South Park has come to an end this year with the final episode of Season 28, and there’s just one problem that’s stuck out about how it all ended. South Park has had a wild road through the year. After spending the first half of the year in the midst of licensing talks, creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone signed a massive deal to confirm South Park‘s future with Paramount. This also meant the series returned for ten new episodes this year, and that turned out to actually count for both Seasons 27 and 28 (but told a single story either way).
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South Park brought its ten episode run to an end with its first Christmas special in six years, and it rounded out the story that the animated series had been telling with United States President Donald Trump, the Antichrist, Satan, and even Stan Marsh’s own struggles. But as it tied together all of the stories, the only real issue from the finale that remains its major sticking point is the fact that it only really focuses on Stan’s role in it all. He’s the only major character that plays a key role in the finale.
What Happens in South Park’s 2025 Finale?
South Park Season 28’s “The Crap-Out” puts together the ongoing storyline that fully introduced Trump to the animated series. After showing off so much of Trump, the episode sees him heading to South Park in an attempt to free Peter Thiel from the jail and stop the birth of the Antichrist. All the while, the focus of the episode sees Stan hoping for some kind of Christmas miracle to turn his life around. He’s been struggling through the season after the Marsh family was forced out of Tegridy Farms, and Randy has yet to get a new job.
So he had been hoping for a miracle to change things, and ends up coming across the now more Christian version of Jesus Christ (and pushes Stan away from him). But this all comes to a head as Stan ends up deciding to help Satan give birth to the Antichrist to help someone get their Christmas miracle, and the multi-season long story comes to its end. Whether or not it was thematically satisfying is very much a debate, but Stan did get his old house back at the end of it all.
What’s Wrong With the Finale?
With Stan returning to his old house, South Park‘s finale also seems to tease it’s going to be returning to the classic episode format seen in years before. It’s something Parker and Stone have seemingly pointed out directly in the latest episodes as well. But that also highlights the main issue with the finale. All of the other boys have been put on the sidelines for much of the season, and Stan’s all alone this time around too. It makes sense for the story the show is telling, and even more so for that ending, but it’s still an issue.
While its missing characters like Cartman (who seemingly was going to play a role in the finale with the “67” meme joke before being tossed aside) are forgotten, hopefully this does mean that South Park‘s future episodes are going to be less Trump focused. He took up so much time in the rest of this season that this finale needed a lot of him as well. But with his story pretty much wrapped up, it could be that we’ll see him much less from this point on. It’s just one nagging issue about how it all wrapped, but not the worst case scenario either.
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