Jmunney's Blog

The Save Greendale Committee has saved Greendale!

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This is Greendale saved?

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The work of the SGC has apparently actually made a difference, even though we haven’t really seen them in action that much this season.  In fact, episodes that have focused on improving Greendale seemed to emphasize the futility of that endeavor. “Analysis of Cork-Based Networking” portrayed the circuitous route of glad-handing that it apparently took to get a simple job done.  “VCR Maintenance and Educational Publishing” presented a Save Greendale task interrupted by a scheme on the side that ultimately amounted to nothing.  But I think it actually works to say that most of the committee’s duties were completed in the background.  The point is conveyed that most of the tasks must have been uneventful and become just a part of the committee’s routine.  It is not like this is the first season that these characters have cared about Greendale, but this year has represented the most practical – and least-story filled – manifestation of that care.

So, this episode begins in a way befitting its title.  It is a “basic story,” if it is even a story at all.  The most urgent matter on the board of to do stars is “Make more to do stars.”  The Save Greendale Committee spends a good portion of the first act playing games on their phones.  The Dean comes on over the P.A. system, but it turns out he just hit the button by accident, so he uses this opportunity to see how everyone is doing.

Abed doesn’t like all this contentment, because he thrives on a good story, and in a good story, people aren’t content all the time.  I feel that typically in this type of situation, Abed would just go off and start his own side adventure, but here the circumstances are a little different, thanks to the incoming visit from the insurance appraiser.  While that is supposedly the narrative reason why Abed should avoid making Greendale as shenanigan-filled as usual, thematically there is something more going on.  I don’t think what Abed is worried about here is contentment so much as the end of an era.  Even though everyone’s time at Greendale seems more or less indefinite at this point, there is a definite sense that the success of the Save Greendale Committee means it is time to move on, and moving on is not Abed’s forte.

In the face of adversity, Abed is not one to shut down; instead, he is one to go even crazier.  For a while, it is his crazy sensibility that seems to be driving the directing and editorial choices of the episode, especially with the cut to the teacher’s lounge, followed by the cut back to Abed running through the hallway, with the camera struggling to find him at first.  The close-up on the guy having some soup after Abed trails off with “Let the lack of story…” is one of the most brilliantly experimental tricks the very experimental Community has ever done.  I saw a comment of someone suggesting that the rest of this episode should have just followed Soup Guy, which I would have found incredible, but this may not have been the best time to go avant-garde, as this could be Community‘s penultimate episode, and it might be a good idea to tie up some narrative loose ends.  Also, it turns out that there ultimately is a story to be told here, because now that Greendale is actually functioning properly and thus has value as a property, Carl and Richie (the always welcome Jeremy Scott Johnson and Brady Novak) are ready to sell out to the first bidder.

The return of Subway isn’t as insidiously threatening as when it was employing corpo-humanoids.  The villain here that might be bringing about the demise of Greendale as we know it is really greed and opportunism, while Subway’s presence is more about delightfully goofy gags.  School locations are renamed with unimaginative Subway-based puns, Jared Fogle cameos, and Annie at her most badass zings to the Subway rep, “Great, thanks for making my joke accurate.  Now it’s hilarious.”  And the most brilliant goofy gag of them all is Abed asking for clarification of how Subway refers to its units of bread, a moment of genuine curiosity amidst the antagonism.

In my review of “G.I. Jeff” last week, I bemoaned the fact that Jeff’s troubles seem to have come out of nowhere.  This episode seems to imply that he is scared of how is life is as good as it is right now, or the way in which it is good.  He has settled down, and when Annie points this out to him and suggests that he loves Greendale, or Shirley tells him that his heart is his strength, he deflects these compliments, by insisting that all he loves are Scotch and himself or by telling Shirley she has something in her teeth.

This state of mind leads to his rash proposal to Britta.  I knew ahead of time that this scene was coming, and as a Jeff/Annie fan, I obviously wasn’t looking forward to it.  But, even though I thought it was a terrible decision for Jeff to propose at that moment, the scene worked for me.  Unlike a lot of Jeff/Annie shippers, I don’t think Jeff and Britta are that terrible for each other.  And I’ve been thinking lately about how I used to be a Jeff/Britta shipper.  When I start watching a new show, I tend to pull for the protagonist to end up with the love interest that he is nominally pursuing (so long as it is clear that they are not completely wrong for each other).  Community began with Jeff chasing Britta, so naturally, I wanted them to end up together.  Jeff’s motives were superficial at first, so I wanted him to have to work for her.  And he did.  They became friends, without any expectation on Jeff’s part that she would inevitably fall for him.  When Jeff started dating Slater, Britta was clearly jealous, whether or not she wanted to admit it.  When they hooked up during the paintball game, their sexual tension was resolved much sooner than that of any classic sitcom will they/won’t they relationship.  Community treated romance differently than other sitcoms, and it felt like it would be more satisfying, or at least satisfying in a different way, if Jeff and Britta eventually ended up together.  But then “Pascal’s Triangle Revisited” happened, and with it came my favorite kiss in television history, and I suddenly became a Jeff/Annie shipper with no looking back.

