| "Something Wall-Mart This Way Comes" | |||
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| South Park episode | |||
South Park as a ghost town |
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| Episode no. | Season 8 Episode 9 |
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| Directed by | Trey Parker | ||
| Written by | Trey Parker | ||
| Production code | 809 | ||
| Original air date | November 3, 2004 | ||
| Episode chronology | |||
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| List of South Park episodes | |||
"Something Wall-Mart This Way Comes" is episode 120 of Comedy Central's South Park. This episode originally aired on November 3, 2004. Its title and theme were inspired by the 1983 Disney movie Something Wicked This Way Comes based on the 1962 novel by Ray Bradbury.[1]
The episode begins with Cartman betting Kyle five dollars that when people die they "crap their pants". Kyle says it is a stupid idea. In the meantime, a Wall-Mart opens in South Park (where Starks Pond used to be) with much fanfare and everyone in town starts shopping there. Cartman is especially delighted that one can buy three copies of Timecop for $18 instead of just one for $9.98, though Kyle wonders why one would need three copies of the same movie. The popularity of Wall-Mart forces the local businesses to shut down, including Jim's Drugs, within minutes of Kyle's declaration that he will now take all his personal shopping there. Soon, local residents, including Stan's father Randy, start to work at Wall-Mart for minimum wage and an extra 10% employee discount on store purchases which according to Randy, evens out the wage.
South Park turns into a ghost town, and the townspeople decide they no longer want the Wall-Mart in South Park. They fail to resist, as they start to miss the bargains (Randy's frenzied case of impulse buying notably re-opens at dinner the first day after the self-imposed ban when Stan accidentally breaks his milk glass), so they (in the form of a vigilante mob) ask the Wall-Mart manager to have the location shut down. Terrified, he asks them to meet him outside in five minutes. As the people stop outside his office, the manager is thrown through the office window in an apparent suicide by hanging, and then defecates with his pants on (to the viewer, the force of defecation is so strong that the pants are blown off). Cartman gleefully tells Kyle he owes him five bucks.
The townspeople burn the building down, only to see it rebuilt. A man rebuilding the Wall-Mart tells Kenny, Kyle and Stan that the rebuilding order came from Wall-Mart's headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas (which is phonetically misspelled as Arkansaw). The three of them then travel to Bentonville to stop the Wall-Mart.
The boys head off, but are joined by Cartman, whom the Wall-Mart "told" to stop them. Though none of the boys trust him (Kyle knows for a fact that Cartman is secretly against them), they are in a hurry to leave. They then reach Bentonville, despite Cartman's sabotage (slashing the tires of the bus they travel on), and talk to Harvey Brown, the current president of Wall-Mart. The boys ask him how they can stop it, and he tells them they need to find and destroy its "heart". As the boys leave, Brown commits suicide by shooting himself in the head and craps his pants. Cartman again laughs that Kyle now owes him ten dollars.
The boys try to re-enter South Park Wall-Mart but Cartman confronts them. He denies that they knew he was against them, but Kyle angrily begins yelling at him that he knew Cartman was against them all along, while Cartman continues to talk about why he was against them. Kenny is then assigned to hold Cartman off while Stan and Kyle enter the Wall-Mart. In the television department, the boys are confronted by a man who says he is Wall-Mart. He says that he can take "many forms" although he only puts on different hats. After a confusing dialogue, he finally tells the boys that the heart "lies beyond that plasma screen television". The boys walk over to find it is a small mirror, that the boys then smash to "destroy the heart." The actual building of Wall-Mart then begins to fall apart, while the man says they will see him in his "true form". However, he does no more than rip off his mustache and jump around. The boys and everyone else inside the Wall-Mart evacuate and gather with other townsfolk in the parking lot, and see the Wall-Mart fold in on itself in a blinding flash of light, and "craps out feces" upon which Cartman laughs loud and hard once again and leaves the scene.
Everyone cheers because Kyle tells everyone that all of these places have a self-destruct sequence if they break a mirror in the back. Chef tells a soldier to spread the word to all the towns on how to destroy these places, in reference to a scene from the film Independence Day. Randy then announces that the Wall-Mart's "heart" was their desires the whole time. Oblivious to the fact that the boys consider this obvious, Randy explains pedantically how the residents of South Park had allowed their consumerism to work against them and nearly destroy their cherished small-town charm. Realizing their mistake — albeit only on the surface — the townspeople loyally return to shopping at Jim's Drugs, which is shown to grow increasingly larger in a Wall-Mart wholesale fashion before being burned down itself. Watching it burn, the townspeople vow not to shop there again, and they immediately head to the local True Value.
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