Jmunney's Blog

“Introduction to Statistics,” “Pascal’s Triangle Revisited,” “Early 21st Century Romanticism,” “Herstory of Dance,” meet the newest member of your family – “Analysis of Cork-Based Networking.”  If there is one storytelling well that has not run dry for Community (and probably never will run dry), it’s school dances.  Even the otherwise shaky Season 4 got it right.  And perhaps that’s what the otherwise brilliant, but rather dark, Season 3 was missing.  Community has a tricky history with romance, but dance episodes have an essentially flawless record when it comes to love and relationships.  “Statistics” covered Jeff and Slater (and teased Jeff and Annie way ahead of schedule); “Pascal’s” dealt with the Jeff-Britta-Slater triangle and then snuck Annie in; “Romanticism” covered Abed and Troy with the librarian (“Books!”) as well as Jeff and the whole group; and “Herstory” teamed up Abed and coat check girl Rachel.  Interestingly, this episode only covers the romance in the C-plot, so we’ll get to that discussion a little later.

To start off, the Save Greendale committee storyline is finally picked back up, after a few weeks off to take care of saying goodbye to Pierce and Troy.  It begins with that old Community standby: the cold opening study table powwow (or, “prelimawow”).  The roster is a little different, but the dynamic is as strong as ever.  The departed may be gone, and that still hurts, but wisely, the new normal has been established.  And then there is an excellent cut-to-the-credits moment, as Annie punctures wall with a star meant to commemorate accomplishing a task.

The bulletin board A-plot with Annie and Hickey seemed a little lightweight due to a storyline that will probably not be picked up on further from here on out.  Lightweight or not, it was appropriately fun in a byzantine manner – or rather, a labyrinthine manner (it was enjoyable even without puppets or androgynous rock stars).  To get a bulletin board back up somehow involves getting approval from the custodian crew, who must be smoothed over with a favor from Paget Brewster in the I.T. department, who is happy to hear head of parking Robert Patrick might be able to help her out, who makes a demand that requires turning to Dean Pelton.  Hickey makes a big fuss about how all this backdoor deal-making is forcing Annie to compromise her principles, and she does display a worrisome tendency therein as she sets out to prove that “Annie Edison doesn’t get nothing done.”  But this storyline is really more about cutting through Greendale’s red tape, and this plot may not be significant plotwise, but it does have plenty significant to say about long-term characterization.  Annie continues to bust balls this season, and in Buzz Hickey, she has inspired another ally to fight alongside her.

As Annie leaves Jeff, Shirley, Duncan, and Chang to put together the midterm dance, this B-plot ends up being one of the funniest ever Chang-centric plots.  Seriously, his insisting on the “Bear Down on Midterms” theme may have been the funniest scene of the season, and it was quickly topped by the “Fat Dog” dance (“It’s not made up“).  The others are frustrated by Chang’s insistence, perhaps a bit too much, as “bear down” is an actual phrase and it does make sense when applied to midterms.  But Chang really needed to expound how that phrase could apply to a dance, as Duncan made clear (“you can’t just repeat it, you need to explain yourself”).

Ultimately, the midterm dance plot worked as well as it did because it was so thoroughly detailed in a way that was specific to the universe of the show itself: it turns out that Chang was inadvertently inspired by a story of a bear attack in Wisconsin, so to avoid the sensitive topic, the bears are re-fashioned into fat dogs.  And in beautiful, ass-covering fashion, Shirley and Duncan create a fat dog entry on Wikipedia, while Chang composes a fat dog song and dance.  And it all falls apart in the most hilarious way imaginable: Garret yelling “IT’S A BEAR DANCE!”

Finally, we get to the romance, which does NOT focus on Jeff and Annie, despite (or because of?) the fact that they have already had so much screen time together this season.  Instead, Abed stumbles into a day-long affair with a deaf girl, thanks to his wearing noise-cancelling headphones to avoid a spoiler-happy Britta.  Speaking of Britta, geez, did she go a bit too far?  I could understand, though not approve, her getting back at Abed for spoiling her, but how could she justify ruining his time with the cute deaf girl played by Katie Leclerc?  At least it was clear that she wasn’t the right girl for Abed if she was willing to spoil him for cash, and Britta did realize the error of her ways fairly quickly, but still – whoa.  The tension between her and Abed was inexplicably fraught.

