounding South Park's Mr Hat is obviously how he managed to reach the gas pedal in the episode "Chef Aid" in order to operate a truck and break Mr Garrison and Chef out of jail. That's something that is just flat-out unknowable. It's also not the kind of mystery that I suspect many of us are liable to lose a whole lot of sleep over. The inexplicability of it all is, in part, what makes it so hilarious. More crucially still, this was Mr Hat's finest hour, and the outcome was monumentally awesome. He'd used his preternatural puppet powers for heroic purposes, atoning to Garrison for being a two-timing whore and enabling Chef to attend the benefit concert his friends from the rock business were holding in his honor. The particulars of how he managed to pull this off seem irrelevant when he brought such cheers and lifted spirits all round.

The same cannot be said for Mr Hat's second biggest mystery, which is the one that caused yours truly quite a bit of heartbreak and confusion during the summer of 1999. I speak of the theatrical feature film, South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, and of the small role he played in its conclusion. Let's take a moment to reflect on how the movie, for all of its merits, has rather a vexing resolution insofar as Mr Hat is concerned, one that appears to leave him and Garrison dangling and gives out contradictory signals regarding which suitor's hand he ends up on. This one gets kind of personal, so buckle up. 

South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut climaxes with combat breaking out between American and Canadian forces, and Kyle and Cartman getting caught in the crossfire. While fleeing the ensuing carnage they encounter a mortally wounded Garrison, who pleads with the boys to take Mr Hat with them. They initially attempt to honor his request, but Cartman quickly tires of hanging onto the puppet and discards it. Soon after, Satan arrives on Earth to bring about the apocalypse, accompanied by his manipulative and emotionally abusive lover, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, and trailed by the soul of a damned but determined Kenny McCormick. Satan continues to be subjugated by Saddam, but with the moral support of Kenny he finally summons the resolve to stand up to him. Out of gratitude to Kenny, Satan agrees to grant him one wish (apparently he can do that benignly, not just through Faustian bargains), and Kenny asks for things to go back to the way they were before the war (aware that this would not exempt him from his own dark fate). Satan laments that he seems destined to live forever in solitude, when he notices the discarded Mr Hat and asks if he'd be willing to accompany him back to Hell. Satan throws his voice to supply the puppet's response - "Sure, I bet we could be best friends, Mr Satan" - and in doing so he eerily acquires the accent and effeminate tones of Garrison. This can be interpreted in two different ways. Either Mr Hat is literally speaking through Satan, as he can be perceived as doing with Garrison, and is actively flirting with him (which I guess tracks with his record for being a two-timing whore), OR Satan has officially hit rock bottom in his desperation and risks sinking into Garrison's derangement. (I gave my thoughts on the question of Mr Hat's reality in my coverage of "Weight Gain 4000", and am once again inclined to apply the philosophy that both things can be true.) An uplifted Satan makes his departure, still holding onto Mr Hat, and the bloodshed on Earth is duly undone. Garrison recovers from his injuries and immediately starts searching for his puppet companion, unaware of what transpired. Meanwhile, the entire town joins hands and celebrates its miraculous deliverance with a reprise of the opening number, "Mountain Town".

There is one further twist to this scenario that we'll get to shortly, but let me first be upfront that for my young teenaged self, who had been sitting there lapping up every solitary second of this film until that moment, this aspect of the ending proved to be the humongous fly pissing nosily in the ointment. To say that it sat uneasily with me would be an understatement, for it's all well and good for Satan to want to alleviate his loneliness with an endearingly uncanny puppet, but where exactly would that leave Garrison? I felt so strongly that Satan's happiness should not come at the expense of Garrison's, and that's a sentiment I continue to stand by. Because Garrison has feelings too, you know. He might be a royal dickhole in most regards, but the puppet was the one thing he genuinely loved and cared about. At this point in the series he was still very dependent on his relationship with Mr Hat, and we'd already seen in "Summer Sucks" how depressed he became in being separated from him for a prolonged length of time. With the help of Mr Twig, he was able to bluff his way through most of that absence, but he was clearly not a happy bunny deep down. Whenever the children asked him when Mr Hat was coming back (as seen in "Clubhouses" and "Chef Aid") it cut right through his facade like a knife through butter. So the implication that he was about to be subjected to round two of that process seemed really unnecessarily cruel. Not to mention that we, like Garrison's class, had just spent a good chunk of Season 2 waiting for Mr Hat to return (because Mr Twig was blatantly never going to replace him), so were they seriously about to send him packing again, not even nine months after he and Garrison were reconciled in "Chef Aid"? Was this going to be a regular thing with that puppet?

Or was this all in fact a gigantic false alarm, and I was allowing myself to get stupid hung up over absolutely nothing (and not for the first time)? Because there is this one additional detail at the end of the film that I want to call attention to and cannot emphasise enough - Mr Hat is back with Mr Garrison in the final sequence. It isn't explained how, but he is. They appear together in two different shots, the first being the crowd zoom-out during the reprise of "Mountain Town". And then at the very end, Garrison and Mr Hat are among the characters bidding farewell to Kenny as he rises out of Hell and, in recognition of his most noble deed, is welcomed by the angels into Heaven. Garrison is waving (and on the unfortunate end of Carol McCormick's t shirt), while Mr Hat's gaze is directed upward, indicating that he is very attuned to what is going on. Neither reappearance went unnoticed in the cinema, and they definitely made me feel a whole lot better. In my head, I could rationalise it perfectly. After all, Kenny had wished for everything to be returned to the way it was before the war. He was, in effect, wishing for the restoration of the status quo, so that things could resume as normal and there would be no lasting consequences to have to grapple with in the series (his demise was the only outstanding matter that would explicitly not be remedied by the wish, but we all knew that was automatically being reset anyway). Which ultimately required Mr Hat to go straight back to Garrison, whether Satan was on board with that or not. That might seem like a sorry turn of events for Satan, who would have had his sole consolation stripped away from him offscreen, but the dude can't just be stealing other people's puppet boyfriends. Not to mention, it wouldn't really have been a happy ending for him anyway, if the implication was that he'd have become as mentally damaged as Garrison (so which of them would actually have been taking the other to Hell?). Best just to let this one go, old Nick. You do have your upcoming relationship with Chris the nutritionist to look forward to. (Oh, and maybe give some attention to Damien, ya sodding deadbeat?)

And it should be noted that this was indeed consistent with the continuity of the series, where Mr Hat was still with Garrison, and there was never any reference to Satan coming between them - although I had to wait a few months to confirm it, as the UK was currently between Seasons 2 and 3, and I didn't really get into using this internet thing until the year 2000 (and even then, mostly to look up fake Pokémon cheats...I never did get that Pikablu after wandering round the Safari Zone for hours).

