‘Community’ season 6, episode 5 review: Prison breakdown
Last week’s “Community” episode was our favorite of the season. Ken Jeong had probably his best episode of the entire series, and we really pushed the boundaries of what makes him such an interesting new addition to the show.
This week, we had what was a really great premise in inmates invading the halls of Greendale, navigating on what were effectively tablets on wheels. It was an incredibly silly sight to behold, but also for the most part a pretty fun one. As for the story itself, it definitely had its moments. We’re not going to say that it was the most magical “Community” we’ve seen, mostly because we’re sitting here writing this wondering if there is anything that we’ll take away from it, other than seeing a prisoner try to murder Jeff by ramming him repeatedly as he was next to a stairwell.
Perhaps one of the best / worst problems with the episode was timing. Mostly, it’s because it feels like we’ve had a ton of the Dean / Jeff dynamic lately, and we feel like this is a relationship that is better in small doses, since the more you give Dean time to creep out, the more the joke starts to wear a little bit. Granted, there are fewer people these days for Jeff to interact with, given that Shirley is gone and we really do not know either Frankie or Elroy very well yet … though we are at least very much on Team Frankie as this new, interesting authority figure. The jury is still out on Elroy, who was mostly there to make generational jokes and to say that Abed’s impression of black guys in science fiction movies was okay.
The Britta / Annie story is probably what left the most to be desired this week, mostly because we never found Abed’s deconstruction of a party for a new movie particularly entertaining. Maybe we just wanted to see either Britta or Annie go completely crazy, and they mostly held it together and acted like any human would once they realized the monster they’d awakened in Filmmaker Abed, determined to make something that was by most accounts going to be terrible.
In the end, we found Jeff going to Dean to tell him how he feels to be fun, just as we did seeing Abed form an army of tablet versions of himself after Frankie determined that allowing prisoners to attend classes was not worth it. It just wasn’t particularly hilarious.
On a separate note, we miss Magnitude! We need some pop, pop! Grade: B-.
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