Original air date: 4/28/2010
The boys stage an intervention for Towelie after he falls off the wagon while working at Timmy and Jimmy's summer camp. At the camp, a jealous camper resorts to dirty tricks to beat Jimmy in a series of competitions.
Tropes used in this episode:
- Addled Addict: Towelie has deteriorated severely by the time he is fired from Lake Tardicaca; he is burned and frayed at the edges, his eyes are bloodshot, and Butters mentions that even his texture has gone from soft and fluffy to coarse and sandpaper-like.
- Adults Are Useless: Jeff VanVonderen does nothing to stop Cartman's anti-Semitic speech and allows it to go on for several hours despite Kyle's protests.
- Art Shift: For Jimmy's surfing display, the background shifts to live-action footage of an ocean wave with Jimmy and his surfboard superimposed over it.
- Black Comedy Rape: Nathan gets raped by a Tardicaca Lake Shark, twice.
- Comically Missing the Point: When the kids gather for Towelie's intervention, they all read prepared speeches about how much they love him and want him to get treated for his hard drug addictions... all except Cartman, who instead reads an anti-Semitic screed that goes on for several hours and never mentions Towelie once.
- The Comically Serious: The Intervention-style intertitles show up in both subplots, offering completely straight-faced commentary on the absurd goings-on at Lake Tardicaca.
- Don't Explain the Joke: Several of the show's captions explain how what is happening to Nathan is funny.Nathan's frustration with Mimsy has caused a momentary lapse in judgment. He has played the B flat himself, thus causing his plan to literally backfire on him.
- Drugs Are Bad: It wouldn't be an Intervention parody without copious references to the evils of drug use, as Towelie's worsening addictions cause him to lose his job, his family, and his self-respect.
- Dumb Muscle: Mimsy, Nathan's lackey, is bigger and stronger than his "boss", and so does most of the heavy lifting for their schemes. Unfortunately for Nathan, Mimsy is also not very bright, and keeps fouling up his instructions so that Nathan is the one who gets caught in the traps instead.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Nathan's final scheme against Jimmy is to booby trap the ukulele he is playing in the Blue Team's performance of "Tardicaca Hula Gal" so that it blows up when he plays a high B-flat during the instrumental break. However, Jimmy keeps messing up the solo and finally decides to skip it. An enraged Nathan grabs the ukulele and plays the solo himself... causing the instrument to detonate.
- Horrible Judge of Character: Jeff VanVonderen takes Cartman's side completely and refuses to let Kyle interrupt the hate speech by saying it isn't his turn.
- Humiliation Conga: As if being blown up by his own booby-trapped ukulele isn't bad enough, as soon as he lands from the explosion, Nathan is attacked by the black mamba snake, the Tardicaca Indians, and the shark in very quick succession.
- Junkie Parent: Towelie's drug problems have caused him to become estranged from the mother of his young child, Washcloth, and at one point he is seen on the phone demanding to talk to his son, insisting that he hasn't been high since Wednesday (and then being told it is Wednesday). Butters bringing Washcloth to the intervention is what finally causes Towelie to agree to treatment.
- Loophole Abuse: At Towelie's intervention, the kids read letters to Towelie explaining their issues with his addiction. Jeff VanVonderen insists that all the readers must be allowed to finish. Cartman uses this to read off an anti-Semitic rant that fills dozens of pages and couldn't have less to do with Towelie.
- Parody: Towelie's subplot spoofs Intervention, complete with white-on-black intertitles, the premise that he thinks he has agreed to be in a documentary about addiction, and an appearance by Jeff VanVonderen at the intervention. The white-on-black intertitles spill over into the Lake Tardicaca subplot.
- Poor Communication Kills: Nathan's schemes against Jimmy keep backfiring at least partly because of carelessly worded instructions to his Literal-Minded lackey, Mimsy.
- To sabotage the canoe race, he plans to put a black mamba snake in the Blue Team's canoe. Unfortunately, because he only tells Mimsy to put the snake "in the canoe", Mimsy puts it in his own team's canoe, causing them to abandon ship in terror.
- He then tries to sabotage the scavenger hunt by swapping the Blue Team's map with a map that will lead them to the Tardicaca Indian reservation, which will get him attacked by the very territorial residents. However, his instructions to Mimsy are "Switch the map! Switch the map!", so he switches the maps... and then switches them back so that the Red Team are the ones who blunder onto the reservation.
- Next, Nathan tries to sabotage the surfing competition with a Tardicaca shark whistle, and he tells Mimsy to swim out to where Jimmy is surfing and blow the whistle. So Mimsy swims out into the lake... and then back to shore before blowing the whistle, causing a shark to jump out of the water onto Nathan and start humping him. The intertitles lampshade the issue.Intertitle: There appears to have been a fundamental misunderstanding.
- Repeated for Emphasis: One of Nathan's instructions to Mimsy is to "Switch the map, switch the map!". The second time was for emphasis, but Mimsy, being Literal-Minded, switched the map twice, leaving them with their own (fake) map.
- Shout-Out: The episode is one long Looney Tunes homage, so many of the characters and gags pay tribute to Warner Bros. cartoons.
- The dynamic between Nathan and Mimsy references the dynamic between diminutive gangster Rocky and his dim-witted muscle man Mugsy, complete with Mimsy calling Nathan "boss" and Nathan repeatedly belting Mimsy while telling him to shut up.
- The Blue Team members include lookalikes and soundalikes of Porky Pig, Elmer Fudd, Droopy (evidently on loan from MGM), Beaky Buzzard, Sylvester the Cat, and Pete Puma.
- Nathan's plan to booby trap Jimmy's ukulele references "the xylophone gag", a recurring joke from at least four Looney Tunes cartoons in which an instrument is booby trapped so that a performance of "Believe Me, if All Those Endearing Young Charms" will cause the performer to explode when they play the final note of the opening line. However, the intended target keeps getting the melody wrong, until eventually the character who set the trap shoves them aside and plays it properly - KA-BOOM!note
- As for non-Looney Tunes shout outs, the establishing shots of Camp Tardicaca use the song "Are You Ready For The Summer?" from the original Meatballs.
- Staging an Intervention: Towelie's subplot is a spoof of Intervention, and so it culminates with Butters, Stan, Kyle, Cartman, Kenny, and Clyde gathering in a room to plead with him to seek treatment. (All except Cartman, who instead uses his camera time to spend several hours ranting about how Jews are evil shapeshifters and must be exterminated.)
- Two Lines, No Waiting: Although the Towelie and Jimmy subplots are initially both set at Lake Tardicaca, they diverge near the end of the first act as Towelie is fired for letting his addictions get so out of control that he gives blowjobs for drug money on camp property. The rest of the episode cuts back and forth between Towelie's downward spiral and intervention on one side, and Nathan's failed plots on Jimmy's life on the other.
- Unknown Rival: Nathan positively seethes with hatred for Jimmy after losing the camp competitions to him for three consecutive years, and spends their entire subplot trying to kill him. Judging from Jimmy's final conversation with Nathan - handing him his "King of Cripple Camp" crown and saying that as far as he's concerned, Nathan is the true champion - he is completely unaware of Nathan's grudge against him.
- Verbal Tic: Mimsy shares with his inspiration, Looney Tunes character Mugsy, a tendency to open almost every sentence he speaks with "Dahhh...", conveying that he is not the brightest candle in the chandelier.
