Review: South Park “Let Them Eat Goo”

 

 

Overview (Spoilers Below)

No longer associated with MedMen or China, Tegridy Farms is in financial troubles once again. To keep the family in the black, Towlie has the so-so idea of selling the unused schwag as mulch. Estimating a haul of ten cents per pound, the plan will sustain them for a finite amount of time. Fortunately, Randy gets high and stops at a Burger King. There he discovers the Impossible Whopper, a plant-based burger. A. PLANT. Based. Burger.

Even though fake meat tends to taste terrible, the Tegridy Burger doesn’t need to taste great because it’s made mostly of weed and gets the residents of South Park very, very high. What starts out as a small roadside attraction becomes huge overnight. His new restaurant becomes the most popular spot in town, eviscerating Burger King and the local cattle ranchers. It also pisses off a Daniel Plainview-type character who is trying to corner the processed plant-based crap market with his “Incredible Beef” goo substance.

At school, Eric and Butters love chowing down on their processed meat-based lunches. Unfortunately, the girls—and like-minded guys—rallied for healthier vegetarian and vegan lunches and blindsided Cartman with fish on sloppy joe day. Cartman is so angry he goes into cardiac arrest because the mere thought of healthy food is bad for his health. After he suffers a few more, rage-induced, minor heart attacks, the school agrees to go back to processed meat. This angers the healthy food protesters.

Enter PC Principal who decides to make a deal with that Daniel Plainview-type gentleman. Since Eric is at the hospital the hope is that the Goo-man’s goo tastes so much like actual meat that Eric will never notice. When Cartman returns, he notices that the “meat” is different but is unable to tell the difference between Incredible Goo and his regular processed crap.

After a day or two, Butters is Telltale Hearting way too hard and has to confess to Eric that he’s secretly been eating plant-based food. Eric is uncharacteristically fine with the realization. After learning that Incredible Goo is just as processed and artificial as the old cafeteria food, he simply doesn’t care.

With the school and most of the local restaurants now serving his goo, Daniel Plainview sets his sights on Tegridy Burger. Working with the Burger King guy and the town’s most successful cattle rancher, they hatch a scheme. The rancher leaves his thirty cows on Randy’s farm after shaming him, leaving them to eat up all the weed. To save their business, Randy and Towelie get super high and murder all the cows. Of course, Mr. Plainview gets this all on tape, causing Randy’s customers to turn on him, ruining yet another of his money-making ventures.

 

Our Take

Cartman’s excellent closing monologue is a perfect analogy for this episode. Compared to South Park’s golden age, and really good modern outings like “Band in China,” this episode was crap in comparison. However, it wasn’t disgraceful crap like last week’s “Shots!!!” or all those episodes a few years back where Cartman had a girlfriend.

This was the nice, comfortable crap we’re all used to. It showed us characters we haven’t encountered in a while like Butters, Wendy, Gerald, and even Councilor Mackey. Stan spent most of the episode in school, away from the Tegridy Farm plotline that he dreads. And we got to see Cartman acting deviously again, as opposed to an imbecilic squealing pig or a calculated supervillain. This is the Cartman that we like—crazy but not bat-shit crazy.

Randy’s endeavors continue to amuse me. In fact, it kind of surprises me that it took almost twenty seasons for Trey and Matt to realize the preciousness of pairing Randy with Towelie. The two are just like Cheech and Chong, except they’re somehow both Chong. And one of them is definitely the king of making mix-tapes because they managed to get every song about smoking weed onto one standard-length cassette tape.

A few weeks ago when Randy garroted Winnie-the-Pooh, I didn’t think he could up his game. I figured the end of his weed business was on the horizon and the entire B-story would be concluded by midseason. But he went and topped himself tenfold by murdering dozens of innocent cows. I don’t know if you know this, but the cow is a sacred animal in the town of South Park. They’re basically India of the West, the “West Indies,” if you will. So this was a bold move by Tegridy Farms and even though it hurt them in the short run, it shows that their drive for success remains focused and virile.

But yeah, Randy will definitely be out of business by the end of the season. There is no getting around that actuality.