NBC’s ‘Community’ season 5, episode 5 review: Donald Glover leaves in sea of hot lava

Going into Thursday night’s “Community” season 5 episode, we knew that we were going to be pretty emotional. What we didn’t realize in the process is that this was going to be one of the best farewell episodes to any cast member of any show ever. It was hilarious, innovative, and completely heartbreaking in its final few minutes as we saw Troy say goodbye. Donald Glover played this perfectly, and the rest of the cast members did the same.

The entire premise of this episode was almost intentionally designed to have Troy and Abed  putting off saying goodbye to each other by playing a game of Hot Lava. The premise? The person who avoids touching the ground the longest wins. There were some tributes in here to post-apocalyptic films and movies, and even the placement of the characters was perfect. It made sense for Britta to be the last person standing outside of Troy and Abed, given that she played such a role in helping Troy realize that to Abed, this wasn’t a game. He literally felt like he would sink into lava without him. This is when the emotional cup started to runneth over.

The final scenes here as Britta played along with the game, and created “clones” for Troy and Abed to deal with the separation better was just enough of a tweak of her character for it to work.

We would be remiss to not mention that there were some pretty great meta references in here, as well: Chang shouted Nathan Fillion as his gay crush when losing the game (a reference to the appearance from the “Firefly” star next week); meanwhile, the boat that Troy left on was the Childish Tycoon, a reference to Glover’s Childish Gambino nickname. To cap everything off, LeVar Burton! He made his first appearance since the infamous season 2 episode that goes down as our favorite moment featuring Troy ever, when he couldn’t talk to him because of his paralyzing fear of disappointing him. Luckily, Clone Troy was confident, could speak out loud, and strive to move forward. Let’s hope that Clone Abed can do the same thing.

Hats off “Community,” for creating both a ridiculously funny episode and amazingly sweet sendoff. This was the best episode of any show in 2014 so far, and it makes this the first time all year that we’ve handed out this grade. Grade: A+.

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Photo: NBC