Season 4 wasn't that bad, I loved some of it like the Muppet episode and the "Freaky Friday" thing with Troy/Abed and Jeff/Dean (though it was one-sided in that case).
It wasn't bad, it just wasn't the same, felt forced and Chang was useless. He was really the main horrible link to the season. And I just realized Troy's final episode is next week!!!
It's true season 4 was decent. If I saw season 4 of Community not knowing the other seasons exist, I would have reacted "This is kinda funny." Just, it was hard to take because they toned down all the things about the first three seasons that made the show special, and made characters act like cartoon caricatures of themselves, more like a standard three camera sitcom than Community. And they only used Brita as the show's Meg, whereas her funniest moments are when they focus on her directionless political rage. And Changnesia was the most "Standard sitcom" storyline of them all and never led to anything funny. I thought the Muppet episode was the worst of the bunch. The claymation episode worked because it was always easy to trace what was happening in the cartoon to what was really happening in real life. In the muppet episode there was no connection between cartoon and reality, and they were doing things in the cartoon you know they'd never do in reality like eat strange berries because a stranger told them to. For the concept to work they would have needed to explain why all of them were acting so far out of character in the puppet scenes. Like Jeff's line in Repilot: You all came here four years ago as real people, and the school turned you into cartoon characters!" That sums up season four rather well.
This episode is awesome. There are so many one liners! So silly I love it! They can do season 6 within the year Troy is gone. Then for the movie he is lost as sea and the study group goes to look for him and get stuck on an island.
I wish I could watch tonight's episode (and Parks and Rec as well), but College Basketball took both of their time slots. I realize in this day and age of Internet and On-Demand viewing, this isn't a huge problem, but there is something to be said for watching a TV show "live" still.
False. Having it automatically download with the commercials edited out? A million times better. No it's not as bad as now when my local syndicated rights holder would have fire and ice destroy their broadcast affiliate and I'd miss episodes of DS9 completely, along with the super annoying sports pre-emptions where it wasn't even clear when the make-up airing would be. Online TV listings did not handle that very well back in those days. But watching a TV show on someone else's schedule is a sorry relic of the past.
What does it say about Chevy Chase that one of the best Pierce-centric episodes they've ever done doesn't even have him in it? I loved how this episode mirrored Season 2's "Cooperative Calligraphy". From the title ("Cooperative Polygraphy") to the fact that both are bottle episodes where our characters get mired in deep interpersonal conflicts. It was a really stellar outing. The beginning of the Troy sendoff. Wow, those episodes went by fast. I'm really going to miss Donald Glover, but at least they left a window open for possible future appearances. Anyone else notice that Danny Pudi seems to have added an extra layer of snark to Abed this year? It makes him just a little darker and I think it works very well for a character whose nature sort of precludes most forms of traditional character development.
I like being able to get online right after the episode is over and discussing it with you guys. Sure I could still do that if I pirated it in some form, but that's not really my thing.
I would also add that downloading it immediately with commercials edited out has been suggested by John Oliver to be the reason it's always in danger of cancellation. One other thing I loved about this episode is that we have Brita back! She's not 'The worst', who 'Britas' and fails to exercise basic competence on menial tasks. She's a pot smoking anti-authoritarian who is a bit of a hypocrite and whose bark is worse than her bite. Her intelligence level is solidly back to average. THAT'S Brita.
Another nice touch was how the polygraph guy kept mispronouncing Abed's name just like Pierce always did.
And in another brilliant callback, she is now (2014) the proud owner of a used iPod nano. I feel like this episode is the first one back where it's like we "never left". Good stuff.
I enjoyed it a lot. It's hard for me to relate to comments such as "It feels like it never left" or that "Britta is back." Since I haven't really watched the show enough to see any changes to the characters, I will take your guys word for it though. As for my DVD viewing, I am very nearly through Season 1, and will probably get into Season 2 pretty quick (since the DVDs are relatively inexpensive) I still beat myself up a bit for not getting into the show earlier.
I love and hate when it happens. It's like "Oh shit I forgot he's not dead", then you are find of happy they aren't.
I think that episode was good enough to be one of my top ten. I'm pleasantly surprised by just how classy they have been in their handling of Chevy Chase's exit. Well, as classy as six containers of super-virile sperm can be.
A few pages back we talked about how the show was supposed to be somewhat realistic. What. The. Fuck? Did he give that interview before making this episode?
They figured out how to do paintball again! All they had to do was take out the paintball. Troy will be missed...
In TNG Suspicions the Enterprise is Orbit of a star while they invent metaphasic shielding so that they can go into stars safely. Loads more examples if you add all the times some on blew up a sun.