| "Raisins" | |||
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| South Park episode | |||
Lexus and Butters |
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| Episode no. | Season 7 Episode 14 |
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| Directed by | Trey Parker | ||
| Written by | Trey Parker | ||
| Production code | 714 | ||
| Original air date | December 10, 2003 | ||
| Episode chronology | |||
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| List of South Park episodes | |||
"Raisins" is episode 110 of the Comedy Central series South Park. It originally aired on December 10, 2003.
The boys are playing football when Bebe tells Stan that his girlfriend Wendy has decided to break up with him. Stan obviously cares a lot about this, as he has liked Wendy ever since the first episode. The other boys tell Bebe that Stan does not care, which upsets her.
Stan tries to get Wendy to be his girlfriend again, asking Kyle and Jimmy to talk to her for him. Jimmy's speech impediment worsens the situation when Stan suggests calling her a "continuing source of inspiration for him [Stan]". Instead, Jimmy stutters on the word "continuing", only managing to repeat the first syllable (pronounced "cunt") which Wendy mishears as an insult.
Stan starts to withdraw from life, and all he thinks about is the breakup. In an effort to stop Stan from thinking about Wendy, the boys take him to Raisins, where all of the employees are young preteen girls, no older than the boys themselves, who enjoy wearing heavy make-up. The waitresses are named after luxury car manufacturers (Porsche, Mercedes, Ferrari, etc.). Being taken to Raisins does not help Stan with his problems and, if anything, only makes things worse. Meanwhile, Butters falls in love with one of the waitresses (named Lexus), and obsesses over her throughout the episode and fails to see and understand her fake interest in him (even when she asks a bouncer to keep Butters away from her when he tries to give her a present and calls her on the phone later on).
Stan realizes he can not get his friends to get them back together; he needs to get Wendy's friends to do it. So he asks Bebe to talk to Wendy, but she tells him to do something romantic to show Wendy how he feels. Stan then asks Bebe to explain it further, and she tells him to "Stand outside her window, and play Peter Gabriel" . Stan does so (choosing the rather unromantic "Shock the Monkey"), only to find Wendy at the window with Token.
Stan's miserable mood is intensified by this discovery, especially as this also inflicts damage on his friendship with Token. Kyle angrily says that, if Stan is so depressed, then he might as well hang out with the Goth kids. Stan takes the advice literally and does become friends with the Goth kids, who are obsessed with non-conformity, while ironically forcing Stan to conform to their ways, and also listen to industrial music like Skinny Puppy. Stan is also seen wearing Nevermore t-shirt while drinking coffee in Diner with his new Goth friends.
Butters runs out of money because he has spent it all at Raisins. Butters' parents, delighted that their son did not turn out gay (Stephen Stotch won a bet from his wife for this), decide to come with Butters to meet his "girlfriend". However, they realize that Lexus does not really like Butters when they arrive at Raisins, and tell him that the Raisins girls know that they can make men do whatever they want by flirting, and thus do this for a living. Butters does not believe his parents and angrily (albeit pathetically) tells them to go to "heck". He then offers to stay with Lexus and even wants to live with her, but Lexus bluntly explains to Butters that she does not want anything to do with him. She leaves to deliver curly fries.
Butters starts to withdraw from life like Stan does. He goes outside and cries in the rain as "All Out of Love" by Air Supply plays in the background. Seeing Butters cry, the Goth kids invite him to join their clique. Butters replies "Yeah, and I'm sad! But at the same time I'm really happy that something can make me feel that sad. It's like--it makes me feel alive, y'know? It makes me feel human. The only way I could feel this sad now, is if I felt somethin' really good before, so I have to take the bad with the good. So I guess what I'm feelin' is, like a beautiful sadness." Stan agrees with Butters to like life more than hating it, saying one of Cartman's famous lines, "Screw you guys, I'm going home." He then leaves the Goth kids.
On the next day, Stan is back to normal and asks the other boys to play football together, along with Butters, who is now relieved of his own misery. When Token and Wendy walk by, Stan calmly calls Wendy a bitch and gives Token the finger. Kyle is thankful Stan for recovering from the incident.
In the commentary mini on the Season 7 DVD set, Trey Parker and Matt Stone talk about how they came up with the idea for the episode. They had the Hooters parody idea, but they had to figure out what would cause them to bring someone there.
Also, they shed light on the Goth kids, they talk about writing the scene in the locker room with Kyle telling Stan he should hang with the Goth kids, and after that they decided that they wanted to actually see that.
Finally, they struggled with the scene where Jimmy is attempting to deliver Stan's message, but stutters on the word "continuing", repeating "cont..." which gets misheard as an insult. They discuss how they were not sure how they were allowed to do that, and they had to decide on what word they could use to make it sound right.
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