By Jesse Cataldo

Throughout its nine year run, “South Park” has proven there’s nothing like a short production time for keeping things current. For the Season 10 premiere, writer-creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone were able to write and animate a lightning-fast rebuttal to Isaac Hayes’ departure in days, capturing the issue while it was still fresh, something impossible to imagine for most shows.

In this case, a longer incubation period might have been for the best; hastily patched together and visibly undercooked, last Wednesday’s premiere contained most of the bad thing about “South Park,” with too few of the good.

The episode began with a “last time on South Park” segment, detailing the departure of Chef in a non-existant previous episode. A promising, but brief moment of inspired television, the segment summed up the kind of creative mockery that makes the show so brilliant at times. Back in the present day, Chef makes a celebrated return from an excursion with the “Super Adventure Club,” but something about him has changed. For one, he has a bizarre pattern of clipped, disconnected speech, thanks to the fact that all his dialogue was spliced together from previous episodes. He’s also developed a disturbing new hobby, and with a little investigation Cartman, Stan, Kenny and Kyle discover their mentor has been brainwashed by the club, which is actually devoted to molesting children in exotic locales.

The connection to Scientology is obvious, but it’s not one that especially rewarding. Even worse, equating scientologists to child molestors is a quick, easy joke, the type of which the show too often resorts to when it can’t (or doesn’t have the time to) come up with something that’s actually clever. The show garnered laughs in an episode last season by simply illustrating Scientologist’s beliefs with the subtitle – “This is what Scientologists actually believe.”

The same scenario is repeated in the premiere with the Super Adventure Club, an unsubtle in-joke that feels as forced and lifeless as the rest of the episode, which never goes anywhere beyond veiled childish name-calling. It seems pointless to criticize “South Park” for being immature, but the show is usually able to succeed by forming that immaturity into an effective satirical weapon. Unfortunately, the premiere never got to that point, and the lazy, slipshod result amounts to a wasted opportunity to score points on an easy target.

Chef and the children in the “South Park” premiere.