Technically everything worked out. But I still walked away from the experience with a sour taste in my mouth. Having Mr Hat show up at the end was absolutely better than nothing, but I didn't like the fact that they hadn't addressed it within the narrative, making his final status a little fuzzy. How could I be certain that his reappearance was even intentional and not an animation error? That it happened in two shots and not just one, and that the second reappearance had seemed so prominent gave me some hope that that wasn't the case, but I couldn't say for sure. To this day, I still don't know what the intention was, and it's one of those things where if I dwell on it for more than ten seconds, it will bug the living snot out of me. It's for this reason that I've always had a somewhat ambivalent relationship with South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut. There's a lot that I can love about it - the soundtrack, the new characters of Gregory and Mole, the interplay between Saddam and Satan, the reveal of Kenny's face and his final redemption (not that Kenny was ever in any serious need of redemption from the viewer's perspective, but he demonstrated what a good kid he is at heart). But the moment where Garrison regains consciousness and asks "Where's Mr Hat?" hurts me too damned much, and since it occurs right at the end, that's the feeling I'm inevitably left with. I just said that I liked the soundtrack, but simply hearing that reprise of "Mountain Town" sends instantaneous chills down my spine.

It's also why I'll reflexively grit my teeth whenever I hear anyone suggest that Bigger, Longer and Uncut would have been a really high and logical point on which to have concluded the franchise (a discussion that seemed more pertinent nearer the time, when there were doubts about the series' longevity). I cannot tell you how relieved I am that this wasn't where it ended. If we'd lived in an alternate reality where South Park had been required to bow out early, then I honestly believe that the Season 3 finale, "World Wide Recorder Concert", would have been a much more triumphant curtain call. I've some major biases on that point, since "World Wide Recorder Concert" is my favourite South Park episode, and it's probably not a coincidence that Garrison there gets the last word and it all ends happily for him (well, happily in the sense that what he doesn't know isn't hurting him). The allusion to the ending of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country might not be on quite so epic a scale as Kenny's final ascension in the movie, but in its own quiet way I find it every bit as moving.

One way or another, Mr Hat obviously did ditch Satan and find his way back to Garrison. That much is evident from how the series carried on, even if the movie itself didn't care enough to explicitly account for it. I am aware of how very silly it is to let this eat any kind of hole in me. So why does it continue to bother me?

 

Everything worked out...with a happy end?

Part of the problem is that it's not altogether clear where precisely in the series' chronology the events of the movie are intended to fall. I'm not sure if Parker and Stone have given any official confirmation on where they see BLaU as occurring, but from what we the viewers have to go on, we just know that it has to be some time between Season 2's "The Mexican Staring Frog of Southern Sri Lanka" (which first set up the Satan-Saddam relationship) and the Season 4 two-parter "Do The Handicapped Go To Hell?" and "Probably" (which picked it up where the movie left off). Bigger, Longer and Uncut hit US theatres on 30th June 1999, as Season 3 was roughly a third of the way through its run, and "Sexual Harassment Panda" was the first episode to air after its debut (on July 7th 1999), but I don't think that automatically makes it BLaU's immediate successor in terms of internal continuity. In my mind, BLaU takes place well before the entirety of Season 3. Sure, there are a handful of moments in Season 3 that were blatantly designed to coincide with BLaU's theatrical presence - "Cat Orgy" contained a shout-out to the film's most prominent box office competitor, the staggeringly brainless Will Smith vehicle Wild Wild West, while "Two Guys Naked In A Hot Tub" had a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo from Mole, a character otherwise exclusive to BLaU. But with regards to the contents of the movie itself, it seems more closely connected what was going on in Season 2, which is when I'm going to hazard a guess that it was scripted. Callbacks to the series are predominantly to Season 2, and to earlier Season 2 installments at that. The revelation from "Ike's Wee Wee" that Kyle's infant brother was Canadian-born proves significant, while Mr Mackey's naive and surface-level understanding of addiction from the same episode comes up again in his showstopper, "It's Easy, Mmmkay". A lot of the supporting kids in the movie are also quite vague and undefined, in a way that I'd associate with the first couple of seasons - Craig and Butters are still background characters, and I don't think Tweek (introduced in the penultimate episode of Season 2) shows up at all. But that's all very tenuous, right? Of course Kyle wasn't going to forget that his brother is Canadian (even if Sheila did), Mackey's well-intentioned condescension had always been one of his defining character traits, and when you've an extensive cast and only 80 minutes to spare, it is inevitable that not everybody is going to have a chance to stand out (heck, not even Pip, who at that point was one of the more established supporting child characters, got to be anything more than an extra in the movie). The surrounding detail that most firmly aligns BLaU with Season 2 would be the Saddam factor. He was kind of a looming figure in its opening stages, before just going quiet for a bit.

Saddam's appearance at the end of "The Mexican Staring Frog of Southern Sri Lanka" was itself a continuity nod to the Terrance and Phillip special "Not Without My Anus", which had infamously aired in place of "Cartman's Mom Is Still A Dirty Slut", the much-anticipated follow-up to Season 1's closing cliffhanger, as an April Fools prank earlier that spring. (Note that when Sky 1 aired Season 2 in the UK, they did not attempt to replicate the trick and stuck "Not Without My Anus" on the tail-end as a weird little out of context extra, making it random as fuck when Saddam showed up in "Mexican Staring Frog", and with a Canadian accent to boot.) The term "continuity" might need to be applied quite loosely in this scenario, since "Not Without My Anus" was framed as being a made-for-TV drama within the context of the South Park universe (albeit one purportedly based on a true story). The means by which Saddam met his demise in "Not Without My Anus" (suffocated by the farts of a stadium of flatulent Canadians) also differed from how he was later reported to have died within the movie (gored by a pack of wild boars), a discrepancy that I'm almost positive was due to them needing a concise explanation for the benefit of movie-goers who hadn't kept up with the series and would otherwise have been confused about why Saddam was in Hell (particularly with his real-life counterpart being alive at the time), and the events of "Not Without My Anus" seeming too baffling and convoluted to recap at the start of BLaU. The series offers a curious intersection between these disparate continuities - in the episode "Probably", when Satan recounts to God the circumstances under which he met Saddam, he reaffirms the death by wild boars backstory, but also specifies that it happened in April, a nod to the original air date of "Not Without My Anus". It's also notable that in the movie itself, the featured events are explicitly stated to take place six weeks after Saddam's swine-inflicted death, which suggests that they would have fallen some time soon after "Mexican Staring Frog", if Saddam was established to already be dead within the internal timeline.

