Are record beef shortages simply not that rich a topic for South Park to riff off? The show’s 29th season had its first outright middling episode this week with a zigzaggy outing that gestured vaguely toward the performative eating of particular foods, nodded slightly at a father-son story development, and wound it all up by repeating and amplifying a funny season-long running gag that increasingly seems like it will actually serve as a makeshift story arc.But let’s jump back to the beginning, perhaps the most laugh-out-loud moment of the episode: Cartman in a fugue of delight over the impending meal of sloppy joes at the school cafeteria, to which he forms a tribute in the form of a sloppy-joe-themed version of Gary Glitter’s Rock and Roll Part Two – a music clearance reaffirming that Trey Parker and Matt Stone don’t care if a song choice might make people tut-tut (because the singer is a serial sex offender) or just annoyed (because that song sucks).

Cartman’s infectious glee is short-lived, however, when he’s informed that the lunch special for the day isn’t a sloppy joe after all, or anything beef-related, but cuy – Guinea Pig on a stick.This is an actual Peruvian dish, to match with South Park’s season-long rechristening as South America. And thanks to its patriotic (if confusingly so) bona fides, beef farmed in South, uh, America is in higher demand than ever in the rest of the country.

So while it’s a beef town, no one who lives there can actually get a reasonably priced cut of meat. This despite the fact that frequent cutaways, usually to Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse, reveal that South Park beef, rich and buttery as it is, gives people who eat it literally explosive diarrhea after one bite (and yes, obviously this is shown in great cartoonish detail.) This side-effect does not sate demand for the beef; consuming it is seen as a patriotic act.This seems like both a commentary on the actual beef shortage in the United States, as well as the MAHA-driven desire for stuff like beef tallow.

This week’s South Park – “Guinea Pig on a Stick” is the episode title – doesn’t get into all that, but there are certainly undertones in the way it depicts demand for larded-up beef from faraway elites. The steakhouse clientele are all drawn to look like the show’s celebrity caricatures, even though none of them are quite an exact match for any real figure that I could recognize.

It’s a metaphor for the episode at large, which perpetually feels like it’s satirizing something bigger and more direct but doesn’t quite come into focus.Part of the problem is that the beef shortage dilemma only lightly dovetails with the episode’s wispy kid plot, which is that Stan’s dad Randy, still in a miniaturized child’s body after the previous episode’s Sephora looksmaxxing mishap, wants to be one of the gang. Kyle and Cartman both seem willing to shrug him off, but Stan keeps snapping at him.

It’s understandable; it’s annoying that Randy oscillates between off-trend kid obsessions (laughing about Italian brainrot) and his own dad-aged references (he simply refuses to shut up about the Goonies). But he does sincerely want to connect with Stan, and eventually everyone kinda tells Stan he’s being a jerk.

Stan softens in the face of his dad’s sincerity.Stan’s dad Randy, still in a miniaturized child’s body after a Sephora looksmaxxing mishap, wants to be one of the gang. Photograph: ParamountThe kids do come up with a solution to the beef shortage after a violent showdown between Ruth Chris herself (not her actual name; that would be Ruth Fertel, the founder of the confoundingly named chain) and the fake cowboys who run the Sizzler.

Sizzler runs away with all of the cows in town, even the ones that might have been consigned to the cattle farm’s champagne room (a funny idea that turns out to be a momentary gag), and like everyone else in the South Park universe this season, Ruth Chris says issues like this will be massively affected by a big change that’s on deck for November.As before, she means the release of Grand Theft Auto VI.Unlike in previous episodes, this joke is finally elaborated upon: Ruth Chris shows a top-secret video of GTA gameplay, opening the kids’ (and Randy’s) eyes to just how much things could indeed change in November. Maybe this will remain a running gag, but the way it’s brought to the foreground now, almost in lieu of an actual resolution, makes it seem like it will figure into the season finale (which does, after all, air not too long after the game’s release).

So, wait, is this a piece-moving episode? Of South Park?!

It sounds absurd, like a recapper reading an irreverent animated comedy like it’s a self-serious serialized show – but it does feel like the endgame.In the meantime, the kids do figure out what to do about the beef shortage. They rebrand Guinea Pig on a stick as a particularly patriotic delicacy; it turns out the steakhouse customers don’t care what they’re eating so long as it’s got that American branding and is larded up with plenty of rich butter.

With the right preparation, Guinea Pig on a stick can provide the exact same explosive diarrhea – and so we’re treated to the episode-closing sight of diners exploding into fecal matter, now with an extra hue of red and blue fireworks in accompaniment. Again, a pretty funny gross-out sight gag, but no moreso than the first dozen times.

Weirdly, this episode of South Park made me look forward to Grand Theft Auto VI, too, assuming there’s now a fun storyline building up to it.