The other thread with the renewed/cancelled stuff wasn’t really suitable for episode discussion.
I don’t have too much to say about this one, but I wanted to get an episode thread up. So here are some scattered thoughts:
I worry that when this show becomes too self referential it’s too alienating to new viewers. When they revealed the mental asylum scenes, I actually briefly considered that since we were at the end of a season with an uncertain future, if they were actually legitimately going in that direction.
But concern about self referential circle jerks aside, I do like how they lampooned themselves with the discussion about how crazy the show has become, being a 2 year community college, etc.
I was dissapointed that they seemed to indicate that there wouldn’t be a paintball episode this year. They could have 6 seasons and a movie of paintball and that’d be alright with me. Especially since they could turn the Chang conflict into paintball somehow.
There’s been too much “Abed is crazy” rather than “crazy Abed is funny” this season. As a clip show, it wasn’t as funny as last year’s.
In any case, you should leave the thread in pairs. Rape is up 8%.
Oh, and a heads up. We get 3 episodes on Thursday apparently. Usually that’s worrying when they just try to dump the rest of a season in one day, but it’s sweeps (I think), so that’s maybe a good thing? Not sure how to interpret it. In any case, we get episode 3.22 at 8, 3.20 at 9, 3.21 at 9:30. No idea what’s going on with that, but we get a big dose of community.
Like I said in the other thread, I loved how Annie went in to full crush mode when Abed did his Madmen impression. She’s insane.
One thing I didn’t like was Chang taking suggestions from his army about Plan B. I actually like Chang this season and was hoping that he would have this elaborate plan with many fail-safes.
Any time we can get John Hodgeman on prime time, the better. I think we can give up on new viewers to the show, and just enjoy the ride. This episode was fantastic - the mental asylum alternate version is hysterical (the line about taking the pen made me lose it). Could there be a three-episode paint ball arc coming up?
This is probably the only show ever to get people to think, “Another clip show? Awesome!”
So much good stuff in this episode. I may want to watch it a third time to see if I pick up on any more Easter eggs. When Annie does “Troy and Abed and Annie in the Morning”, you can see Annie’s Boobs in the air conditioning vent behind her. Also, I’m not sure, but I think Abed solves all of the puzzles on the fake psychiatrist’s coffee table.
Networks air stuff out of order quite often. The last few years of Scrubs on NBC suffered from this quite a bit (quite noticeable because Cox shaved his head at one point, yet he kept going back and forth to having hair and not) and another recent example is The Finder on Fox (one character mentioned finally getting to meet another character, even though they’d had plenty of interaction before). And of course, Firefly is one of the premiere examples of this nonsense, where they actually aired the first episode last.:smack:
As for this Community episode, wow, everytime I think I couldn’t love the show more, the prove me wrong. That asylum bit made me pause the DVR so I didn’t miss anything from cracking up too much. And the return of Baby Boomer Santa! YES!
This is not at all what people are talking about when they call this show self-referential. (BTW you do know, right, that the bits from “previous shows” in this epsisode were not from previous shows? And that’s one way in which the show is self referential–creating fake clips for a clip show is the show saying something about the kind of show it is, namely, a sitcom.)
There was a joke about how they’ve been in community college for three years. Jeff then begins arguing that this is normal. This is self-reference–it’s the show justifying itself against a common (lighthearted) criticism.
I wondered if that was happening. Willa’s parole officer keeps going back and forth from open hostility to grudging respect, and I couldn’t tell if it was sloppy writing or out of sequence episodes.
I love how self-referencial the show is, and would feel unsatisfied if they played to new-comers.
Speaking of which, did anyone else feel that when Hodgeman was listing out why they were all committed and Britta cut him off was referring to how Britta’s character has changed so much since the first episode? It was also referred to a couple episodes ago when Jeff remarked “when I met you, you seemed smarter than me.” Either that or maybe there is a backstory we haven’t got on why she ended up at a community college… Either way, the Britta of the pilot episode would have seen right through the fake psychologist.
And finally, why wasn’t Pierce at the table for when the Dean gave them pizza? They even went out of their way to have Dean mention there was 6 pieces.
EDIT:
I forgot that at the time and thought it was a callback to that time Abed pretended to be Don Draper and Annie almost kissed him. HOW DID I MISS THAT TWICE?
But that’s on a small portion of the jokes on the show, and it would not even be noted by someone watching fo the first time. I can’t imagine how that would make a difference to a new viewer. Same with the fake clips (though I disagree that they are self referential: drama will often show flashbacks of events we never saw before, and that’s Family Guy’s stock in trade: Peter often refers to events that were never shown previously, and which are then shown in flashback): the fact that they were not clips has no relevance as to whether they’re funny or not. At most it’s just an extra level of humor.
The scenes worked because they were funny within the context of the show, not that they were never shown previously. In fact, that was utterly irrelevant to the episode. They were just typical flashbacks you see in every show on TV.
This was a great episode of Community in gestalt. It was not a good standalone episode and the fake clips were particularly weak, especially from the viewpoint of a new viewer.
