‘South Park’ Brings Back Tweek for First Time in 5 Years in Craig-Centric Episode

The six-episode 29th season of South Park (or South America, this season) is nearing the end of its run, and the penultimate episode, airing Wednesday night on Comedy Central, will spotlight an unsung and perhaps forgotten character, Craig Tucker, and bring back a fan favorite who has been missing from the season so far: his boyfriend, Tweek Tweak.

Season 29, episode five is titled “We Be Clubbin’,” and the logline, from a press release sent to The Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday morning, reads: “When club sports take over Craig’s afternoons and weekends, Tweek signs up to spend more time with him. Soon his whole family struggles to keep up.”

Tweek, the over-caffeinated, paranoid wreck, has carved out a special spot in the hearts of South Park fans, but he hasn’t had a speaking role on the Comedy Central mainstay since the second episode of season 24, which aired in March 2021. If you forgot about Tweek, you likely forgot about Craig, too. He’s the show’s deadpan voice of reason, often calling out the four main characters for their antics in ways that double as meta-commentary on the show itself. Craig hasn’t stepped out of the background at South Park Elementary since 2019.

Still, Craig and Tweek have been together for more than a decade — at first, against their will. The two were paired off in the 2015 episode “Tweek x Craig,” in which the Asian girls at school start drawing yaoi art of them in affectionate and homoerotic poses. A desperate-to-seem-woke Randy Marsh decides that people don’t choose to be gay; “Asians decide,” or, as he later clarifies, “the Japanese.” The boys try to stop the frenzy by staging a breakup, then end up playing along as a couple. In the end, it stuck, and the relationship is now South Park canon.

It’s unclear whether or how the episode will tie into the season’s running threads: the town’s name Trump-era name update to South America and the change coming in November with the Nov. 19 release of Grand Theft Auto VI, a gag widely read as a nod to the just-passed midterm elections. South Park will most likely find a way. Or maybe, as Tweek would scream, “That’s too much pressure!”

South Park season 29, episode 5, “We Be Clubbin’,” airs at 10 p.m. ET/PT on Comedy Central and streams on Paramount+ starting Thursday.