Now let's consider how Garrison and Mr Hat might specifically fit into this. In the series, Mr Hat was with Garrison from the very beginning up until the Season 6 episode "Death Camp of Tolerance" when Garrison decided to officially retire him (sob). The only exception in between would be that aforementioned arc in the middle of Season 2 where he went AWOL for a few episodes and was temporarily replaced by Mr Twig. So...if you're determined to tie Mr Hat's supposed disappearance at the end of the movie with the continuity of the series, that's the only window you have. But is that even doable? Could this actually be the origin of that whole bizarre love triangle arc in Season 2, rather than merely a harrowing echo of it? Perhaps. There is a fan theory proposing that "Summer Sucks" should be seen as the direct successor to the events of BLaU, as awkward as it would seem to have to retroactively factor in the movie before an episode that debuted a whole year ahead of it. After all, that installment opens with Mr Hat having already absconded, and Garrison struggling to comprehend what's become of him. It would also be consistent with what the movie indicates about Saddam and where he goes within the series' timeline, with bonus points for the fact that if his death occurred in April, six weeks along would certainly be taking us into the run-up into summer. The obvious bugbear of this theory, from my perspective, is that it requires you to overlook Mr Hat's reappearance with Garrison at the end of BLaU, which I am loath to do, but I think it's an intriguing notion nevertheless that merits consideration.

The trouble is that the background information regarding Saddam might ultimately hold more water with this reading than what happens with Garrison and Hat in "Summer Sucks". There are certain narrative details it seems somewhat of a stretch to have to line up with the movie (notably, that in "Summer Sucks" Mr Hat specifically goes missing on the last day of school), but it's more of a tonal mismatch that I'm feeling. The circumstances behind Mr Hat's mysterious disappearance in "Summer Sucks" are implied to be quieter and more mundane (relatively speaking) than the high-stakes drama of the movie's climax. Garrison spends the episode grappling with a low-key but intensely personal crisis that, so far as he's concerned, completely overshadows the town's apocalypse of the week, an out-of-control black snake firework destroying everything in its path. His immediate assumption is that one of the children has stolen the puppet as a prank, though he later reflects, during his psychiatry session with Dr Katz, that Mr Hat might have walked out because of a disagreement they'd had earlier that morning. What they disagreed about is anybody's guess (and Garrison presumably attached less significance to it than did Mr Hat, if it was really that much of an afterthought to him), and I'd argue that the story works as well as it does because it keeps the details to such a vague and understated level (making it the perfect companion to the wilder, more overblown A-story about the snake). We learn few of the particulars, like what inspired Mr Hat to go or how he was able to leg it in the absence of legs, a choice that accentuates the absurdity of the situation, but also the pathos. Garrison's loneliness becomes twofold. Not only has he been unceremoniously ditched by his emotional support puppet, the rest of the town takes little to no interest in his plight and can't even begin to understand what he's going through. Even the viewer isn't totally sure on where to stand, with Katz's assessment suggesting that his testimony should be seen as unreliable, although toward the end we get a teasing glimpse into Mr Hat's side of the story, which corroborates at least some of what Garrison was saying. The puppet is revealed to have travelled to Green Bay, Wisconsin, apparently to live out his sexual fantasies involving Brett Favre (and odds are that he succeeded, given that Favre seemed to return his interest). So if this does take place right after BLaU, then presumably he's already dumped Satan and is weighing up his options before going back to Garrison.

I do find it basically plausible that Parker and Stone might well have conceived the movie's conclusion first and then been inspired by that to do the whole arc in Season 2 where Garrison and Mr Hat spend several episodes separated. On a conceptual level it certainly feels as though there could be some intersection, particularly since they didn't land that far apart, all things considered. At any rate, it's an idea they did better justice to in the series, where they had a lot more time to explore its implications. And since Season 2 saw the light of day first, it makes the ending of BLaU feel kind of redundant as well as mean. Whatever Garrison did prior to "Summer Sucks" to drive Mr Hat away, he had suffered enough for it, and my feeling is that he'd earned the right to keep the puppet at his side uninterrupted for a few more seasons. So yes, I definitely understand the appeal of the theory. It takes what amounted to a joke and a loose end in the movie and allows it to have meaningful follow-up with a clear resolution in the series, in a way that doesn't feel as if it's rolling back on any prior development. I'm not sure that I buy the two premises as totally compatible, however. At most, I can see one idea giving rise to the other, but I'm not really sensing that they are one and the same. I don't subscribe to the theory, but I will make this one further observation about it. When Mr Hat finally returns to Garrison in "Chef Aid", Garrison is initially reluctant to take him back and throws him out the door, telling him to go to Hell. That's standard retaliation from Garrison (he said the same thing to Mackey in "Summer Sucks"), but it gives it a little extra resonance when you're watching it through the lens of Mr Hat having potentially already been there.

As I say, I'd rather not ignore the fact that Mr Hat IS with Garrison during the final sequence of BLaU. That is what my heart and my gut tell me to look toward, even if my brain is inevitably going to get in the way by asking questions. We've already discussed how the nature of Kenny's wish might potentially account for Mr Hat's return within the narrative, but since it's not acknowledged we can't be certain what's actually going on, and that keeps me in such a queasy state of limbo in processing this ending. For that much I will forever curse South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut, even as the "Uncle Fucka" sequence retains its devilish power to have me collapsing into fits of giggles. It is what it is, however, and are there any means of making sense of why the sequence plays out in this manner? I suspect that I've given the matter more thought than anybody else on Earth, and as I see it there are three different possibilities we have to choose from.

The first is that Mr Hat's reappearance is indicative of something being cut from the final sequence (in spite of the film's innuendo-laden title). It's entirely possible that the epilogue was running on a little too long and needed to be trimmed down, and the solutions to Stan and Kyle's respective arcs would naturally take priority. So they might have taken out a follow-up moment with Mr Hat and Garrison and hoped that audiences would just roll with it. Irritating shortcuts will sometimes be taken (Pixar's Soul, for example, was meant to incorporate a sequence explaining Mr Mittens' survival that was ultimately excised, although they had Mittens show up alive and well anyway, to the relief but also confusion of cat-loving audiences all over). Back in 1999, this is what I'd desperately hoped would turn out to be the case, but I don't think it ever went anywhere.

The second is that Mr Hat being with Garrison in those two closing shots was an animation error that was somehow made twice over. This is by and far my least favourite possibility, since it makes that final glimmer of comfort a total fluke and suggests that the intentions of the film were a whole lot meaner, although it isn't completely unsalvageable, by virtue of the fact that it still happened. I'm of the opinion that there can be happy accidents. Just look to the ending of "World Wide Recorder Concert". When Garrison boards the bus in the final scene and gives his directions to Ms Crabtree, you might notice that Kenny is alive and seated in the background, despite having already been killed during the disastrous brown note incident. It wasn't entirely out of the question for Kenny to die and be immediately resurrected (it happened earlier that season as part of a meta joke in "Succubus"), but my intuition here is that Kenny's return was indeed a mistake. It happens from time to time. But you know what, I'm glad that he's there. I think that closing Undiscovered Country allusion is simply wonderful, and it strikes me as only right and proper that even Kenny was allowed to be a part of it. We can apply that same logic to BLaU. If nothing else, those shots give the appearance of Garrison not being left alone at the end or excluded from the celebration, and that too seems only right and proper. If it was an honest error, then all I can say is, bless the inattentive animators who were responsible. Whatever they were paying you was not enough.