The ultimate silver lining here was the return of Brie Larson, which we all know I’ve been anxiously awaiting.  I’ve been wondering how things went on the date that Abed and Rachel decided to have at the end of “Herstory of Dance.”  Apparently, that date never happened!  Or, it did, but they never contacted each other again until now.  That’s a little disheartening after how well they hit it off initially, but at least they were both mature about this second chance, not spending any time getting angry with each other, instead admitting they both should have been more proactive, and then deciding right then and there to get dinner (and apparently watch Rick and Morty – the best new show of 2014!).  I loved that Rachel started a coat check at this dance without any permission – I’m assuming she did so in the hopes of running into Abed again, a tactic reminiscent of Matt Damon pursuing Emily Blunt in The Adjustment Bureau.  As someone who was awaiting this moment with bated breath, I must now ask: that’s not it, right?!  They didn’t get Brie Larson back just for 2 minutes, did they?!  Based on the last shot of the two of them (during the Roxy Music-scored montage – add “More Than This” to the pantheon that also includes “Somewhere Out There” and “Kiss From a Rose”), it looks like she’ll be around a bit longer.  I mean, she was sitting in Troy’s seat.

Speaking of guest stars, this episode sure had a lot of them.  Was it too much?  Or did they satisfy?  Part of that, at least on an initial view, depends on whether or not you knew ahead of time that they were going to appear.  Since I hang out in areas where that sort of thing is revealed ahead of time, and also I can’t help but look it up myself anyway, I already knew about almost all of them.  It was fine knowing that Jerry Minor was going to be there, since he’s already appeared multiple times and this storyline more or less required his presence.  Eddie Pepitone wasn’t announced, but I figured he would show up.  I actually think it was better that I knew about Kumail Nanjiani, because I might have gotten too excited if he showed up unexpectedly and I wouldn’t have been able to settle into his rhythm; he basically played one of his overly officious characters from Portlandia.  Nathan Fillion’s appearance was a little disappointing, but that was more to do with it being so short, and Nathan Fillion is bigger than that, so it would have been a disappointment whether or not I knew he was going to be there.  Maybe he and Kumail could show up again at random points in the future, the way Jerry Minor and Eddie Pepitone have.  Paget Brewster’s appearance was fine for me either way, as I don’t know her that well.  It would have been cool if I didn’t know about Robert Patrick’s appearance, because he’s the sort of guy that I would go, “Oh, wow, Robert Patrick” to if it were a surprise, but it wasn’t that big of a deal.  With Katie Leclerc, it didn’t matter either way, because I’ve never seen her in anything else.  It was probably the most problematic knowing about Brie Larson, seeing as knowing about her made it obvious how Abed’s plot was going to end.  But everyone played their part well – I can’t in good conscience knock the episode for what I knew or didn’t know ahead of time.

This really was one of the most consistently hilarious episodes in a while, so I’ll end my review by listing some great funny moments I haven’t gotten to yet:
-“Is deforestation on the list?”
-“They really get the incest right.”
-“That was gibberish. You’re good.”
-“Yes, that is a Whitney original” – great line thanks to Kumail’s delivery
-Annie yelling “EVVEERRYTHING!” (which seems to have been a reference to Gary Oldman yelling “EVVEERRYONE!” in Léon: The Professional)
-“There was plenty of space to park in dinosaur times.”
-“Whatever you’ve got in your butt, can we get it out later?”
-“But you learned a lesson, and I gave a differently-abled person a job! … Let’s be fat dogs about this!”
-“This got Sorkin-y.”
-The bad sign language was great, and endearing, since Abed was actually making an effort to learn.
-The Dean thinks David Bowie is macho, which, of course he would.  And hey, even though Bowie may be androgynous, he’s got plenty of testosterone, perhaps too much, as his one multi-colored eye is due to a fight in which he was punched in the face.

