South Park Season 23 Episode 4 “Let Them Eat Goo” Review

South Park Season 23 Episode 4 “Let Them Eat Goo” Review

Yo Ho! Nightrider here!

“Let Them Eat Goo” shows good continuity with “Band in China” while focusing on another present issue: the selling of plant-based food and similar products. South Park knows how to get people’s attention and present their critiques from unique angles.

Beware of spoilers!

Randy’s profits are down and orders a family meeting to strategize. Towelie suggests that unused marijuana can be used for mulch. It sounds like a great plan: help the planet while helping business. However, Randy goes to Burger King and things get interesting. Proclaiming Burger King’s new plant-based product as “shitty,” he gets the idea to make his own burgers with the marijuana scraps to make a big profit.

Meanwhile, Cartman loves his school lunch but finds out that several students (Wendy and the girls according to Cartman) succeeded in having the cafeteria serve healthier foods. He rants out in anger until he suffers a heart attack. He comes back and delivers a verbatim argument (a la LeBron James) about free speech ruining his lunch. Then he suffers another heart attack during his lunchtime because Wendy speaks about climate change and sustainable agriculture.

It was funny to see references from other media appear in this episode: the Goo Man is the character Daniel Plainview from the film There Will Be Blood while the “goo” factory is reminiscent of the scene in the film Soylent Green where Charlton Heston’s character Frank Thorn discovers that Soylent Green is made from human remains. The only difference with the Soylent Green reference is that the green goo is made from a lab; what really makes the green goo? A new classic “Randy moment” is where Randy and Towelie get so high that they kill off the cows that invaded their marijuana crop to the tune of “Pass the Dutchie” made very famous by the British Jamaican reggae group Musical Youth; this footage was recorded so that the Goo Man’s plans of ruining Randy’s Tegridy Burgers work.

Cartman concludes this episode after learning the truth of his “incredible meat” lunches from the Goo Man. In his speech, he turns the argument of climate change and plant-based foods against his opponents and the school by apologizing for his behavior and letting them know that the new processed crap is just like the old processed crap he loves. Since garbage begat garbage thanks to Wendy’s protests, Cartman doesn’t care about the ethics of sustainable agriculture or climate change because he’s still eating garbage; he only wants to eat garbage happily. He then announces that freedom of speech doesn’t matter and happily sings a song about enjoying plant-based processed foods, leaving the school stunned and hesitant to eat their “healthy lunches.”

I have a feeling we’ll be seeing more of the Goo Man trying to take control of the plant-based food business in South Park this season. Perhaps he’ll go on the famous “milkshake speech” rant against South Park while Randy becomes Frank Thorn. But more importantly, what present issue(s) is South Park going to critique next?