The third possibility is the one that I tend to lean toward nowadays, which is that Parker and Stone were straight-up trolling us. They worked that interaction between Satan and Mr Hat into the resolution because it amused them, but at this stage weren't actually looking to mess with the status quo and just stuck Mr Hat back with Garrison anyway, in stark defiance of any and all prospects of anything from the movie having lasting consequences. The question of where precisely the movie is supposed to fall within with the series' timeline becomes irrelevant, because everything is reset at the end, the situation with Garrison and Mr Hat included. If anybody cared enough to get their knickers in a twist about the lack of explanation, then that would be hilarious, wouldn't it? I, unfortunately, was the easiest victim in the world. But hey, at least the outcome actually went in my favour, in terms of what I'd wanted to see happen. And the following year they gave us "World Wide Recorder Concert", which I wholeheartedly adore and see as compensating for any callous disregard Garrison might have received at the end of the movie, so it's all good.

Besides which, I've made the point twice already that a number of Mr Hat's most memorable moments were rooted in a degree of inexplicability. As is befitting a character who is a puppet of ambiguous autonomy. The question of how he managed to ditch Satan and get back to Garrison's hand at the end of BLaU will just have to be added to that same list. We all know that it wouldn't have worked out between Mr Hat and Satan anyway, in the same way that it ultimately didn't work out between him and Brett Favre. Mr Hat is a flirtatious son of a bitch, but Satan is so touchy-feely, and I could see that pissing Mr Hat off before long. Maybe his last-minute u-turn was entirely unrelated to Kenny's wish, and he just realised then and there that Satan really wasn't as hot as all that and he was getting out of the arrangement through his own volition. You underestimate those preternatural puppet powers at your own peril (unless of course you're Kathie Lee).

Weight Gain 4000 (aka Man Say Thing Not)

Who is Kathie Lee Gifford anyway?

That was the question lurking persistently at the back of my mind on a Friday night in the summer of 1998, when I had my first ever South Park experience (the proper old school way, by sneaking into the spare room and keeping the volume down, so that my parents wouldn't figure out what I was watching). The episode I saw was "Weight Gain 4000", then making its UK terrestrial debut on Channel 4, which follows the Colorado mountain community's ill-fated love affair with Kathie Lee Gifford, a celebrity I'm pretty sure no one in the UK had ever heard of before this series came along. At the time she was well-known to Americans as the host of a popular syndicated morning talk show, Live with Regis and Kathie Lee, but as a name she gained absolutely zero traction across the pond. They couldn't have picked an individual to whom the Wickershams and Decklers were more indifferent - so unlike Barbra Streisand, with whom I've since had ample opportunities to get acquainted through countless other media, the send-up she received in early South Park is still what I primarily associate with her. There is exactly one other thing that I know her for, that being her strange guest appearance (alongside her co-host Regis Philbin) in the "Terror of Tiny Toon" segment of The Simpsons episode "Treehouse of Horror IX", in a rare instance of the characters interacting with live action footage - it's a sequence as aesthetically and narratively jarring as you would anticipate, but Gifford herself got a memorable line out of the deal ("I'm going home! Dom DeLuise can interview himself!"). I don't know Kathie Lee and am only vaguely aware of her reputation, but I've never felt that was a particularly insurmountable barrier to appreciating "Weight Gain 4000", since I get the impression that the episode is treating her as something of an arbitrary celebrity anyway. So far as I can tell, the only dialogue taking any kind of really personal jab at Gifford is the observation by one of Mayor McDaniels' aides that she loves children...if they're working in a sweatshop, an allusion to a line of Gifford-branded clothing that became a source of controversy in 1996 when it came to light that sweatshop labour was used in their manufacturing. Otherwise, she could have been swapped out with any number of contemporary celebrities and most of the jokes and plotting would still have made every bit as much sense. The point isn't really Kathie Lee Gifford per se, but what she represents in context, ie: celebrity at its most empty, vapid and disposable. How am I supposed to feel about Gifford? However I want, I suppose. For the purposes of this story, she becomes a total non-entity, a blank slate propped upon a rickety pedestal, onto which the characters can project their adoration and yearning for proximity to that more elevated state of being...or alternatively their self-loathing and feelings of scuppered ambition.

A question that did not play on my mind at all throughout that initial viewing was how I was supposed to feel about Mr Hat, a quirky-looking glove puppet and the South Park resident who is most firmly in the anti-Gifford camp. He and the puppet master, third grade teacher Mr Garrison, have a long-standing grudge against Gifford that dates back to their childhood, when Gifford (then identifying by her birth name, Epstein), snatched a talent show victory from them at the eleventh hour. Her upcoming visit to South Park represents an opportunity to settle the overdue score, and Mr Hat is determined to see that Garrison takes it, and takes it the old-fashioned way, by acquiring a gun and blowing Gifford's brains out. His character I had no difficulty figuring out where I stood on - Gifford might be a non-entity, but I'm positive that Mr Hat isn't. 

Watching "Weight Gain 4000", it never once crossed my mind that Mr Hat was anything other than a living being with a mind of his own. It was extremely easy to buy into his reality, and the show's characteristically flat art style had a significant hand in that, since Mr Hat has the exact same eyes as every other "real" character within the cast. He doesn't emote, and his pupils remain in a mostly fixed position, but he looks no less conscious than anybody else. When I look into the puppet's eyes, I don't see the vacant gaze of an inanimate object, but rather the uncanny intentness of a sapient, if preternatural being that is quietly observing and taking in everything around it. That Mr Hat spends most of his screen time looking directly into the camera doesn't exactly quell my unease. Let's face it, this wouldn't be any stranger or any more absurd than any of the other weekly happenings within this pissant white bread town. If you were on board with the monsters and aliens, the regenerating Kenny, the talking crap as a part of this reality, then why would this living puppet be any more of a stretch? And yet, I remember it coming up in a discussion on South Park back in the day and being mildly perturbed that I was the only one who saw it that way. Everyone else at that table was convinced that Mr Hat was just the alter ego of Garrison and that this was the real joke I wasn't getting. I countered that if you paid close attention to the puppet, his eyes frequently moved. I knew this because whenever Mr Hat was on screen, he was usually what I was focused on. At first I was mainly just guarded against that uncanny stare of his, but I quickly picked up on the fact that the position of his pupils intermittently shifted between shots, in a way that indicated a responsiveness entirely independent of Garrison. It didn't happen in every episode, but it happened enough times to make it worth looking out for. The discussion's response when I cited all of this? "I think you're the loony one in this room." Or something to that effect. I felt like I was being aligned with Garrison, in having some deep-rooted emotional need to see life in the inert puppet. Eh, maybe. It could be that I just have an innate affinity with the delusional. It had never occurred to me that the feral hippo raiding the trash cans in Lily Takes A Walk might be all in Nicky's mind either.

