What do politically correct behavior, gentrification, immigration, body shaming, transgenderism, gay relationships, gun culture, and police brutality have in common? Yes, they’re all incredibly divisive socio-political issues in our current culture (and we haven’t killed each other over them…yet), but they’re also part of the unified theme of this season of South Park. Now in its 19th half-season, Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s animated hit continues its tradition of holding nothing sacred and picking on any instance of hypocrisy in our culture, be it from the right or the left.

In Season 19, Stone and Parker have taken the bold step of actually having episode-to-episode continuity which gradually rolled into an overall epic storyline. Certainly they’ve had episodes that called back to earlier ones in the past, and Season 18 had running elements which continued between episode (such as Randy’s notable outing as pop star Lorde), but Season 19 apparently marks the first time that the entire season served as one long episode. The experiment appears to have been a success, as fans have been asking throughout the season–where is all this going?

In brief, Season 19 has concerned the running gag of a “PC Principal” (yes, that’s his official name) taking over management of the elementary school and showing more concern with proper use of language than any actual education. Playing off the perception that PC-culture is more about thuggery than actual social change, PC Principal is a literal fratboy bully who assaults and shames the town into agreeing with his social justice campaign. In the first episode alone, Kyle–one of the town’s few Jews, mind you–gets assaulted and shamed for simply refusing to agree that Caitlyn Jenner is a stunning and brave woman.

The tackling of “PC Culture” hasn’t been without controversy, of course. I’ve seen internet critics and commenters alike reject what they perceived Season 19’s message to be–that being PC is bad and that those who push it are thugs. Isn’t social change and inclusiveness good? Why are we being attacked?

But people who think it’s about them need to remember that, again, South Park has no sacred cows, and if Parker and Stone have any message, it’s that sacred cows are dangerous. The social commentary is never about PC itself, but simply about shitty human behavior in how a movement is pushed on other people. Kyle’s objections to Caitlyn Jenner had nothing to do with her transgendered status, but simply with the fact that she’s a lousy person (exemplified by Jenner’s repeated appearances this season, with the running gag that she keeps mowing down people with her cars).

What Stone and Parker do this season, as they do always, is to call out basic human shittiness illustrated through the superficial, crowd-following behavior of the townsfolk. They happily turn the poorest section of town into the upscale SoDoSoPa (“South Downtown South Park”) while crowding out and ignoring the impoverished McCormack family. Randy delights at being able to shop at a Whole Foods, but goes out of his way to avoid making any kind of a donation to starving children at the checkout even while spending obscene amounts of money on luxury foods.  (This gag becomes more and more absurd, with Randy having to reject the donation by having to pull a sandwich out of the mouth of a starving girl to say “No Thanks.”) The town loves social trends, treating the novelty of two gay kids in their school as some kind of social marker–but refuse to listen to the kids’ objections that they aren’t actually gay but just being obsessively drawn that way by the Asian students.*

If these sacred cows seem a little too left-centric, don’t worry: the right gets their comeuppance as well. Mr. Garrison bizarrely morphed into a Donald Trump analogue this season whose mission was to keep Canadian refugees out of the city, and with a mission to take his political opponents and fuck them to death. (This philosophy is literally applied when Garrison meets Trump’s Canadian counterpart.) Police brutality and hypocrisy is addressed when the patently racist cops refuse to get involved when, after being shamed into impotence, the town suddenly wants them back to deal with the threat of ISIS. And even in tonight’s finale, America’s gun-culture is addressed with everyone getting their hands on a gun and using it as the ultimate leverage piece in conversation.

Ultimately, what I liked about this season is that it addressed what I perceive to be America’s growing problem of a lack of civility in discourse. Maybe the left isn’t full of PC thugs and the right isn’t full of Donald Trump racists, but both sides sure perceive each other that way. It’s getting louder and angrier out there, and South Park makes a sincere effort of holding up a mirror to show both sides how ugly they’re getting in the process. They’re probably hoping we’ll have a good laugh in the process, because I have to say that this season really was funny in spite of all the social commentary that dominated things.

But what of the overarching plot? Season 19 increasingly suggested that there was some sinister motive behind the PC/gentrification phenomenon that overtook the town, and indeed, the last three episodes have proven to be a trilogy which tied together the season’s loose threads. The “Sponsored Content” episode revealed that yet another of the season’s running gags–PC Principal constantly telling a young girl to shut her pie hole–was in fact the linchpin to the entire season. I will say that the actual reveal in this week’s final episode fell a bit flat, as fans had been long speculating that some long-unused character(s) were behind the culture shift. Unfortunately, there was no dramatic unveiling of the curtain–it was just more typical South Park weirdness.

Still, even as it made us laugh, Season 19 did illustrate that even divided as we are, we’re all part of a community–whether a town, or the internet, or even the Earth. We’re stuck here together, and we can either continue to escalate over our differences, or we can go back to communicating and figuring out how to get through this thing together. And that’s what makes for some quality TV–when we can reflect on the human experience even when we’re seeing a man-turned-woman-turned-back-into-a-man fuck a Canadian Donald Trump to death.

Rating: Five out of five Cheesy Poofs.

* South Park didn’t make that up, either. There seriously was an actual phenomenon of Tweek and Craig slash art that long predated this season, and Stone and Parker finally decided to address it in an episode.