That's in addition to the last couple, which only included a handful of casual references. Seriously, leaps and bounds better than the aged-up reenactors in Season 16's "I Should Have Never Gone Ziplining." Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this was the first episode in Season 18 (besides the premiere, obviously) that didn't feature a callback to a previous episode. Props to the creators for casting spot-on live-action versions of the boys at the end as well. I also thought it was a nice touch that Stan, the least featured boy this week, was in fact the one stuck in VR all along. ("Linda, do you remember why Butters is grounded?") Best of all, Cartman was actually right in the end: he was just a computer program. I also enjoyed the fact that, per Cartman's rules, if Butters was grounded in VR, then that remained the case in real life. Scenes like the one between Cartman and Kyle, where they argued over which one of them was sent to rescue the other, were truly ingenious. Of course, once it was revealed that Cartman was the one stuck in virtual reality and not Butters, the storyline took a delightfully zany turn into mind-boggling territory. Cartman's Morpheus riff on Butters was classic, as were his virtual reality "rules," of which Butters pushed to the utmost limits (ball-punching, carjacking, hooker beating, etc.). Other than that, this episode was very entertaining. To be fair, this was a pretty funny bit for the first few scenes, but by the time Steve the IT guy joined in, it had gotten pretty tired. Really, the whole storyline was fueled by one recurring joke: the boys saying, "Oh, f*** yoooou," to one another over and over again. Indeed, "Grounded Vindaloop" was probably the most cleverly plotted episode of the season thus far, but like I said, the humor wasn't quite as on-point. Rather, VR was used as a means of taking the viewer on a wild and crazy head trip. However, the main point of this storyline wasn't to satirize the technology itself. To some extent it did, particularly early on when Cartman tricked Butters into taking his own "headset" for a test spin. From the previews, it looked like Matt and Trey were going to be making fun of Oculus Rift and virtual reality tech in general - similar to what they did last week with freemium games. This week's "Grounded Vindaloop" was definitely one of those episodes.
Sometimes, episodes of South Park aren't as funny as they could have been, but their concept and execution are so well done that it doesn't really matter whether you laughed or not.
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