Warning: Fullfrom South Park: Season 18 to follow.

Usually, our season reviews for South Park are a little different from others because each episode is standalone and separate. Generally speaking, there is little connective tissue between installments (multi-episode arcs like last year's Black Friday Trilogy notwithstanding). However, with Season 18, co-creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker took a slightly different approach to doing the show, by incorporating serial elements and establishing a continuity within the season. Therefore, it's important to not just look at the episodes by themselves but also the ongoing storylines that fed into multiple episodes.

IGN's South Park: Season 17 Review

Season 18 started with a clean slate in the premiere, "Go Fund Yourself," which effectively skewered the Washington Redskins scandal, the Ray Rice controversy and the NFL as a whole. The episode was notably front-loaded with other parodies -- including Apple and ISIS -- but these components were never brought up again. Interestingly, though, the boys' Redskins startup did play into the next episode, "Gluten Free Ebola," which had Cartman, Stan, Kyle and Kenny dealing with the fallout from their failed company. This episode gave us our first look at Randy as Lorde, which turned out to be a major overarching storyline for the season.

Loading

"Oh my God, THE WHEAT THINS!"

"Like we're not going to tell Kenny we have a f***ing drone."

"The Cissy" was an episode that went back to basics for Cartman, who exploited another PC hot button -- in this case, gender identity -- to get his way at school. However, the more noteworthy storyline here was Randy's Lorde arc, which took center stage after his brief appearance as the singer-songwriter in the previous episode. This is really where the theme of gender identity took hold and actually had more to say on the subject than even Cartman's storyline did (although both were amusing in their own right).The following episode, "Handicar" (otherwise known as the Wacky Races episode) was widely regarded as a low point for the season, as Nathan and Mimsy returned for an underwhelming storyline that riffed on a lot of the same jokes from their last appearance. It was also jam-packed with pointless references to Matthew McConaughey and Tesla Motors. Coincidentally (or not), "Handicar" didn't prominently feature any references to previous episodes, which also made it less interesting than the rest. (It didn't help that none of the other boys were in the episode at all.)After that, South Park came back with a string of solid entries including "The Magic Bush," "Freemium Isn't Free" and "Grounded Vindaloop." While all three episodes had their moments, the first and third of those were particularly strong. "The Magic Bush" was great in that it successfully combined sharp satire with a "boys will be boys" storyline -- both of which are South Park staples. Meanwhile, "Grounded Vindaloop" brought something entirely new to the table, using VR technology to tell a well-executed -- and delightfully surreal -- story. In fact, of all the episodes in Season 18, those two were probably the most inherently "like the show."Leading into the final episodes, there was "Cock Magic," which came close in some respects to attaining the same level of quality as, say, "The Magic Bush." For example, Randy's "c***" magic was almost objectively hilarious to any diehard fans of South Park -- maybe even one of the best bits to come out of this season. That said, Season 18 already had a lot of Randy focus, what with the Lorde stuff, so this additional storyline with him as the star felt like overkill. Meanwhile, the boys' Cock Magic tournaments clumsily tied into a girls' volleyball subplot that didn't really go anywhere, which left this episode feeling doubly muddled.

IGN's South Park: Season 18 Finale Review

Then there was the two-part season finale, which attempted to bring all the other storylines together... but ultimately this kind of went off the rails. Actually, the best parts of these episodes were the stuff completely unrelated to previous storylines -- not PewDiePie, necessarily, but Kyle's failure to see the appeal of Lets' Plays and wanting to play video games with his brother Ike. Not only did that concept hit home, but it also seemed to represent Matt and Trey's own thoughts on media distribution and this generation's definition of "interactivity." Alas, those ideas were never made clear, and they gave way instead to a barrage of callbacks and Cartman's YouTube persona. While this two-parter definitely had its moments, it didn't take advantage of the serial elements at play and failed to deliver payoffs for those storylines.