Warning: This review contains full spoilers for South Park Season 28, Episode 4!

South Park definitely doesn’t have the best track record with holiday episodes this year. The Halloween-themed “The Woman in the Hat” turned out to be the first real misfire of Season 27/28, bringing an abrupt halt to all the momentum the series had established up to that point. And now Thanksgiving proves just as difficult a nut to crack, with “Turkey Trot” also falling short of the mark. Not the most auspicious setup for the big season finale, to say the least.

The one advantage “Turkey Trot” has over “The Woman in the Hat” is that it doesn’t struggle as much in tying together the two halves of the episode. This week kicks off with the cash-starved Chamber of Commerce resorting to (what else?) Saudi Arabian funding to bankroll their annual 5k run. That dovetails neatly enough with the show’s latest Trump Administration spoof, as Secretary of Defense War Pete Hegseth shows up to rescue the imprisoned Peter Thiel at his boss’ behest.

It also helps that this episode makes more of a meal out of lampooning Hegseth than “The Woman in the Hat” did with its very brief, surface-level spoof of Stephen Miller. The show is every bit as scathing as it was with officials like Attorney General Pam Bondi and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem (who also makes a return appearance to commit more acts of canine murder). It’s amusing to see Hegseth portrayed as a glorified YouTuber in perpetual search of content. The fact that he comes equipped with his own theme song and spends half the episode getting pushed around by Sgt. Yates just makes the spoof that much better.

But beyond satirizing Hegseth himself, this episode doesn’t have a lot else going for it. The Turkey Trot storyline itself falls pretty flat after the initial Saudi Arabia reveal. It becomes one of those cases where the show repeatedly seizes on the same handful of beats long after the novelty is gone. How many times do we need Cartman to rehash the same race science joke? Haven’t we seen him try to exploit his fellow students for his own selfish ends 1000 times before? Maybe some viewers might appreciate a slightly more traditional storyline involving the South Park kids, but this just feels like something that’s been done before, and better.

At the very least, there was potential to dig a lot deeper on the Saudi Arabia front. Perhaps this episode would have been better off if that were the sole focus, rather than bringing Hegseth and the military into the fray. Having him launch an attack on the Turkey Trot race is a neat enough way to tie things together, but it doesn’t end up yielding as much humor as you’d expect. It’s all a fairly anticlimactic way of tying things up, right down to the overly predictable twist of Tolkien accidentally winning the race and proving Cartman correct.

Sidebar - The show once again proves its gaming bona fides by showing Tolkien playing Arc Raiders, but then it immediately cancels that out by suggesting he was playing on an Xbox 360. That’s a minor detail, but it still bugged me watching Cartman carrying such an ancient console through the streets.

In the end, this episode only manages to make it feel all the more like the series is spinning its wheels right now. Apart from Hegseth winding up in the jail cell right alongside Thiel, nothing here really serves to advance the larger narrative of these two seasons. I’m still struggling to understand what the point of that Cartman “6 7” subplot even was, given how abruptly it's been swept under the rug. And there’s absolutely nothing this week regarding Trump and Satan’s baby or the new love affair between Trump and J.D. Vance. “Turkey Trot” winds up being a real momentum killer right before the big finale. There’s an awful lot of ground to cover and loose ends to tie up in only one episode. We’ll soon see if the South Park crew are up to the challenge.