5.1/10. I mostly watched this one after watching "Dagger of the Mind" from Star Trek and realizing it was a direct parody. Unfortunately, the show doesn't do much with the parody, just implanting the same setup (replete with a Dr. Adams and a Dr. Van Gelder) into South Park's world and hoping that's enough. There's some mild humor out of the fact that the big grand brainwashing scheme isn't for a purpose anymore nefarious than convincing people that the planetarium is cool, and Mr. Mackey doing a mind-meld is amusing, but the plot isn't especially compelling and there's not enough good laughs to prop it up.
The b-story, with Cartman auditioning to be in a cheesy poofs commercial, is fairly shallow as well, but has a few more chuckles built in (including the haiku scene). The revelation that he's only in the commercial for about a second, and his anger at no one seeing his big moment because they were at the planetarium leading to the resolution and combination of the two plots worked fairly well, but overall, it's just not the show at its best.
You can tell in these early episodes, Matt and Trey were still finding the show's voice (even as they got self-referential with "We Killed Kenny" bit) and things hadn't quite solidified into the polished, sharp show South Park would become.
Shout by KuhnBlockedParent2022-04-14T23:36:11Z
Best part is Trey going hard on the Cheesy Poofs song. One of my favorite things about the show is when he does that super over the top voice