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shallowness) wrote2019-12-18 07:07 pm
shallowness) wrote2019-12-18 07:07 pm
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Thoughts on Community season 4 (second half)
Back in October, I posted an overview of my thoughts about the first half of Community season 4, as watched on DVD. I've now nearly finished watching the second disc (bar a few commentaries. So far, the commentaries have been variable in quality.) Here are my thoughts:
Overall, the episodes on this disc/from the latter half of the season were stronger than the opening ones. My favourites were ‘Introduction to Felt Surrogacy’ AKA the puppets musical episode with added Community weirdness and meta and ‘Heroic Origins’, more for feels than laughs, though it’s brimful of pay-offs and continuity. But neither of them reached the highs of seasons 1-3’s outstanding episodes.
As ever, the group survives all sorts of threats, usually by the power of Jeff’s Eloquent Speeches. But the question of who’s in the group arises in the viewer’s mind, because they aren’t always the Greendale seven, with Pierce sometimes around, sometimes not. Sometimes, the core group includes Kevin-Chang, but never the Dean.
They went for competitive Annie and Shirley before the valedictorian track thing, by having both try to set Abed up. My shipper heart liked Jeff allowing (and abetting) Annie to redecorate his flat, and I was amused by the effect of the Dean-as-Jeff on Annie, but then it all got sour
Pierce has a few less awful moments, from when he rightly calls Jeff out for his treatment of Britta to the banner save (year of the banners as the commentaries have it).
With the inevitable Troy/Britta break-up, the show puts friendship first. While I sometimes thought they strained to be heartwarming, I was touched by Jeff’s willingness to go along with flickering the lights for Troy and Abed.
I did enjoy Abed’s attempt to discover their backstory in ‘Heroic Origins’, which of course uncovered some unwelcome connections, mainly contributions to Shirley’s marital woes. But there was a voice inside my head going, ‘HELLO, YOU ALL LIVE IN THE SAME TOWN. THIS WAS INEVITABLE.’
The vacillation over who was this season’s baddie/s didn’t help. When Abed gifted us with a glimpse of the Darkest Timeline, in which Jeff and Annie were together (and all their shippers accused of just liking them because of the age difference? SOUR), I didn’t think that their threat to the Prime Timeline would become the Big Bad, overtaking Kevin-Chang’s alliance with the other college’s dean, and the latter was teaed for a while longer.
So the finale was all in Jeff’s head, the Darkest Timeline threat an expression of his anxiety about regressing to Old Fake Lawyer Jeff once he’d graduated. Although I enjoyed Abed’s visit to the Darkest Timeline, and could see they thought they were being clever, apart from the anti Annie/Jeff bent (with our Annie deciding Jeff should belong to nobody and thus be free to be objectified by everybody) I didn’t know that paintball had stopped being cool!
It was a happy, burbling accident that gave us Brie ‘Captain Marvek herself’ Larson in ‘Herstory of Dance’. The cast is generally good, and the actors involved in the body-swapping were clearly having a blast.
The Dean’s black and white costume in ‘Herstory’ is the outstanding costume.</cut?
Overall, the episodes on this disc/from the latter half of the season were stronger than the opening ones. My favourites were ‘Introduction to Felt Surrogacy’ AKA the puppets musical episode with added Community weirdness and meta and ‘Heroic Origins’, more for feels than laughs, though it’s brimful of pay-offs and continuity. But neither of them reached the highs of seasons 1-3’s outstanding episodes.
As ever, the group survives all sorts of threats, usually by the power of Jeff’s Eloquent Speeches. But the question of who’s in the group arises in the viewer’s mind, because they aren’t always the Greendale seven, with Pierce sometimes around, sometimes not. Sometimes, the core group includes Kevin-Chang, but never the Dean.
They went for competitive Annie and Shirley before the valedictorian track thing, by having both try to set Abed up. My shipper heart liked Jeff allowing (and abetting) Annie to redecorate his flat, and I was amused by the effect of the Dean-as-Jeff on Annie, but then it all got sour
Pierce has a few less awful moments, from when he rightly calls Jeff out for his treatment of Britta to the banner save (year of the banners as the commentaries have it).
With the inevitable Troy/Britta break-up, the show puts friendship first. While I sometimes thought they strained to be heartwarming, I was touched by Jeff’s willingness to go along with flickering the lights for Troy and Abed.
I did enjoy Abed’s attempt to discover their backstory in ‘Heroic Origins’, which of course uncovered some unwelcome connections, mainly contributions to Shirley’s marital woes. But there was a voice inside my head going, ‘HELLO, YOU ALL LIVE IN THE SAME TOWN. THIS WAS INEVITABLE.’
The vacillation over who was this season’s baddie/s didn’t help. When Abed gifted us with a glimpse of the Darkest Timeline, in which Jeff and Annie were together (and all their shippers accused of just liking them because of the age difference? SOUR), I didn’t think that their threat to the Prime Timeline would become the Big Bad, overtaking Kevin-Chang’s alliance with the other college’s dean, and the latter was teaed for a while longer.
So the finale was all in Jeff’s head, the Darkest Timeline threat an expression of his anxiety about regressing to Old Fake Lawyer Jeff once he’d graduated. Although I enjoyed Abed’s visit to the Darkest Timeline, and could see they thought they were being clever, apart from the anti Annie/Jeff bent (with our Annie deciding Jeff should belong to nobody and thus be free to be objectified by everybody) I didn’t know that paintball had stopped being cool!
It was a happy, burbling accident that gave us Brie ‘Captain Marvek herself’ Larson in ‘Herstory of Dance’. The cast is generally good, and the actors involved in the body-swapping were clearly having a blast.
The Dean’s black and white costume in ‘Herstory’ is the outstanding costume.</cut?