Community 4x07: Economics of Marine Biology

Greendale needs money, so the Dean recruits the study group to help him land a whale: A student with no ambition or chance of graduating whose parents are rich and will continue paying for classes indefinitely. But to get this guy to enroll, they need to create a diversion to keep Greendale's previous whale, Pierce, occupied. That diversion is Jeff.

They're the best of friends.

While Jeff and Pierce go to the barber shop, Annie, Britta, and the Dean show the whale around campus. Unfortunately, he arrived on a brand new Vespa scooter that was given to him by City College, so the Greendale folks have to turn to bribery: Unlimited soda refills, computers, some guy's bling, and basically anything else he wants. Britta plays along until the Dean asks her to dry off the guy's shoes, at which point she bails in disgust.

Meanwhile, Jeff and Pierce are actually bonding. They talk about beer, women, dogs, and how awesome it is to not have to shave your own face.

Seriously, it's great.

The whale's tour culminates with a party in the cafeteria featuring balloons, bubbles, and all the strippers he could ever want.

Although, they arrive in bathing suits that they don't take off, so I don't know if they technically count as strippers.

Annie thinks they've gone too far when the whale likes Magnitude's catchphrase so much that he gets the Dean to give it to him. But since it's all for Greendale, she's willing to shut up about what happened. That is, of course, until the two of them get to school the next day and find a dishevelled Magnitude in the study room trying to come up with a new catchphrase. After seeing that, the Dean heads back to the cafeteria to tell the still-sleeping whale that he would love to have him and his father's money at Greendale, but they're not going to change the school just for him. The whale decides that it's cool to finally have someone who's willing to treat him like a real person and not just kiss his ass because his dad's rich, and he officially declares his intention to enroll at Greendale.

Magnitude celebrates with a big 'Pop-Pop' all over his face.

Jeff's position as a diversion is exposed, but he apologizes and decides to spend more time with Pierce at the barber shop. Also, Abed starts a frat because the Dean tells him not to.

Elsewhere, Troy and Shirley take a class that they thought was PE, but which turns out to be PEE (get it, that spells pee!): Physical Education Education. Basically it's a class where they learn how to be gym teachers. Shirley is good at it and Troy isn't. After a number of embarrassing failures, Troy drops the class. However, when he returns to the gym to retrieve his keys, Shirley is inexplicably there, and she teaches him how to teach PE by teaching him how to teach Kevin. Cue the montage!

This isn't as sexy as it looks, they're just teaching Chang to golf.

When they're done, the professor also inexplicably arrives, and everyone learns a valuable lesson. Although, I'll be damned if I know what it is.

What I Liked
-This week's best line: "Tour sucks, bro. Ya gotta think big: Hookers, blow, hookers..."-Richie

What I Hated
-Let's potato chips had a very pronounced role in this episode and even a commercial in the tag. For fuck's sake, who thought that was a good idea?
-The PEE song and montage. It was the right idea, but the execution was just horrible.
-They screwed up the continuity on Jeff's beard. I wasn't the only one who noticed this, so why couldn't the continuity guy on the show keep track of when he was supposed to be scruffy and when he was supposed to be clean-shaven?
-The Delta Cubes. It could've been fun as the b-plot to an episode, but as a tiny subplot, Abed creating a frat was just pointless.

Final Thoughts
There were three plots this week (four if you count Abed running around like a weirdo) and none of them were any good. I'm beginning to think that there just may not be enough time in a half-hour sitcom to fully develop three separate plot lines. There wasn't even enough time to fully develop Shirley and Troy's montage.

Like most of the classes at Greendale, apparently PEE is a single-day course because Shirley and Troy managed to go through an entire semester's worth of work while Annie and Britta were showing off the campus.

For the first time in quite a while, a show delivered an episode that didn't contain a single thing that I could say I liked. The 'best line' thing is merely a holdover from when Community used to have a lot of really witty/wacky lines that made me laugh like no other show could. That hasn't been the case for quite some time now, and I'm honestly thinking of dropping it entirely. The only reason I might keep it in is that it would look really weird for the 'What I Liked' section to be completely empty.

Allowing Pierce to do something other than be a really racist old man was nice, but we already know that Chevy quits the show over that stuff, so I'm willing to bet that he'll be sliding back into his old ways soon enough.

The season's now more than half over, which is a very good thing. This episode wasn't as terrible as last week's but it still only delivered single digit laughs. This show used to be hilarious, and now it's merely mildly amusing. I'll keep watching until the end of the season, but that's more out of a need for closure than any desire to see more episodes of this crap.