I still believe. I am, however, obliged to reconsider "Weight Gain 4000" from the perspective that it was almost certainly written with the intention that there be some level of ambiguity on this point, and that the average viewer is liable to approach it with the assumption that Mr Hat is just a common or garden puppet and Garrison just very severely disturbed (not an invalid assessment regardless), at least until the end, when the situation is somewhat muddied. After all, this is a familiar trope: the ventriloquist who brings life to an inanimate prop that he subsequently can't control. The implicit question prompted is a fantastically eerie one - who is the real puppet and who is the real puppeteer? It also plays into a very prevalent fear, automatonophobia, the aversion to anything designed to suggest a pseudo-humanity and sapience where none should reasonably exist (puppets, dolls and dummies are among the most common automatonophobic subjects, but it may also apply to statues, mannequins, masks, animatronics and waxworks). It was featured with particular notoriety in the 1945 Ealing anthology Dead of Night, and there are also at least two classic Twilight Zone episodes dealing with this premise (three if we count Talky Tina). The malevolent puppet tale that Garrison's arc in "Weight Gain 4000" most strongly recalls would be Richard Attenborough's underrated 1978 horror Magic, where Anthony Hopkins plays a socially awkward ventriloquist named Corky whose dependence on his dummy Fats takes a deadly turn when the dummy incites him to kill (you'll notice that even their names point to the ominously subverted nature of their dynamic - which of them is flesh and which is wooden?). Mr Hat isn't really like the dummy Fats, however. Fats is a distraction; we spent the whole movie staring at that unnatural little bugger, waiting for the much-anticipated moment where he'd come to life on his own terms (a la the circus doll from Poltergeist), and yet he confounded us by remaining perfectly stationary. This was all our own folly; we were warned from the start, on no uncertain terms, how this was going to work and of the real meaning behind the title: "Magic is misdirection, and misdirection is getting the people to look in the wrong place at the wrong times." Not so with Mr Hat. His is a presence that both demands and rewards close scrutiny. Keep your eyes on him for long enough and he'll move.

As a concept, Mr Hat didn't come from nowhere. He is thought to have been based on Mr High Hat, a real educational tool designed to help kindergarteners develop language skills (South Park co-creator Trey Parker confirmed that Mr Hat was modelled on a puppet used by one of his own teachers to deliver lessons - the kicker being that, unlike Garrison, she didn't bother to throw her voice and just synced up its movements with a vinyl record - although Garrison himself took inspiration from a fruity literature teacher who'd had some novel opinions on Beowulf). I suspect that the whole Garrison-Hat dynamic originated with the observation that it would be hilarious to see a teacher who used a Mr High Hat puppet getting into a Magic-type scenario with it, and "Weight Gain 4000" is the episode that attempts to mine the most out-and-out spookiness from that prospect. On the automatonophobia scale, Mr Hat occupies a curious middle ground. He's uncanny, but he doesn't take you all the way into the valley. He was based on an actual educational puppet, and as such he was designed to look basically cute and ostensibly innocent, although the beady intentness of his gaze runs contrary to that.  It is interesting to note that his original design, as seen in the first episode, "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe", didn't have eyes at all. I couldn't tell you if this was revised specifically for the purposes of "Weight Gain 4000" (which was the second episode produced, although "Volcano" aired ahead of it in the US, leaving me a bit unclear on the official ordering), but the addition of eyes completely rewires your perception of the character. As well being more consistent with the design of the original Mr High Hat puppet, it makes him a whole lot more convincing as an antagonist here. The eyes become a window into the puppet's crazed little soul - without them, it becomes harder to suppose that he has one. In "Weight Gain 4000" they are put to particularly sinister use in a sequence where he coerces Garrison by making his pupils glow red and doing an Exorcist-style head spin (for the record, I don't count this among those instances of eye movement suggesting independent responsiveness, since it is framed in such a way that it could be in Garrison's mind; the others are not). Another unsettling touch is that most of Mr Hat's dialogue in this episode is delivered in a voice that is significantly deeper and more threatening than the one Garrison usually gives him, which becomes especially creepy in shots where the focus is on the puppet and you can't actually see Garrison's lips moving (notably, when he retrieves Mr Hat from the dresser drawer), making it easier to buy into the premise of the voice being the puppet's own. Also, while I doubt this allusion was intentional, something that doesn't escape my notice about Garrison is his ambidexterity, with his left hand being his "own" hand and his right hand the one claimed by Mr Hat. Same predicament as Norman Bates, then.

The premise of "Weight Gain 4000" has it that Cartman has been named the winner of a national environmental essay contest, and is due to have his award presented to him by Kathie Lee Gifford in a televised ceremony. Cartman refuses to elaborate on the details of his winning paper, which was reportedly chosen from out of over a million entries, causing his peers to suspect that his victory was not legit - in particular Wendy Testaburger (RIP Mary Kay Bergman), who'd put a lot of work into her own submission, an essay about the plight of bottlenose dolphins, and feels cheated by the outcome. The adult characters, meanwhile, are all too wrapped up in the prospect of Gifford's visit to care. For Mayor McDaniels, this is an opportunity to boost her own profile by showcasing what an efficient and cultured little town she's running, with the hopes that she might be able to ditch all of these stupid hicks and move onto something more glamorous. For Chef (RIP Isaac Hayes), who's been asked by McDaniels to perform a song at the ceremony, it's an opportunity to get his rocks off with a sultry queen of sexual fantasy (his words). And for the town, it's a chance to experience an ephemeral sip of elevation, by basking in the aura of the celebrity passing through and maybe working their way into a fleeting crowd shot on national television. What nobody is talking about (apart from Wendy and Stan) is the dolphins. There are no actual dolphins in the episode, but they represent the real aggrieved party in this scenario - the worthy causes for which the essay contest was presumably designed to promote awareness, but that end up being lost amid what it ultimately becomes, a spectacle of publicity whoring and vacuous celebrity worship. When Cartman dismisses dolphins as "intelligent and friendly on rye bread with some mayonnaise", he does so in explicitly meaner and more forward terms than everyone else, but he sums up the basic indifference of the whole town.

