Oh, he didn’t say it was free Five Dollar Footlongs for life.
Dammit, that’s what I came in here to say. 
I’ll be ok with Community being done after this season, if it is. I was actually ok with it being done after LAST season, as I didn’t realize that it was coming back for a 5th season. This season has had some gems (I really liked the GI Jeff episode, for the most part), but I’m ok with it being done, for now.
love this recap, but can it be edited? there are sentence-breaking omissions and typos. please fix.
I have been a daily boingboing reader for years. I loved this blog. The shift in content over the past year or so, though, has been quite dreary. “This Day in Blogging History” simply recycles old content. That Pepsi Beyonce ad that I had to skim past when reading on my phone for weeks was so jarringly out of harmony with the supposed values of the site and community. This morning was the breaker: FIVE articles that summarize television shows, three of them all in a row. If I wanted to watch television, I’d watch television. I want to read interesting things. I want to read about “wonderful things”. Too much of what is offered is now rehashed content, summaries of television, or placeholders that point me toward podcasts. I’ll be seeking elsewhere for my wonderful things, with a tinge of melancholy.
I read BoingBoing through an RSS reader, so I don’t have to worry about being bored by content that doesn’t interest me (and also saves me from the ads on the main site). It’s how I consume the entirety of the web, actually.
Sniff, I still miss you Google Reader.
Feedly has been a pretty solid replacement for me, once I turned off all the silly views that they had and put it back to list mode only. And I was able to link it up to my Google Reader account before it all shut down, too.
Am I the only person who thought Season 4 wasn’t that bad? It’s clearly different and missing Harmon’s voice, but some of the work on there was inspired - I especially loved the Troy and Abed switching bodies episode which was subtle, funny, and so deftly handled. The finale wasn’t amazing but it was a lot of fun, it did “make paintball cool again,” and it finally closed the door on the Evil Timeline story idea which had been lurking over the show and honestly wearing it thin. And most importantly for me, it was even keeled. It felt like the showrunners and cast/crew were doing their best with what they had and making some nice moments out of their situation.
Frankly I think this new season is a LOT more uneven. Troy’s absence is really destroying a lot of the dynamic, and the “Save Greendale Committee” idea in general doesn’t have the same charm as the banality of the study group. After one or two episodes where the single best thing about S4, Rachel, was brought back and used well, she’s once again been forgotten. “GI Jeff” was smartly conceived but it was ultimately all over the place, the pacing was rushed (it felt like an incomplete 15 minute episode), and the message was so heavy-handed. And it was exceptionally out of character for Jeff to try weirdo remedies to cause his collapse to begin with. It was a really laborious excuse for a GI Joe episode, and the considering the conceit was virtually identical to the S4 finale (it’s all in Jeff’s mind), I don’t understand why one is so great and the other is so ehn. And the other cornerstone of S5, Advanced D&D, for me was just a retread combined with stuntcasting. While it had great moments from Jim Rash who can make anything funny, Cross was woefully underused and the confident showoffy conceit of the show creating a magical world in the mind of the viewer out of what is essentially a bottle show was not as well handled here. The first one felt badass and audacious. This felt forced and unsatisfying.
While it’s nice to hear Harmon’s unmistakeable voice in the show again, Harmon isn’t perfect and there’s a lot about this season where he’s simply trying too damn hard to recapture the magic. Maybe this two parter is his admission that it’s no longer possible after losing both Pierce and Troy and after losing the driving conceit of the show, that they were all desperate students in this community college gone mad.
I can look at Season 4 somewhat objectively and appreciate it for what it is, and also look at Season 5 and know that even with Harmon back something just isn’t right about the show. I don’t know why more people can’t do this.
You’re not the only one. While I haven’t disliked season 5, I’ve been bored with it more often than not compared to season 4; it seems like the dialogue just isn’t flowing between the characters as well as it used to. The GI Joe episode was a throwaway since I didn’t care about the original series and didn’t get most of the references. I’ve been trying to empathize with Abed losing Troy, since I really enjoyed their relationship in previous seasons, but his development seems to be moving somewhat slowly. I’m surprised at how much the show has lost for me with the departure of Donald Glover. I still hope for six seasons and a movie, since that would fulfill a strange prophecy for a lot of fans, but this season I’ve been left wanting more often than not.
Like this recap. <3
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