Three wildly different episodes of Community finished out its third season tonight, a fitting showcase for the most versatile comedy around. All of them dealt with the different themes and stories flying around this season, from Chang the Dictator to Pierce’s father (and Jeff’s, for that matter) right down to the struggle for Abed’s sanity and the whole air conditioning annex’s recruitment of Troy. With one the first third completely dedicated to a high-concept Pierce story, the last two episodes were more of mixed effort, rushing through a lot of story lines in order to have two minutes to set up season 4. But even when it was slighty off-kilter, it was always funny, and most of the emotional moments hit the right beats at the end, leaving us with an interesting montage of scenes to chew on while the Greendale 7 recovers from their tumultous year.
In terms of the season’s canon, ‘Digital Estate Planning’ felt a little out of place, like it should’ve aired somewhere toward the middle of the season, rather at the very end. Either way, The Journey to the Center of Hawkthorne was a fantastic homage to games like Zelda, Super Mario Bros, and one of Dan Harmon’s personal favorites, Minecraft. In reality, there isn’t a whole lot to talk about in the episode outside of the video game jokes… and why there was a hanging skeleton in a cage in Abed’s baby Abed cave? It was nice to get a pixelated cameo from Giancarlo Esposito, plus the possibility of him returning in season 4, now that he’s the brother Pierce never had.
The season story lines really begin to come to a head in ‘The First Chang Dynasty’, which takes Ocean’s Eleven, and replaces millions of dollars for a bearded, half clothed Dean Pelton. The end of Chang’s big takeover of the campus ends in anti-climatic fashion at his (25th) birthday party, with the Dean simply recovering from his time in captivity, and Chang escaping to live another season in the background with only a scene or two in each of the thirteen (fingers crossed for 22) episodes, like this year.
Chang’s arc this season has largely felt like a waste, save for the noir-themed jokes back in ‘Competitive Ecology’, and it all reared its ugly head in ‘Chang Dynasty’. The kids have never been that funny of a concept, and for the amount of time it spent building into the Greendale 7 getting expelled, and the dire situations that arose when Chang’s master plan went into effect, the ending of ‘Dynasty’ just felt stunted with Chang running out of the room and it ending there.
That takeover was resolved by bringing another big season arc into the fold: Troy and the air conditioning unit, which turns into a weird murder conspiracy story in ‘Introduction to Finality.’ Backed up against Troy’s big character moments was a really dark Abed/Evil Abed story, on top of Shirley’s Sandwiches, and Jeff’s issues…
‘Introduction to Finality’ felt like it had too much to accomplish, and spent way too much time on a court case we didn’t care about – and one we didn’t even really get much of a conclusion to, except a Jeff speech about choices and destiny. But that speech, even though it was a little shoehorned in there, pushed all those complicated plots aside to close the season with a touching vignette about our characters, and where they’re going to be next season.
Thankfully ‘Introduction to Finality’ wasn’t the series finale, and tonight the last night of Greendale we’ll get. There were plenty of classic moments, funny jokes, and each episode represented well the flavor of what Community is about, even if some of the character stuff was weak. All three were very solid episodes of the show, even if they weren’t the best versions we’ve seen over the last three seasons.
But more on the macro Community stuff in my Final Thoughts next week. For now, we can all enjoy a glass of special drink that Community lives for another day.
‘Digital Estate Planning’: B+
‘The First Chang Dynasty’: B+
‘Introduction to Finality’: B
Other thoughts/observations:
– if there’s one thing this season did well, it was remind us that these people really need each other to grow, and both their friendship and Greendale is making them better people. Something we see a lot, especially with Jeff, and its that companionship that makes Community such a great show to turn into every week, no matter how wacky it can get.
– ok, I’m a tiny bit dissapointed with the three episodes tonight. They all felt like versions of Community we’ve seen done a little bit better before. I think there was just too much character stuff developed over the season for it all to close cleanly.
– so the Vice Dean is dead, but Starburns is alive… interesting.
– was that Britta moving into the former Dreamatorium? And how the hell can you play Inspector Spacetime in that tiny new version?
– Britta & Troy is obviously going to be a season 4 thing… do think it’s started to get teased a little too long. But that hasn’t stopped Jeff and Annie teases, which I don’t believe will end, even after the Annie vs. Annie conversation in ‘Virtual Systems Analysis’.
– how do they bring Chang back now? Is it possible he ends up working at City College, which is going to be another big plot line in season 4, it appears.
– can we just say that Annie was severely underused this season. Even Pierce had an emotional arc this season, where the fuck was Annie’s?
– can we get a Vicki/Fat Neil wedding next season?
What did everyone think of tonight’s triple feature? Feel free to leave your thoughts/comments below!
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I disagree tbh. Maybe they could have done slightly better with the video game episode but I have a feeling that that’s more to do with most hardcore community fans having assumed one would be in the pipeline since the beginning, and after how great Contemporary American Poultry was with the Goodfellas homage it had a lot to live up to. It more than served it’s purpose though. Brilliant references to the classic NES/SNES platformers I loved when I was young. Also the wrapping up of storylines didn’t feel rushed to me at all. It would have felt rushed had they crammed all of it into one episode. But setting aside the Chang-ctator arc for it’s own episode, as it was a major arc, and then giving the minor arcs of Shirley and Pierce’s business and Troy with the Air Conditioning Annex an episode felt very right to me. Not to mention they were both fantastically well done episodes. Also maybe it could have felt rushed simply because they all aired back to back? More of a fault on NBC’s part.