Mr. Mackey is now gluten free, and everyone is annoyed when he won’t quit preaching about how great he feels — but, after witnessing a disturbing demonstration of what happens to your body when you do eat gluten, South Park becomes the first town in America to go gluten free. This is an inconvenience for the boys, who planned a party to win back the crowd for abandoning school in favor of a start-up company.
"Gluten Free Ebola" contains examples of:
- As You Know: Principal Victoria says this phrase twice regarding Butters and the gymnasium.
- Bait-and-Switch: When Stan said that they already had a friend who needed them, some fans thought it was Butters, given that he was always the Fifth Ranger of their group and that he wanted to come back to school after burning the gym. But instead it was Scott Malkinson.
- Big "NO!": Cartman towards the end of his nightmare.
- Credits Gag: The credits have been revised to say who is gluten-free.
- Crossing the Burnt Bridge: The boys have to face the kids at school after blowing them off to start their own company. Butters is the exception, who got himself suspended for burning down the gym.
- This is the sign that from now on, South Park is no longer a series of stand alone episodes with little to no continuity; it now has a continuous episode-to-episode storyline throughout each season. The A.V. Club noted this as an experimentation with episode-to-episode continuity, in which the episodes "explore the consequences of the boys' actions [week to week], allowing the plots to be motivated in part by their attempts to dig themselves out of a hole".
- Easily Forgiven:
- The boys: throwing the party gets them forgiven without any further mention of their actions.
- At the end Wendy gives up on chastising Stan for his Jerkass behavior and gets back together with him.
- Engineered Public Confession: Wendy gets Stan to admit live on radio that the real reason they're cancelling the party is to avoid ridicule again.
- Failed a Spot Check: Randy didn't realize that beer is made of wheat (containing gluten) and he gets quarantined at a Papa John's since he drank Pabst Blue Ribbon.
- Foreshadowing:
- "I keep having dreams of Aunt Jemima. She's trying to tell me something, but then she just fades away."
- When Stan tries asking Randy about a co-worker who might be Lorde's uncle, he dodges the question and asks some unrelated questions. The ending reveals that he is Lorde.
- The Guards Must Be Crazy: The guards quarantine whoever ate gluten at a Papa John's, but neglect to thoroughly inspect the place more and failed to discover the pizza dough at the Papa John's.
- Hope Spot: One of the quarantined men at Papa John's starts eating pizza dough with no apparent ill effects, and proclaims that gluten is safe after all. Then his dick flies off.
- Insane Troll Logic: Randy claims that ice cream, since it doesn't have any gluten, must be good for you, despite how ice cream contains sugar, fat, and lactose, which is just as bad for you as gluten.
- Noodle Incident: It's never seen how or why Butters set the gym on fire.
- Not Hyperbole: The FDA representative starts his demonstration by stating that people have probably heard of all sorts of things gluten is supposedly responsible for, including "having your dick fly off". After he explains his audience what gluten is while using some lab equipment to distill some gluten-heavy foodstuffs into a beakerful of pure gluten, Mr. Mackey shouts at him to drink the contents of the beaker if he's so sure that gluten isn't harmful. He hesitates a bit, decides it can't be that bad and drinks it, but shortly afterwards he's in great pain, his veins start turning black and sure enough, his dick starts flailing around rapidly before flying off like a rocket.
- Nightmare Sequence: Cartman dreams about the party being ruined by the lack of food, with Aunt Jemima briefly interrupting it with a cryptic message.
- Pet the Dog:
- Despite both being some of the biggest Jerkasses in town, Stephen Stotch and Mr. Garrison both try to save the Papa John employees of the gluten epidemic when the entire town is in chaos, trying to warn them to leave the place before their dicks fly off.
- Cartman has a lot of admiration for Aunt Jemima in his dreams, and waves goodbye to her vision during the party at the end of the episode. It's especially notable since she's black and he has a tendency to be scared of or vilify black people.
- Ship Sinking: Stan/Wendy, after Stan dumped her and bragged he would be "swimming in bitches". It was refloated at the end of the episode.
- Shout-Out:
- Aunt Jemima appears in Cartman's dreams, sitting on a porch in a rocking chair like Mother Abagail from The Stand (1994).
- At the end, everyone is now engaging in an entirely simple carbohydrate-free diet in which their diet consists of mostly fats, meats and vegetables. This is known as the keto diet in real life.
- Take That!:
- Stan asks Wendy if she still wanted to see "that stupid The Maze Runner movie".
- The quarantine zone that Randy, Mr. Garrison and a random civilian is sent to is Papa John's.
- Tempting Fate: The FDA representative assures the townspeople that gluten is completely safe for consumption. Mr. Mackey dares him to drink a vial of concentrated gluten.
- Toon Physics: Unfortunately for Stan and the rest of the gang and the rest of the world, gluten is proven to be a destructive substance that can cause a person’s dick to fly off if consumed in large or concentrated quantities. Randy even doubts that gluten can cause such effects for a moment, but when a second person eats a lot of gluten and the same results happen, Randy is forced to accept that yeah, that’s how their world works.
- The Unfair Sex: Following their breakup when Stan attempted a start-up company, Wendy gives Stan a lengthy "The Reason You Suck" Speech about how selfish, fickle and unreliable he is. Fair enough, but this is the same girl who coldly got her best friend to inform Stan he was dumped after getting bored of him and continuously attacked him verbally due to misplaced jealousy and a lack of trust over Facebook.
- Wham Episode: Downplayed, but this is the episode where South Park started having episode-to-episode continuity.