The sudden emergence of Jeff and Annie wasn’t the only thing that made me stop cheering on Jeff and Britta.  In season 2, the latter pair were fuckbuddies, but nothing happened beyond that, and they have both made it clear that the sex wasn’t all that great for either of them.  By Season 3, they were old friends, but the kind of friends who are kind of mean to each other, and not in the pleasantly teasing sort of way.  By this point, I was like, “Yeah, no way,” regarding Jeff/Britta.  And, really, I felt that way up through most of this season.  But looking back, in Season 4, Britta did help Jeff get back in touch with his dad.  And this season, they really haven’t been as combative as they used to be.  This whole series kicked into gear because Jeff was trying to sleep with the hot blonde in Spanish class.  It would actually be kind of cool if they could manage to successfully bring it all the way back around to the beginning and make them a legitimate couple … except for the fact that there is someone else who is much more compatible with Jeff.

I have seen Jeff/Britta shippers make their case by saying that Jeff can just be himself when he’s with Britta.  And you know what?  They’re right.  But he can also be himself when he’s with Annie.  Annie accepts Jeff for who he is, but also pushes him to be his best self.  It all comes back to “Pascal’s Triangle Revisited” again.  Jeff at that moment wished that part of him – the part that wanted to evolve – could be with Slater and that another part of him – the part that wanted to be himself – could be with Britta.  The implication was that with Annie, he could be both of those parts, and I have always found that that remains to be true.  I wouldn’t hate it if Jeff and Britta ultimately ended up together (and I never thought I would have said that just a few weeks ago).  But the difference is, while I think Jeff and Britta could work, I think Jeff and Annie already have been working.  They’ve never officially been a couple, but they already act like one in so many ways.  Even though Jeff and Britta had a great intimate moment in the proposal scene, I was more struck by this episode’s subtle Jeff/Annie moments.  When Shirley told Jeff, “you got something in your chest,” I immediately thought of this.  During the conversation about settling down, Annie’s eye roll at Jeff struck me as meaning, “I know you care more than you’re willing to admit, but I’ll let you come to realize that on your own time.”  Admittedly, I have conditioned myself to see things this way more than most Community fans, but these little moments with Jeff and Annie happen a lot, whether or not you interpret them romantically.

Ultimately, though, Jeff and Britta probably aren’t going to actually go through with getting married, at least not any time soon.  They have a history of spontaneously deciding to get hitched, and they didn’t actually go through with it those other times either.  There are clearly some new wrinkles that the second part will add to this next week.  There was a reason they were interrupted as they were about to christen the new table.  The buried treasure plot will also have plenty more to do before any thing can be said about it definitively.  The Dean, Annie, and Abed were infectious in their enthusiasm, but buried treasure sounds almost too much like a deus ex machina solution at this point.  We shall see how this all wraps up next week, but wow, we are left hanging more than any other Community episode has left us hanging before.

And now, the bullet-point portion of the review:
–So, uh, Alison Brie danced in this episode.  Apparently Danny Pudi and Jim Rash danced as well, but it’s hard to be sure, because my eyes were otherwise occupied.
-On the whiteboard: “This may be your last chance for a screen capture.”
-“The information you requested- is on the Internet.”
-“I wrote a paper on those dogs.” (A few seconds of silence)
-Insurance appraiser Ronald Muhammed was played by Michael McDonald, and that me laugh.  His routine about the city’s definitions may have been the funniest part of the episode. “The city defines a dog as any living entity with four legs and a tail.”
-Leonard chooses to “unsubscribe” from Abed, and it is hilarious because it is said by Leonard.
-TOMATO

I would not call Season 5 Community‘s best, but I would call it its most consistent.  Seasons 1-3 didn’t really have any duds, but they did have a few instances of treading water or going a little too insane.  Season 5 has basically avoided those missteps, but I think this year could have benefited from at least a few more episodes.  This is all a prelude to saying all the elements of “G.I. Jeff” were very good to excellent, but because there wasn’t room to set those elements up earlier in the season, the episode itself may have been no more than merely good.

The earlier Community episode that “G.I. Jeff” calls to mind – and specifically invokes – is “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas.”  Jeff’s shock at seeing himself stuck as a community college professor as he turns 40 apparently provokes a psychotic break in the style of Abed discovering that his mother won’t be a part of future Christmas celebrations.  While the crises are similar, the fantasies manifest in significantly different ways.  Abed actually saw the world as stop-motion animation.  In “Geothermal Escapism,” the floor actually was lava for him.  We have seen inside Jeff’s head before, and this time is consistent with those past occasions.  While his friends are present in his imagination, he does not project those visions out upon the world.  In the season 3 opening song and dance number of “Biology 101,” he created a (too-)perfect (Pierce-less) future.  In “Advanced Introduction to Finality,” he considered the crossroads of graduation as a fight between his good and evil selves.