I don't think it's controversial to say that the individual we most care about in all of this is Garrison. Later installments would go to lengths to cement him as a man (or woman, depending on when you were watching) whose unpleasantness and depravity knew no bounds, but for now, we are just two (three?) episodes in and he is by and far the most sympathetic character here. It is difficult not to feel for anyone whose life is as screwed up and vulnerable as his evidently is, but he's also appealing because he is, among the adults, the only dissenter who doesn't accord with the town's mindless worship of Gifford. Which is not to say that he isn't just as warped by the allure of celebrity as the others. His resentment of Gifford stems from her having beaten him in a national talent show as a child, and (as he sees it) costing him his own shot at stardom. The underlying insinuation is that celebrity is interchangeable, and that the media stars we put on pedestals are no better or more deserving than the rest of us, but just had all the lucky breaks. When it comes to Gifford he is both right and wrong. On the one hand, it would be churlish to deny that Kathie won because she was the better ventriloquist, and she clearly stoked young Herbert's feelings of inadequacy in that regard - the thing that upset him the most about young Kathie's performance is that she was able to throw her voice with two puppets at once, something he struggles to do with just one. But then it can't also be denied she had an unfair advantage with all of that luxuriously over the top stage production. As Garrison puts it, "She had choreography. How could we compete with that?!"

Garrison's increasing urge to destroy Gifford is driven by his distorted sense of justice, and by Mr Hat's (blatantly erroneous) assurances that it will make everything better, although he initially sets his sights on merely upstaging her, when McDaniels enlists him to direct the children in a play about the history of South Park as part of the ceremony. He attempts to assert control over Mr Hat by confining him to a dresser drawer, but finds that his disdain for Gifford won't be so easily suppressed; McDaniels sits in on a rehearsal and is naturally horrified to discover that it consists of the children beating one another senseless in a recreation of a historic confrontation between pioneers and the Utes. Garrison's defence is that his play is historically accurate, though we suspect that this violent spectacle stems less from any noble obligation not to whitewash the atrocities committed against the Utes than it does the passive-aggressive expressing of his loathing for Gifford (whether he's conscious of it or not). To give McDaniels her due, she is the closest thing this story has to a semi-sensible adult. She's in it for herself and is explicitly indifferent to the matter of whether Cartman won the contest fairly, but she at least has a decent handle on what is and isn't appropriate for the ceremony (it's just unfortunate that she didn't think to vet the song Chef had prepared as she did Garrison's play). When she challenges Garrison on whether their esteemed guest would actually enjoy seeing children crack each other's heads open, he lets his disdain for Gifford slip, loudly and in front of the entire town, and gets completely ostracised for it. It's for this reason that we don't lose sympathy with Garrison, in spite of his startling aloofness toward the injured children, and McDaniels clearly being in the right about the inappropriateness of his play - we can feel the crushing loneliness of where he stands. The residents of South Park, much like the residents of Springfield, are governed by the law of mob mentality, which Garrison has found himself in the dire position of being vocally out of step with. Hence why he goes back to Mr Hat. The puppet is the only ally he has.

In the meantime, Cartman faces a quandary of his own, since McDaniels has suggested that he get in shape for his television appearance, but he isn't inclined to break his ingrained habit of sitting on the couch all evening and stuffing his face with Cheesy Poofs. In "Weight Gain 4000", Parker and Stone are clearly making some kind of statement about television culture and the media we're primed to emulate, with the episode title deriving from the dubious nutritional product into which Eric invests all of his hopes and dreams of looking his best for the day of the ceremony. After seeing an ad on TV (and being naturally undeterred by its disclaimer that it might lead to irreversible damage to the liver and kidneys), he's convinced that he can achieve a perfectly toned body through a program of non-stop consumption and parroting of the promotion's inane "Beefcake!" sloganeering. In reality, it proves a fast track to morbid obesity. Although Wendy would appear to be Garrison's obvious parallel, in being similarly aggrieved about losing a contest under circumstances she considers unfair, when you look at it his story actually has more in common with Cartman's. Both are subjugated by a voice that compels them to unquestionably obey. In both cases this voice arises from an object that serves as a substitute for human companionship, and gets to them by playing off of their inadequacies and selling them a facile solution to a problem it will, in actuality, only exacerbate. The television promises Cartman speedy buffness, but causes him to become more overweight than ever. Mr Hat promises Garrison instant healing for his long-term psychological distress, but goads him down a route that can only finish off his already wrecked mental health. There's not such a difference between Cartman's misplaced faith in what his television is telling him to do and Garrison's willingness to go along with what his puppet buddy is asking (outside of Garrison at least having reservations in the beginning). Both are equally insane. At the same time, the whole town buys into a mass delusion regarding the ceremony, a parade of lightweight gestures designed to fuel the sensation of getting their fifteen minutes of fame while nothing of real substance is accomplished, not least as far as those suffering dolphins are concerned (Man say thing not!). Lacking from the occasion is any spotlight on Cartman's paper or on the thoughtful issues he supposedly raised, because that is decidedly not its purpose.

Determined to not lose sight of that point is Wendy, who is the most competent participant in all of this, something that might put her in the loneliest position of all, for competence is not in abundant supply in South Park. Garrison, for his part, is really not adept at this assassination business. Not only does he show up to the ceremony openly brandishing a rifle (which he acquired from Jimbo with minimal questioning), he approaches the last person it is within his interests to be seen by, Officer Barbrady, to ask for pointers on where to get a clear shot view of Gifford. But then neither is Barbrady adept at this policing business, cheerfully directing Garrison to the book depository, so it balances out. Since no one with any authority has had the initiative or curiosity to take a look at Cartman's paper, Wendy chooses to take justice into her own hands, by breaking into the classroom filing cabinet, where she discovers that Cartman's winning paper was nothing other than a copy of Henry David Thoreau's 1854 publication Walden; or, Life In The Woods, a plagiarism so slackly barefaced that all he did was cross out Thoreau's name on the cover and pencil in his own. Even so, her subsequent efforts to expose Cartman's cheating are thwarted by the town's illiterate disinterest, as Wendy realises, despairingly, that they are uniformly lacking in awareness for one of the seminal works of American literature. A pronounced link is drawn between all this mass worship of celebrity and the televisual image and the dumbing down of cultural standards, when Wendy admonishes the town with the rejoinder, "I bet if Walden was a sitcom you'd all know what it is!" And it would be unfair to suggest that this problem is limited to South Park. Whatever screwy virus has infected this town has already spread out far beyond its confines - the fact that Cartman's paper got past every check in a national competition without anybody noticing is pretty fucking telling. To say nothing of the episode's most bizarre gag, when Wendy pulls her own submission from the cabinet to find that the anonymous judges who marked it had the same inexplicable misconception about (and lack of compassion for) dolphins as Cartman, questioning why, if they're so smart, they would live in igloos.^[1] The masses are a mindless bunch. But then the wayward individualism Garrison embodies also gets flipped on its head, once the ceremony is underway and he discovers that, for as isolated as his Kathie Lee hatred has made him in his own community, on a national level he would have to get in line. Gifford is driven into town in a bullet-proof dome (a parody of the popemobile) and it dawns on Garrison that he isn't the first person who's attempted to take a shot at her. Clearly that woman has pissed off a lot of people. But then what celebrity hasn't?

