The episode—reportedly the penultimate episode of South Park‘s bizarrely truncated 28th season—dealt with a bunch of the usual suspects, lightly touching on the show’s ongoing Trump plotline (albeit without going to the graphic lengths it recently achieved), and allowing Eric Cartman to once again be a force of town-wide menace. (In this case, getting obsessed with “race science,” which involves him recruiting South Park’s one Black kid onto his team to try to win the titular event.) Oh, and it got some swipes at Pete Hesgeth in there, but Hesgeth is so obviously buffoonish that even the series seems to realize that clowning on him—by depicting him as a rampant attention seeker in a fight with Kristi Noem to see who can milk more attention out of any given situation—is at least a little bit redundant.
As it usually has over the last few months, South Park reserved its actual satire for chunkier material, in this case the controversy surrounding the recent Riyadh Comedy Festival, and some of the comedians who participated in it. To some extent, the show drew from an older playbook, doing a bit of the old “both sides” maneuver: Having usual moral voice Token repeatedly try to drop out of the town’s Saudi-backed Turkey Trot over the queasy feelings associated with taking Saudi money, only to have Cartman point out that ostracized regimes rarely improve on topics like human rights abuses. Or, to put it in the show’s terms, asking if he wouldn’t prefer “them to pay America for sports rather than hacking up reporters and paying Pete Davidson to do comedy?” (Kevin Hart also took a similar hit.) Putting the words in Cartman’s mouth certainly suggests that the series is ascribing cynical motivations somewhere, but it still makes South Park one of the only mainstream American TV shows—outside of, like the news, and the late-night programs—that’s directly addressing the controversy.
