Ok, so it's taken me a couple days to get around to these and last night my xbox live went down for awhile, rendering me unable to access my hulu account so it's been fun....
I guess first off I'd have to say that this season as a whole doesn't have a ton of laughs, at least not of the variety that I found in the first few seasons and this batch of episodes is among the worst offenders; they just aren't THAT funny. I'm not saying I don't find some humor here nor am I saying I don't like these eps, (although it might be one of my least favorite stretches) just that the overall darkness of the season has definitely taken away from some of the funny....
Bondage Still not sure where I stand on this one. I recall when the day it aired I was reading one of those advance preview blurbs (maybe on aintitcool.com.....?) and they mentioned one if the negatives being 'not much Alison Brie' and damn if they weren't telling the truth. I'm always disappointed whenever she doesn't have a large-ish role in any given episode and here she is
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AADD So I'm just watching it now, and I'll probably come back to the others. I like this one. It's not as good as the original, in my opinion, but I could see how someone might like it better. One thing I enjoy about it is that they don't attempt to just recreate the previous one, scene for scene. It's a totally new story. I must admit the the stakes don't feel quite as high this time, but I think that's partly because they were still trying to establish Hickey and we really didn't know him that well
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I guess first off I'd have to say that this season as a whole doesn't have a ton of laughs, at least not of the variety that I found in the first few seasons and this batch of episodes is among the worst offenders; they just aren't THAT funny
I'd theorise that that's because Community wasn't acting very sitcom-y in S5, arguably. The lighting was dark, atmospheric and moody, and the dramatic potential for characters mined more for pathos than for laughs. As a result, most of the eps aren't laugh-out-loud funny (though for me I can get some good laughs) because the tone/style was more dramedic than it had ever been before throughout the entire series. It makes me wonder if S6 will keep that dramedic consistency since from what we're getting of the new set photos there's lighting that looks similar to S1's and is generally brighter but that tone was set in S6 so it intrigues me if they'll continue it subtly.
J/B Focus in This, Part 1liz_marcsDecember 6 2014, 23:09:25 UTC
It's interesting to me that Dan seems to revisit his "choice that Jeff would have to make" idea in this season. It didn't quite come off because of the truncated nature of 13 episodes and the fact that he had to accomplish *a lot* during season five (not the least of which was dealing with the departure of two cast members).
The real problem? Is because he was going to tie the Jeff's Dad storyline to Britta, which would have been the emotional wallop to make Jeff's sudden re-emergence of his feelings for Britta more rooted in something real. Instead, it plays out rather shallowly in Bondage and a little bit in App Development. Sure, the shippers picked up on what Dan was doing (both J/B and J/A shippers), but it's interesting that a lot of viewers simply missed what was going on to the point that Jeff's sudden proposal to Britta in "Basic Story" really DID seem completely out of the blue and based on absolutely nothing.
In a weird way, S4 laid the ground work much better for a return to J/B because the Jeff's Dad storyline made it
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RE: J/B Focus in This, Part 2liz_marcsDecember 6 2014, 23:09:37 UTC
In any case, I always found Jeff's self-knowledge about what triggers his attraction to Britta in "Bondage" (She's shiny! I want to be shiny, too!) a bit on-the-nose and maybe a bit OOC. It could be he talked it over with one of his therapists at some point, but I never took Jeff to be all that self-aware about why he does what he does. What's more, he comes right out and admits that there's nothing romantic about it. It's not even about Britta. It's about him. I'll be honest. It didn't actually feel like it was Jeff talking. More like it was the writers talking through Jeff. It's akin to Abed's moment of comfort for Annie in "Basic Sandwich," where you didn't feel like it was Abed talking, but rather the writers talking through Abed
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RE: Advanced Advanced Dungeons and Dragonscgkm2099zDecember 6 2014, 23:37:12 UTC
I like that Annie and Jeff have a side conversation to suggest calling off the bet, but that when Hickey says Hank will be willing to attack them, Annie looks pissed. It’s like Hickey’s suggestion that they might attack them is equal to a full betrayal in Annie’s eyes, and she immediately looks at Jeff (I won’t let them hurt you!). When the groups come together, Jeff and Hickey are looking intimidating, but Annie looks like she’s ready to fight someone for real (badass!). Jim Rash’s death scene was just fabulous. And of course, as soon as Chang attacks Jeff, Annie immediately defends him. I love the melee that ensues, and it includes one of my favorite references Community has ever done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_ekugPKqFw Also, I feel the need to point out that Jeff role-played holding Britta’s face in a puddle. Abed’s “I owe you nothing speech” is fantastic, and I love that the veteran D&D player Hank looks embarrassed because he got caught up in the
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You didn't laugh at Jeff stand's up? I thought that the funniest scene of the season! (Save for the Dean's peanut rap, of course.) Yeah, the stories didn't really mean anything, but Joel committed it to so hard and so well.
