South Park: why is Randy a kid? Blame one trip to Sephora
Randy Marsh walked into Sephora a grown man, which is more than anyone can say about how he walked out.
The episode responsible is "You Like That on Your Face," the third of South Park's 29th season, which aired on Comedy Central on October 14 and hit Paramount+ the next day. Trey Parker wrote and directed it. It's the looksmaxxing episode: the kids of South Park, a town the season has renamed South America, are obsessed with their faces and with "aura battles," and terrified of being cringe.
What happened at Sephora
Stan gets there first. He takes Wendy to Sephora, where the saleswomen start smearing face cream on the kids, and Stan ends up wandering an endless, empty version of the store straight out of the Backrooms.
Randy goes too, after using the same app Stan did. He comes home looking like a fourth grader.
He has his own theory about it: his diet and all the bike riding. Stan is pretty sure it was the Backrooms. Sharon's solution is to send Randy to school, which puts him in Stan's class, alongside Kyle, Cartman and Kenny.
Everyone else's trip
Randy isn't the only casualty of the cosmetics aisle:
- Cartman takes Ike to Sephora, balks at the prices and asks for free samples. A saleswoman offers him far more if he'll go to the back rooms and meet the manager.
- Kyle and Stan find them back there with their faces mutated, and meet the manager: a giant woman with a tube of face cream, aimed at them.
- Kyle promises Ike his face will go back to normal, and that he'll back him up in his aura battle against Chase Chadwick, the episode's parody of the influencer Clavicular.
Randy settles that battle himself. When it starts, he steps in, handles things the old-school way and beats Chase up. The episode ends with him being marched to the principal's office, protesting all the way.
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Critics couldn't agree on the episode. IGN's Jesse Schedeen called it "probably the weakest new episode of South Park in several years," while The Hollywood Reporter's Kevin Dolak suggested it might be the season's "high-water-mark."
Is Randy still a kid?
Yes, for now. He's still shrunken in episode 4, "Guinea Pig on a Stick," the Halloween-week episode in which he joins Cartman, Stan and Kyle on South America's beef crisis.
The show hasn't said whether it's permanent. It already let Randy run a weed farm for years and then walk away from it, so a few weeks in the fourth grade is well within his range.
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