Community returned from a week’s break with “Foosball and Nocturnal Vigilantism”, which was a solid entry to the season but overall fell a little bit flat.
The two main stories of the episode started off simply enough. Jeff was humiliated at foosball by a couple European guys at school, and he said that he would play them a rematch on Monday. It turns out Shirley was an expert in foosball, so she agrees to teach Jeff and train him for his showdown. On the other story, we see Troy and Abed get mailed a very fancy special edition of Dark Knight Rises, which Annie destroys and tries to cover up. Both of those stories sound perfectly normal, right? Well, unfortunately they both suffered from the same issue for me: They both just got way too unrealistic.
Now I know what you’re thinking. This is Community! The sensational and crazy story lines are what makes this show so great! Well, usually I would agree with you, but the crazy story lines are usually prefaced by showing us, the audience, that these are a special case. For instance, we know that the Christmas episode from last season that was in claymation was all taking place in Abed’s head. We know that the paintball episodes weren’t supposed to be based in realism, as well as the Halloween stories from a few episodes ago that all were just told from members of the group. What hurt this episode so much for me was that none of this rang true with the characters that we know. Shirley is a nice lady, and we know she can have a dark side, but it just seemed too goofy and convenient that she was an expert in foosball and that she so easily lapsed into being a cutthroat foosball monster. And the whole anime scene was so unnecessary and forced.
On the same token we know that Abed can be kind of out there, and we’ve seen him dress up like Batman before, but actually breaking the law and trespassing into his landlord’s apartment based on some far-flung theory was just silly. We’ve heard Abed’s crazy ideas and theories before, but he’s never acted on them in this way and done something illegal. Also, Annie going from a clean freak goody-two-shoes to somebody who would trash an entire apartment to cover up one mistake felt like a stretch.
It wasn’t only the inconsistencies in the characters that bummed me out, it was the general lack of them in this episode! We got about two lines from Chase and Britta, and absolutely no Dean or Senor Chang. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: This show is at it’s strongest when all of the characters are working together as an ensemble, and that wasn’t the case this week.
I had to think really long and hard about whether or not I’m just over-analyzing the last two episodes and judging them harshly because of all of the drama of the show being benched for midseason, and I don’t think that’s it. It’s just an unhappy coincidence that the two episodes that have aired since this announcement happened to be not up to par. I really hope this show can pick it up and recapture the hilarity from the beginning of the season, and hopefully it can prove to NBC that it deserves to be on the schedule for at least one more season.
Random Thoughts:
- I was wondering why that cop looked so familiar to me, but then he actually just says in his scene that he appeared on a previous episode! Thanks for saving me the trip to IMDb!
- Oh, Alison Brie, why do you have to make me love you so much? Her Christian Bale impression killed me every time.
- I recommend checking out Leonard’s pizza review on the actual YouTube. It’s really there!
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