Community - "Advanced Introduction to Finality" - Review

Community’s season four finale “Advanced Introduction to Finality” suffers from a lot of the problems this season has suffered from. It’s high concept with a tacked on heart. It’s not very funny. There are many character decisions that don’t align with what we know about the characters. And that’s really just the start of it.

It’s an episode where I can understand all the intentionality of it but in execution it’s an absolute mess. It leans on ideas from the past that just aren’t that fun or interesting to re-hash (notably the darkest time line). The darkest timeline dopplegangers crossover to make sure Jeff takes a job as a lawyer … only they don’t because this would be so totally ungrounded in reality that even by Community standards it would make the series seem broken (much more than it already is). All in all, it just left a bad taste in my mouth.

There’s a heart in there somewhere if you look hard enough. But the whole premise of the episode wants to have some weird headscape shenanigans to go down so that we can get insight into Jeff’s feelings about leaving Greendale and how his time there changed him so much. But this analysis is so very unclear for so long that it’s almost beside the point. 

The real point is to try out this concept, which is cool (I guess at face value at least) and may be in the past I could potentially see the show attempting something of this sort, but I wish it didn’t involve the darkest time line (which has never been much fun outside of “Remedial Chaos Theory”). More importantly, concept for the sake of concept is never, never a good or genuine basis for a series. 

Community could get away with the craziness of its premises in the past because there was some deeply felt emotion under the surface that wasn’t sutured on at the end. Here I felt very little and at times was uncertain as to what the writers wanted me to feel in the first place.

The episode made me uneasy at times simply because this never should have been a concept it ever tried to pull off ever, and the the way they went about it was so poorly handled that it became marred even further.

This season has had its moments, but by and large it has been inconsistent, at times laugh-less, sometimes flat out irredeemable (yea, I'm being bombastic, but this episode has me in that sort of mood), and this finale is the worst offender. A very disappointing effort from a lackluster season of a show that used to be so much more.