It falls on Wendy to be the moral centre of the episode, when she overhears Garrison discussing the assassination plot with Mr Hat and resolves to put aside her grievances with Cartman until she's ensured Gifford's safety. Which is ironic, in a way, because if we're viewing Season 1 in a vacuum then I think Wendy ends up being the most profoundly evil South Park resident of them all. At this stage, I'm not even sure that Cartman's got that much on her. His rap sheet within those first 13 episodes is already pretty ugly - he's awful to Pip (but then so is everyone else), he dehumanises Marvin and he takes an unsettling amount of joy in dressing up as Hitler for a Halloween party - but rarely takes him above the level of a particularly mean and ignorant school yard bully. In terms of all-out unbridled malevolence, there's surely nothing that tops Wendy's actions at the end of "Tom's Rhinoplasty". Justice for Ms Ellen, who was perfectly lovely and never did anything to hurt anyone (no, Kenny doesn't count - that was just fate working its usual way with him).

Still, you can't deny the girl's got guts. When Barbrady proves useless in locating and apprehending the armed Garrison (in spite of his having earlier told Garrison where to go), she's prepared to confront him directly, along with Stan, the only one of the central four who could be convinced that saving Gifford was a nobler endeavour than being on television. By now, they're getting to the point in the ceremony where Gifford is about to hand Cartman his award, for which she's presumably going to have to briefly open up her glass bubble, and that's all Garrison needs. Wendy tries to talk him out of it by speaking to him from a position of empathy, insisting that she understands how he feels because she's just been through a similar experience with Cartman. This affinity is something that Garrison wasn't expecting and responds to, leaving the matter teetering on a knife edge as to where it might go. During their confrontation, you'll notice that Mr Hat is only visible in shots where Garrison is leaning toward shooting Gifford; whenever it looks like Wendy might be reaching him, the puppet can't be seen. It's a neat way of illustrating the tug of war between Wendy and Mr Hat for Garrison's senses, showing us which of them has the advantage in that given moment. Wendy finally gets Garrison to lower his gun, making it look as though she might have clinched it, but all hopes of a peaceful resolution are brutally dashed when Stan transpires to be a terrible judge of when to keep his mouth shut. He makes the fatal move of expressing awe for Gifford's ventriloquist mettle, triggering Garrison's feelings of inadequacy and ensuring that Mr Hat gets the final word. The shot is fired, just as the stage cracks under Cartman's immense weight, causing Gifford to be flung from it and Kenny to take the bullet instead, to nobody's real horror. Kyle does his thing and acknowledges Kenny's death in the moment, but otherwise the town moves on almost instantly from what by all rights should have been an appallingly traumatic spectacle, too hung up on the premature departure of Gifford and the TV crew to care. It's almost as if they all know this isn't a consequence that will actually stick.

Indeed, the most troubling aspect of the ending is not Kenny's improbable impaling on the flagpole, but the way Wendy ultimately betrays her own principles. I'm not talking about her attempts to publicly expose Cartman as a cheater, coming after that seemingly heartfelt speech to Garrison about her own experience in learning how to lose gracefully. The script definitely frames her as something of a hypocrite in this regard (Stan: "What about not holding anything against the person who wins?" Wendy: "Well, not if it's Cartman!") but the thing is, she's not wrong. Cartman committed a really audacious act of plagiarism; I don't think it was petty to try to expose him at all. No, I'm talking about how, when she fails to inspire the faintest level of outrage over Cartman's cheating, she gives up and accepts a consolation prize in the form of Stan's offer of a tuna fish sandwich. Tuna fish, you say? From the girl who'd written so passionately about the suffering of bottlenose dolphins? See the incongruity there? I mean, for all we know the tuna Kyle's mom buys is all dolphin-friendly (Shelia Brofloski is nothing if not conscientious, right?), and the script doesn't explicitly call Wendy out on this point, but I find it hard to believe that it wasn't a deliberate choice to specify that the sandwiches would be tuna of all things. It's a contradiction made all the more unsettling for the fact that it passes without comment, with Wendy giving only a resigned "What the hell" and following after Stan. Does it imply that she was never that sincere in her cause, or that she's giving up then and there, having realised the futility of what she's up against? Either way, this shit's bleak.

Fortunately the ending is a little less unhappy in other regards. The only character who's left with no form of consolation (besides Kenny) is McDaniels, last seen lamenting her thwarted ambitions of escaping the town and inadvertently insulting its populace before a microphone. Garrison gets hauled off to the nearest psychiatric hospital, which in theory should mean that he'll get the help he needs, although when Stan and Kyle later pay him a visit he indicates that Mr Hat is the actual target of the psychiatric intervention. Misdirection, or does the puppet's psychosis indeed put Garrison's in the shade? In either case, the extensive therapy Mr Hat went through evidently got results; as far as I'm aware, he never expressed any further desire to kill Kathie Lee Gifford. Actively pushing Garrison into doing bad or questionable things also wasn't his raison d'etre going forward, at least not in this way. Elsewhere, Cartman's blind adherence to Weight Gain 4000 has paid off, in the sense that he gets to be on television after all, in an interview with Geraldo Rivera (ah, now this is a US talk show host I am familiar with - the Al Capone's vault guy, yes?), having become so morbidly obese that he can't leave his house. Despite the distinctly derogatory nature of the feature, Cartman proclaims himself to be living proof that a person can attain their dreams. Judging by his continued spewing of that "Beefcake!" nonsense, he's still entrenched in the delusion that he's achieved optimum buffness, although maybe that's of no odds. After all, it got him on the receiving end of national media attention, however dubious and however transitory, and that's all the affirmation he needs. And at the very end we see that Chef also achieved his short-term goal of getting Gifford to sleep with him, in spite of how mightily perturbed she'd looked by his public serenade about hummingbird sex (a simile Chef went even harder with in the version appearing on the Chef Aid album, where he sings about the male hummingbird letting his humming gravy fly all over the nest, or somesuch). Unfortunately, she might even be too much of a rabid sex maniac for him to handle.

