"Pip" (also known as "Great Expectations") is the fourteenth episode in the fourth season of the American animated television series South Park.

The episode is a parody and comedic retelling of Charles Dickens's 1861 novel Great Expectations, and stars the South Park character Pip, who assumes the role of the protagonist of the novel, who is his eponym.

This was a demanding task for the South Park studios at the time, and production of the episode was stretched out across several months.

He then goes home, where his sister's husband Joe reads an advertisement about a Miss Havisham seeking a boy to play with her daughter.

After his time in London, he shows up at Miss Havisham's house, where she tells Pip that he can find Estella at a party at the palace.

Just before Pip asks Estella to be his girlfriend, her boyfriend, a modernly American seventeen-year-old named Steve, enters the scene.

The group returns to the mansion discovering a bunch of men and boys with broken hearts and Miss Havisham powering up her device.

Creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker had the idea to recreate Charles Dickens's Great Expectations in the style of South Park from the very beginning of the series.

[15] To achieve the style, assets had to be built from scratch, including many new characters with "new mouths with rotten-out teeth" that were used for most of them.

[11] At the beginning of the episode, Pip is dressed in more ragged clothing than he usually wears in South Park.

Later, when he becomes a gentleman in London, he is wearing his usual South Park attire, including his bow tie.

An early storyboard scene shows "Pip walk[ing] up to the class holding a HUGE manuscript of paper.

[18] Beginning his story in the classroom, he starts by introducing the origins of his name, only to be interrupted by Cartman - much like the scene in "An Elephant Makes Love to a Pig".

In "Pip", the narrator ends the story with the line "And they all lived happily ever after, except for Pocket, who died of Hepatitis B".

[21] The reason behind the introduction was to make it clear to the viewers that it was going to be an "extremely different experience" from the other episodes, and that they are not going to see the regular characters of the show.

[2] "Pip" serves as an explanation of the origins of its central character, as well as a retelling of the 1861 Charles Dickens novel Great Expectations.

At one point however, the episode begins major digressions from the novel, mainly Miss Havisham's technology, such as her Genesis Device and robot monkeys.

[26]: 186  The ending of the episode has been viewed as "a joke about contemporary Hollywood's inability to produce entertainment that does not depend on idiotic spectacle.

)[9] Malcolm McDowell's portrayal of the narrator parodies Alistair Cooke, "a British person" himself, who was the host of Masterpiece Theater between 1971 and 1992.

[1] According to creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker, it is "probably one of the least-popular episodes of South Park" they have ever produced, and "most people [...] pretty much hated it".

"[1] The creators said that recreating Great Expectations in South-Park-style "seemed like a decent-enough idea, except that [the novel] kinda sucks, especially its ending".

[26]: 184  In their review of the fourth season DVD, IGN called the episode "a serious fizzle", saying that the creators "don't always hit a home-run".