Community: "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons"

A review of tonight's Community, after the jump....


It might seem unfair to compare any given episode of Community to another, given how different any episode can be. And yet, tonight's episode is obviously indebted to “Cooperative Calligraphy” and “Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas.” Like the former, is was obviously done on a shoestring budget, keeping the cast (mostly) in the study room, and wringing plot out of character relationships. Like the latter, it used a world of fantasy to flesh out further sides of characters we have seen glimpses of in the past. (That we heard, rather that saw this fantasy realm was irrelevant, as all to the actors tonight brought it to life, as it were.) Unlike either of them, it wasn't quite as good.

The humor here was hilarious, as was all of the references/nods to D&D and other games of it's ilk. The lines were flying tonight, as the group gathered around to play the game, dryly reading the most ridiculous lines possible. (I can see how people who actually play D&D might not find this funny.) Beyond this, the actors brought skill with the facial features and tone that let us buy into this imaginary reality. This in and of itself helped to make the jokes told even funnier by grounding them in a "reality" even if it was an imaginary tale inside a fictional television show.

While the comedy and atmosphere were pitch perfect tonight, it was on the character front where the show failed to live up to past expectations. I didn't inherently have a problem with Jeff wanting to help Fat Neal – I was assuming he used to be fat or picked on or something, and that this was him finding closure of sorts for past emotional trauma. That I could buy, and I think the show could have pulled it off. What I can't buy as much is the idea of Jeff doing it due to guilt. I acknowledge that Jeff has grown since the series began, and that he has developed more of conscience while retaining his lovable douchebag exterior, and thus could be capable of feeling guilt. But the closing moments of “Asian Population Studies” has stuck with me since they aired, and though it could possibly have been meant only as a joke, I can't it out of my head that Jeff wants to regress to the heartless bastard he once was. If it hadn't been for that episode, the reveal would have landed; as it is, it rang kind of false.

As much as I am making as deal out of the Jeff part, it was Peirce's role in things that really bugged me. Look, I get that Peirce is the mean, heartless one of the group, and I totally bought that the group would leave him out of the game. That made sense. And it of course mad sense that Pierce got his feelings hurt and acted out against them (thought based on the introduction, I thought Chevy Chase wasn't going to be in the rest of the episode, so when he appeared again it kind of through me for a loop.) So while Peirce is, deep down, an insolent child and behaves in childish ways, tonight he was acting like a borderline sociopath. It ultimately came off as just too mean, even for Pierce, and the dark nature of his behavior was at odds with the lighthearted tone of tonight's episode.

(It is of course interesting to compare this to the dark nature of Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas, where Pierce delivered a positive, uplifting heartfelt moment in a episode of darkness. [It helped that he was dressed as a teddy bear in the scene.] As diametrically opposed as they may seem to his actions tonight, both came from his sense of familial connections with the rest of the group. One was out of a place of love, the other, anger.)

Yet I admit all of this was played well by McHale and Chase, and some of the other actors also got some nice (and truer) moments. Danny Pudi got to play all manners of D&D, characters, all while still making it seem like it was Abed doing the acting. Gillian Jacobs perfectly blended in Britta's faux-incendiary speech with her D&D character Lavernica (especially in the scene with the gnome.) And Allison's Brie gesturing during the unheard, presumably smutty imaginary sex tale between Hector the Well Endowed and the Elf Maiden was the hardest I had laughed all night.

All in all, a very hilarious episode, but one which failed to land the emotional beats that is put out.

What did everybody else think?


Additional Thoughts:
Okay, how awesome was that adjusted opening credits sequence? I wonder if Dan Harmon paid for this one out of pocket as well. Actually, considering this episode budget was on the cheaper side, probably not.

“So we're just gonna ignore that hate crime, huh?”

“Shouldn't there be a board or pieces or something to Jenga?”

“You have...successfully rubbed the sword on your balls.”

“If that's sarcasm, I can't tell, because, well, everything in the game is silly.”

“Just so you know, my name...is Kyle.”

“This why I wanted to play Chutes & Ladders.”

“Look, before you respond, I can make it up to you. I can find a Fatter Neal.”

“And so it was that Pierce Hawthorne save Fat Neal and learned very, very little.”