I laughed, but I was also cringing. It was a classic case of "mean" humor where Jeff was pretty much punching down from his Four Position.
He took one not very mean potshot at his fellow Fours, just more of an observational thing. And he tread very lightly (if he said anything at all, I can't recall at the moment) on the Fives.
Now, strategically it makes sense. Jeff wants to be a Five, so you don't piss off the Fives. If I understand the system correctly, all of the Fives voting in unison basically outweighed the votes of everyone else, even if everyone else was voting in unison - which is a pretty good analogy of the 1% if I ever saw one. Jeff probably knew he wasn't going to get Shirley's vote, so he needed to win all the other Fives, as well as most of the Fours, in order to get in
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RE: Bondage and Beta Male Sexualitycgkm2099zDecember 7 2014, 04:18:00 UTC
I wasn’t crazy about the Abed/Hickey B plot, but kudos to Danny Pudi and Jonathan Banks for their performances. I found the opening of the bit really sad though, because he wants to be so excited about it, but it’s just driving home how much he misses Troy. I’m sure it was the first time he’s done anything with Kickpuncher since Troy’s departure and he just looks so sad to be doing it alone. So he makes an ill-placed attempt to bond with Hickey because he’s still desperate to fill the hole left by Troy. I want to know what incident caused Annie to ban glue guns from the apartment! The only other thing I want to touch on here is that when Abed finally goes over the edge, he says to Hickey “You have all this rage and shame and loneliness, which I don’t even know how to feel, much less understand.” That line doesn’t make a lot of sense to me because Abed is in the midst of feeling rage because he’s missing his movie, and it was loneliness that drove him into Hickey’s office. Are we to chalk that up to Abed not understanding the emotions
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Comments 52
I guess first off I'd have to say that this season as a whole doesn't have a ton of laughs, at least not of the variety that I found in the first few seasons and this batch of episodes is among the worst offenders; they just aren't THAT funny. I'm not saying I don't find some humor here nor am I saying I don't like these eps, (although it might be one of my least favorite stretches) just that the overall darkness of the season has definitely taken away from some of the funny....
Bondage Still not sure where I stand on this one. I recall when the day it aired I was reading one of those advance preview blurbs (maybe on aintitcool.com.....?) and they mentioned one if the negatives being 'not much Alison Brie' and damn if they weren't telling the truth. I'm always disappointed whenever she doesn't have a large-ish role in any given episode and here she is ( ... )
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I'd theorise that that's because Community wasn't acting very sitcom-y in S5, arguably. The lighting was dark, atmospheric and moody, and the dramatic potential for characters mined more for pathos than for laughs. As a result, most of the eps aren't laugh-out-loud funny (though for me I can get some good laughs) because the tone/style was more dramedic than it had ever been before throughout the entire series. It makes me wonder if S6 will keep that dramedic consistency since from what we're getting of the new set photos there's lighting that looks similar to S1's and is generally brighter but that tone was set in S6 so it intrigues me if they'll continue it subtly.
Reply
The real problem? Is because he was going to tie the Jeff's Dad storyline to Britta, which would have been the emotional wallop to make Jeff's sudden re-emergence of his feelings for Britta more rooted in something real. Instead, it plays out rather shallowly in Bondage and a little bit in App Development. Sure, the shippers picked up on what Dan was doing (both J/B and J/A shippers), but it's interesting that a lot of viewers simply missed what was going on to the point that Jeff's sudden proposal to Britta in "Basic Story" really DID seem completely out of the blue and based on absolutely nothing.
In a weird way, S4 laid the ground work much better for a return to J/B because the Jeff's Dad storyline made it ( ... )
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He took one not very mean potshot at his fellow Fours, just more of an observational thing. And he tread very lightly (if he said anything at all, I can't recall at the moment) on the Fives.
Now, strategically it makes sense. Jeff wants to be a Five, so you don't piss off the Fives. If I understand the system correctly, all of the Fives voting in unison basically outweighed the votes of everyone else, even if everyone else was voting in unison - which is a pretty good analogy of the 1% if I ever saw one. Jeff probably knew he wasn't going to get Shirley's vote, so he needed to win all the other Fives, as well as most of the Fours, in order to get in ( ... )
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