“Geothermal Escapism” started out as a paintball episode in every way except paintball.  But “The Floor is Lava” was close enough to paintball anyway, as it also proved to have the capacity to destroy the entire campus, with thanks also once again to a disproportionately enticing prize.  The possibility that something like this could happen on Community was never in doubt.  Of course Abed would want to give Troy an appropriately massive, campus-wide send-off.  And no surprise that it would call back to their past great adventures.  But for the first half of this episode, I was a little wary.  It wasn’t just that Lava was so similar to paintball (the post-apocalyptic angle was new, but really just a subgenre of the action genre so fully covered in “Modern Warfare”), it was that the character stakes didn’t seem that high.  “Modern Warfare” took place in light of Jeff and Britta’s sexual tension boiling over, and the Season 2  2-part finale was precipitated by the possibility of Pierce being kicked out of the group.  It feels like at this point in the show’s run, these people are too comfortable with each other to have conflicts on those scales.

This is why I kept my eye on Britta, who insisted on everyone having a chance to grieve.  This really seemed unnecessary; nobody wanted Troy to go, sure, but not everyone needs to go through the same grieving process when a friend leaves.  Jeff, Shirley, and Annie at least all seemed perfectly capable of seeing Troy off without too much fuss.  But there was somebody missing from that opening study room scene.  Abed’s absence served both a narrative and a thematic purpose, and this was ultimately all brought together by the end.

It wasn’t just that the creators of Community wanted to re-capture the glory of the paintball episodes.  Abed was the one who orchestrated The Floor is Lava.  He was the one who really wanted to go back to those good times.  Britta may have applied her grief psychology too broadly at first, but she was right to have that mindset.  If genre-savvy Abed – who knows to be wary of sequels – was so focused on making something like a sequel (a spinoff, perhaps), then something had to have been be up.  When the game comes down to Troy, Britta, and Abed, everything is brought into perspective.  Abed knows intellectually that Troy won’t be here forever, but his unique emotional state affects his perception so strongly that he can’t help but see the floor as lava.  This episode had to be so similar to what had come before so that the change of the status quo that came at the end could be felt so strongly.

So I had no trouble feeling the ending of this episode, but it took me some mental aerobics that I more or less just explained to really get on the first half’s wavelength.  Ultimately, I do think it succeeded from start to finish.  It helped that the action was so well-directed.  You really got a sense of how painful some of those falls were.  Annie’s drop especially looked like it hurt.  There was also no shortage of laughs, with highlights including Duncan’s complaint that everyone besides the British cheats, Garrett’s storytelling about Shirley Island, “the reverse Danny Thomas” (whatever the hell that is), Gillian Jacobs’ delivery of “I understand. I lived in New York”, and “Cirque Du so long, you high-stepping acro-bastards,” which was perhaps as funny as it was only because Leonard said it.

For Troy’s last episode, “Geothermal Escapism” didn’t focus as much as one might have expected on Mr. Barnes.  But as I talked about in my review of “Cooperative Polygraphy,” Troy has clearly matured enough to take on this next stage of his life.  It wasn’t necessary to show him preparing, as it was clear that it was time for him to move on.  And so this episode focused more on those saying goodbye, particularly Abed, and here was just the latest example of how much of a classic all-time TV character he is.  It has never been confirmed one way or the other that Abed has Asperger syndrome, or something similar, and I think that has been for the best.  He understands his limitations, and he consistently attempts to work around him, so it is fascinating to see him actually debilitated by his condition.  It is a fitting cap to one of the great friendships in TV history to see Abed be able to be so honest with Troy in that moment.

As Troy is about to set sail, he gets the perfect goodbye from each of his friends.  His moment with Britta interestingly – and poignantly – calls back to their relationship from last season.  Annie eloquently expresses her amazement that someone she could barely talk to at first is now the easiest person for her to open up to.  Shirley is rightly denoted as the badass of the group.  Jeff, who in previous seasons looked to have been threatened by Troy’s heroic rise, is now genuinely impressed by how his protégée of sorts is now more awesome than he is.  And Troy and Abed – Clone Troy and Clone Abed, that is – don’t shake hands.  They hug.