“We’ll try not to embarrass your community college library wedding.”

Community is back and it feels so gooood. It feels like this review is coming late, but unfortunately I can’t watch Community live (which makes me feel kind of like a traitor), so late it will have to be. This episode was pretty good, though I have to admit, I was looking forward to a meta-Abed reference on their unbelievably long hiatus. But we did get that Uganda line, so I think it’s fine.

We open in Greendale’s cafeteria, where the coffee shop has shut down. Shirley talks about her business ideas on what to do with the open space; make a sandwich shop. Pierce informs the group that he’s trying to expand into entrepreneurship, and suggests that he be the investor in Shirley’s idea. Suddenly, Andre (Shirley’s ex-husband now-turned-boyfriend) bursts into the cafeteria and proposes to Shirley, complete with a fresh dancing crew. She accepts (for the second time).

In the study room, Britta and Jeff have an anti-marriage rant, much to the chagrin of Annie. Shirley arrives and tells the group the wedding rehearsal will be in two days in the study room itself (?), and asks Jeff to give a toast. The group offers to help plan the wedding, and Pierce offers his business partnership again, but she rejects all of their help so she’ll have time to plan the wedding, and strongly urges them to act normal while there. Troy and Abed take this to heart, and decide in order to be normal at the rehearsal, they should have a 24 hour “weirddown” in the dreamatorium. We never did get to see what went down there, but they’ll be the Dreamatorium episode soon enough. I’m (in)patiently waiting.

Britta urges Shirley to at least hear what Pierce has to say about her potential sandwich shop, and signs herself and Annie up to take care of all the wedding details. She hesitantly accepts, and while at first she’s unimpressed by Pierce’s business offer, she soon pities him after it becomes known that Pierce was fired from Hawthorne Wipes. They make the pitch to Dean Pelton, and he seems very impressed by it (and the picture of him holding bags of money).

However this makes Shirley late to her rehearsal wedding, of which Britta completely planned. She isn’t that happy about this, because it means Britta will eventually have to become a wife, and she didn’t even sit on Santa’s lap as a child! Jeff, meanwhile, is having trouble writing a toast since he’s so adamantly against marriage, because of his dad bailing on him. The two of them have a drunken almost-marriage at the altar after Andre and Shirley take an argument outside. Andre reveals that he wants Shirley to stay at home with the children since he wants to be the main breadwinner in the family, but Shirley can’t accept that. The two rush into Jeff and Britta to solve their debacle, which ends up being a reconciliation between them. They marry on the spot.

All the while, Troy and Abed have arrived in normal grey suits with normal humor and normal reactions to all the madness going on around them. Then, Troy spots Annie’s Boobs (!) and goes up to Abed, telling him to embrace their weirdness. Dean Pelton informs Shirley that a Subway is being built in place of her sandwich shop, but she’s more worried about Pierce’s reaction. We end to a shot of him drunkenly talking to his father’s grave, which is always good.

I really liked this episode, and though the plot was good for a post-hiatus storyline. It had a lot of character development, and set a stage for some character’s paths for the next couple of episodes. I liked how Troy and Abed being normal kind of set a theme of normality for the episode, and I appreciated the fact that while there was a normal, less inside jokes feel to the show (probably to attract new viewers), it showed what Community would be like without those things. It explored the limitations of its normality and answered to a lot of the critisism that the show would attract more viewers if  it lost some of its “weirdness”.