There is a certain bitter irony in the episode's final arrangement with Garrison and Mr Hat (both are confined, but the latter is much more heavily restrained), given the way their characterisation would subsequently go. "Big Gay Al's Big Gay Boat Ride" would drop the first all-important hint that Garrison's mental health issues were further compounded by his being a self-hating gay who was terrified to leave the closet. It also came to light that Mr Hat was enjoying a freedom that Garrison had adamantly denied himself, in that he was more at ease with his sexuality and routinely fantasising about being in a sauna with pro-footballer Brett Favre and a bottle of thousand island dressing, a pleasure that Garrison could only experience vicariously, via his connection with Mr Hat. Mr Hat was so much more liberated in fact that in "Summer Sucks" of Season 2 he was able to temporarily abandon Garrison to pursue his kinky fantasies for real, driving Garrison to attempt to replicate their relationship with a vaguely human-shaped twig that, most tellingly, wore a pink triangle on its shirt. I will say that if Mr Hat is nothing more than Garrison's alter ego, then I'd be considerably less disturbed and confounded by the events of "Weight Gain 4000" than by whatever is meant to be going on with that bizarre love triangle between Mr Garrison, Mr Hat and Mr Twig. The Gifford murder plot would at least be comprehensible.

Actually, the Garrison-Hat interaction that gives me the most pause is a fairly low-key one, from the Season 1 finale "Cartman's Mom Is A Dirty Slut". We find the two at a bar, with Garrison wanting to go home for the night and Mr Hat insisting on "just one more cosmopolitan". Garrison tells the puppet it has a drinking problem it needs to admit to, but wilfully orders the requested beverage. The implications of this exchange are quite a bit more unsettling than first meets the eye. From Mr Hat's words, it isn't clear if the craving for cosmopolitans is his own, or if he's enticing Garrison to keep drinking (thus becoming the devil on his shoulder yet again, albeit less dramatically than in "Weight Gain 4000") - Garrison's response indicates the former, although in practice it might make little difference. It's safe to say that, either way, Garrison will be the one physically drinking that cosmopolitan, even if it is to accommodate an alcohol dependency originating with his other half. If it's not his problem, then he's obliged to make it his own. Their partnership hinges on a shared energy, an uncanny interrelation of both form and personality. Garrison relies on Mr Hat to articulate the forbidden regions of his psyche that he's too terrified to face alone, while Mr Hat relies on Garrison to articulate him. That is the nature of their symbiosis - they are both each other's voice.

So is Mr Hat real? That is a silly question. Of course he is. You only have to pay attention to him across enough episodes and I promise you'll see the evidence.

Look, to play devil's advocate for just a moment, the most compelling case against Mr Hat's reality is that characters who attempt to come at Garrison's relationship with the puppet from a rational standpoint often end up sounding pretty danged convincing. In particular, the psychiatrist Garrison sought out in "Summer Sucks" whilst pining for the absent Mr Hat (actually the titular character of another contemporary Comedy Central series, Dr Katz, Professional Therapist) really did seem like he had Garrison's number: "I think Mr Hat was actually your gay side trying to come out. It's you who is gay, but you're in denial, so you act out your gay persona with a homosexual puppet." It makes sense as he says it. But then Katz never met Mr Hat in person. And in the same episode we also get what seems like irrefutable proof of Mr Hat's reality, when we go inside Brett Favre's sauna to find him in the company of the stray puppet. Favre greets him cordially and there's a close-up of Mr Hat blinking and returning his gaze. The puppet blinked on screen, and the puppet master wasn't anywhere in sight. What more proof do you need, people? A similar situation occurs in "World Wide Recorder Concert", when school counsellor Mr Mackey attempts to talk to Garrison about his daddy issues (they are a doozy, I can tell ya) but is blocked by an aggressively protective Mr Hat. Mackey offers the rational explanation, that Garrison has switched personalities to Mr Hat as a coping mechanism for his traumas. Mr Hat does not himself disagree with this assessment ("Good one, Sherlock. You figure that out all by yourself?") but goes on to wipe the floor with Mackey in a round of fisticuffs, during which he is removed from Garrison's hand, and the children who witness the incident independently acknowledge that it is indeed Hat and Mackey doing the fighting. Clearly the show liked to mess with us by suggesting both possibilities within the same breath. And here's the beauty of it - they don't actually contradict one another. There's no reason why Mr Hat can't be alive and a figure onto which Garrison projects all of his insecurities, hostilities and latent desires. Both things can be true. The real ambiguity might lie with where one stops and the other starts.

Sometimes the puppet's actions defy any and all rationalisation, as seen in "Chef Aid" of Season 2. Mr Twig, then making his sixth appearance with Garrison, becomes the target of a series of strange attacks by an unseen assailant who obviously has access to Garrison's residence. Garrison sets up a camera and summons Barbrady the instant the photos arrive from the developing lab, hoping he'll arrest the culprit, but instead gets branded a "weirdo" by Barbrady and discovers the pathologically jealous Mr Hat lurking inside his closet (ho, could there be a clearer metaphor?). Crucially, the viewer never sees what the pictures actually show, taunting us with the possibility that Garrison might have captured his own unconscious rejection of the twig (and whatever he sees, he has to concede that he's wasted Barbrady's time). This is what Chef presumes to be going on; when he and Garrison later cross paths in police custody (Chef having been arrested for non-payment of a fine and Garrison for his increasingly concerning public behaviour), he offers the diagnosis (less sensitive than Mackey's) that Garrison has "split personality schizophrenic jeebies." And then Mr Hat, determined to get back into Garrison's good graces, shows up and is able to bust them out by using a vehicle to break down the cell wall. Chef is witness to this occurrence, confirming that it isn't just in Garrison's head. By the end of the episode, Chef is a believer. When asked how he escaped, he has to credit the jailbreak to Mr Hat, even though he has lingering questions about how the puppet managed to reach the gas pedal.

Is Mr Twig real? Sure, why not? Given enough time I've a feeling he could have gone full Otesánek.

Finally, while Mr Hat is typically perceived as a reflection of all of the most awkward, problematic and messed up traits in Garrison (we haven't even touched on his role in "Chef Goes Nanners"), it is only fair to acknowledge that there are occasions where he's conversely been the voice of reason in their dynamic. In the Season 3 episode "Succubus", he (rightly) advised Garrison that his "poontang" facade was pulling the wool over nobody's eyes. A more subtle instance of Mr. Hat being able to claim the moral high ground over Garrison occurs in another Season 3 episode, "Jakovasaurs", when McDaniels reminds Garrison of a sorry incident where he was entrusted with caring for a wounded pigeon with which he supposedly attempted to copulate. Garrison tries to blame the pigeon, insisting that it was promiscuous and asking the townspeople to raise their hands if they can honestly say that they've never slept with it. A split second later and everyone except Garrison has their hands confidently in the air - and if you look at Mr Hat, you can see that his hand is also directed visibly upward. Apparently even he considered that pigeon a low point for Garrison.

 

[1] A lot of people assume it was Garrison himself who wrote that, since it came from his filing cabinet, but he didn't judge this contest and the official script (which differs slightly from the finished product, mind) does indeed specify that it was written by the judges. I'll admit that it's not particularly clear, however. The implications of the people who ran this national context being just as churlish and ill-informed on these issues as Cartman are definitely a whole lot wilder.