Well. This review is pretty damn late. I can give you a excuse including that I was walking in New York City during a blizzard and nearly gave myself frostbite, but if you’re reading this you probably don’t care. A upside to this delay was that it gave me a time to rewatch “History 101” and form some new opinions on it. If you still have a pessimistic view about it after reading literally dozens on articles on how and why Community won’t be the same without it’s showrunner, I encourage you to rewatch it. You’ll find out that it’s not so vastly different from other, albeit weaker, episodes. It was fyne. Not fine, fyne.
We all know season premieres are not one of Community‘s strong suits. But when I watched the episode live, only one word came to mind – meta. And not meta in a subtle, cool, way that Abed usually references to. I mean meta in an overt way. I mean, “Fans of the babbling brooke will be upset but I found it limiting.” I thought they were trying and failing to recreate Harmon’s references to the show inside the show. Then, at the end of my first viewing, I thought that maybe the overtness is cool and it’s just going way over my head? But after the second viewing, I changed my tune sort of. Obsessive, clued in viewers knew that the first scene of Abed TV is basically everything that the faux-Twitter account promised us in the new season: a laugh track, multi camera shooting, and just overall not what we wanted to see. I came to the conclusion that the new showrunners included this as a sort of nod to that, a nod that they won’t completely destroy Dan Harmon’s creations.
And I’m trying not to sound pessimistic, because honestly? This episode is comprable to other Community episodes. I think the show still retains some of it’s magic without Dan Harmon, and I still believe that pretty soon season 4 will hit it’s own stride. Not as much glory as Harmon’s spectacular season 2, but it’ll find a stride of it’s own. After all, even though Dan was a big force behind this show (I don’t think anyone will argue that). we still have great writers that’ve written some of our favorite episodes. We still have one of the greatest case ensembles on television. As long as Community and it’s new showrunners don’t try to recapture the glory days, we’ll be fine. As I mentioned before, season premieres are not one of this shows overwhelming strength. Even though, as Pierce stated, nothing much really happened in this episode, it still needed to take place. The show still needed to address that this is the last year in Greendale. And we all knew Abed would have a problem with this.
And that’s the whole plot of the episode basically. Or at least the most important one. We all knew we’d get a storyline like this. I mean, just rewatch Abed’s little soliliquy to Jeff in “Critical Film Studies” (seriously, do. One of my favorite Abed moments of all time). And they handled it well. We’ve already seen the group come together outside of school, but they’ve always had school and by extension the study room as kind of a home base for themselves. Abed’s coming to grips that pretty soon they won’t have that anymore. He wants to keep his friends more than anything. He’s just not sure if he knows how to without Greendale. But as the episode progresses, even Abed’s original happy place urges him to move on. He needs to, it’s something he can’t escape. Acting props to Danny Pudi, by the way. Look at his face when Jeff delivers the balls to Pierce. Just as Pierce becomes overwhelmed by Jeff’s balls and their innuendos, Abed is overwhelmed by the balls and their innuendos, by the guarantee that the group will, indeed, be graduating.
And they tied it up with a nice little bow. That part where Abed realizes that this was all the future one day actually really relates to the past seasons. We’ve seen Abed trying to avoid the future in the past, trying to preserve what he can of the then-current day. And then the show reminds us that, well, if we doubted the future of Community then, we shouldn’t doubt it now. Overall, yeah, the episode was missing something. Nothing actually tangible, just a little feeling. And time will tell if this is just a placebo effect over the loss of Harmon. But it wasn’t a terrible episode, either. It wasn’t a multi-camera laugh track with corny jokes. But who knows, maybe I’ll become a lobbyist at NBC for the immediate firing of the new showrunners in a few episodes. We’ll see and ish.
Tidbits
“While they were incepting, I stole their balls!” Leonard, I will love you forever and I am not lying.
I have Changnesia : ((((((((((
Really, watch that Critical Film Studies clip. It’s awesome and is a necessity for all lovers of Abed aka every viewer of Community, ever.
Honestly, you’re lucky I’m even a person after Lost ended. The ending of that was kind of like the end of my life, but I might be in a Community cult. Other favorites include The O.C, Suits, and almost everything else (slight exaggeration). Cool cool cool.