The key difference between Jeff and Abed is that, even though Jeff’s interior life is quite strong, the separation between that interior and his exterior remains clear.  Jeff may not have wanted to face where his life was at, but it required mind-altering substances and a break from a fully conscious state for him to get stuck in a part of his head where he isn’t facing reality at all.  Like Abed, Jeff’s psychotic break takes the form of a cherished piece of entertainment from his childhood.  (Jeff and Abed are a lot alike, don’t you know.  They were both raised by television, weren’t they.)

I have never watched the G.I. Joe cartoon, but I have watched plenty of cartoons from the 90’s, which is close enough to the 80’s, which is when Joe is from, so I think I know something close enough to the style that this episode was going for.  The attention to detail was typical of Community, which is to say, AS EXACTING AS POSSIBLE.  I especially appreciated the tiny film strip scratches constantly popping up throughout the frame.  There were a few gags at the expense of G.I. Joe that were a little on the nose (the lip sync mistake comes to mind), but most of the takedowns were astute and even the cheap jokes were funny.  The Joe’s and Cobra totally having their mind blown by the instance of someone actually being killed was particularly cutting.

While I have never seen G.I. Joe, the commercials for the toys lasted into the 90’s, so I can say that the ad breaks that were part of Jeff’s fantasy were completely accurate.  I never realized until now just how strange it was to have this group of boys narrating their toy playing in the backyard while interacting with the commands of the narrator.  Weaving Jeff’s storyline into the commercials made them even more surreal.

The one episode of television that “G.I. Jeff” most reminded me of was actually “The Sting,” my favorite half hour ever of Futurama.  Annie’s plea of “Jeff, please, I don’t want you to die. Can you hear me?” in the former sounded a lot like Fry imploring Leela that she needs to wake up in the latter.  The predicaments that Jeff Winger and Turanga Leela faced were both prompted by life-threatening circumstances.  While Leela’s journey was a real mind-bender in which she couldn’t figure out what realm of reality she was in, Jeff – or “Wingman” – understood rather quickly what was going on.  And thanks to Abed as “Fourth Wall,” a clear route of escape back to reality (the animated realm up to the live action commercial interstitial realm and then up to the live action real world) was presented to him.  But Jeff took some convincing that it was worth it to wake up.  He was scared that because his life is still stuck at Greendale, he won’t ever be where he really wants to be, so he would rather retreat into the pleasures of his boyhood.  Tellingly, and appropriately, he changed his mind when he was reminded of the pleasures that are a part of adulthood, like boobs and Scotch.  In his heart-to-heart with Duke and Cobra Commander, I think he began to realize that he needs to enjoy those pleasures with as much enthusiasm as he enjoyed G.I. Joe.

One last note about the portrayal of Greendale in the G.I. Joe world: Jeff cast the Dean, Chang, Duncan, and Hickey as members of Cobra and noted that “it’s as if there’s something about [Greendale] that feeds on ambition.”  While he is friendly with all four of these guys to various degrees, it is clear that he does not want to remain at this place for as long as any of them have been there.

I want to fully embrace “G.I. Jeff,” because it does have that patented Community blend of biting humor and heartrending pathos, but Jeff’s troubles seem to have come out of nowhere, and this is why I began this review by contending that this season could have benefited from the breathing room of a few more episodes.  I suppose the crisis of this episode is the sort that strikes with little or no warning, but it would have made sense if Jeff’s inner demons had been seen more earlier in the season.  Also, the ending of the episode felt a little rushed.  Nobody looked all that visibly distraught once Jeff woke up.  This may have been meant to capture the spirit of hugs and lessons learned at the end of an 80’s cartoon, but I think that still could have been pulled off with everyone looking more worried.  There was a chance he could have died!  Or, at least, that was what was implied while he was still in G.I. Joe world.  It feels so harsh to criticize these details, but they were important.  With a little tightening up, this could have been a damn near perfect episode.

And now, the bullet-point portion of the review:
-“Your idea was doing the exact same thing we did to those other guards back at headquarters?”
-“We’ve been shooting at each other and missing for 20 years.”
-I loved Britta imitating a whirring saw.
-“I swear to God, I feel Korean.”  You see, it’s funny, because Ken Jeong actually is Korean.  On the subject of Chang, the moment when he, as Overkill, split up into multiple copies and asked, “Which me is the real me?” sounded like a subtle reference to the various personae that Chang has taken on throughout the years.
-“You’re still 18-49 for almost a decade.”
-“Milk sold separately.”
-“Innocence not included. Comes with reversible ethics.”