Community 4x09: Intro to Felt Surrogacy

Thing don't seem to be going well for the Greendale Seven... well, Greendale Six, since Chevy's not there (and I mean Chevy, not Pierce). They're all sitting around the study room table in awkward silence. Apparently they've been doing it for days and Dean Pelton will not condean that behaviour. So, in an effort to get them to talk about what's wrong, he busts out a box of puppets for therapy purposes.

It's worked wonders with Chang.

Abed gets the ball rolling and tells the story of how they got to where they are, which we get to see in puppet flashback form.

They've been friends for four years now and spent so much time together that he and Troy were able to create study group bingo cards with lists of all the phrases the gang says. After a minute of watching them play, Jeff suggests that they're in a rut and they should get away from Greendale. Annie agrees and says that they need to go on an adventure. The group then sings a horrible, shit-awful song about adventure, which leads to them taking a balloon ride.

Because hot air balloons are adventurous.

Unfortunately, due to Pierce and Troy's fiddling, they take off without the balloon guide. Pierce's further meddling takes them high in the air and far off course. If you can really have a course in a hot air balloon. Eventually, they land in the woods where they meet a kindly mountain man played by Jason Alexander.

His hair looks at least as real as it did in Pretty Woman.

Jason used to be a student at Greendale, but after he graduate, he moved out to the woods to be his own man. He sings a terrible, shit-awful song about how awesome and stress-free it is to live in the woods, then gives them psychotropic berries, and they all trip balls.

Then Shirley takes over the story, and she tells the Dean how they sat around a camp fire and she revealed that she once forgot her kids at the grocery store because she was spying on a man she thought was Andre. Back in the present day, the rest of the group stares at her in disbelief. But, not because they think she's a horrible person, but rather because they were so tripped out on berries that they couldn't remember that she told them that before. As it turns out, they've all been avoiding speaking to each other because they thought they'd revealed some terrible secret about themselves, but, even though they all did, no one remembers. Since they've all forgotten everything, they're in the clear... except that Shirley has just told them her terrible secret.

Which kinda bums her out.

To make things even, Jeff gets the group to re-reveal everything, which we see through a shit-awful puppet song. He met the perfect girl, but couldn't handle the fact that she had a son, so he abandoned them just like his dad did. Annie was struggling in history, so she let Prof. Cornwallis rub her feet in exchange for the answers to a test. Britta is an activist, but she's never voted. Troy accidentally started the great Greendale fire of '03. Pierce never slept with Eartha Kitt; they just dry-humped in her tour bus. Abed didn't have a secret. He just saw that everyone was being awkward around each other and mimicked their behaviour.

It's kinda his thing.

With the situation resolved, they all go for yard margs at Skeepers. Because that running joke doesn't suck at all.

What I Liked
-Even though the lyrics suck, a few of the cast are actually pretty good singers. Yvette Nicole Brown was by far the best.
-They mention that Duncan hasn't been around for a while. Strange how the absence of John Oliver correlates with the decline in quality of the show.
-This moose.

Awesome.

-This week's best line: "Dean, what happened is between us and Jesus. And Jesus don't snitch." -Shirley

What I Hated
-The Dean is dressed up as Pinocchio for some unknown reason. It literally has nothing to do with the episode at all, and is essentially a pointless 'Hey look at the Dean's funny costume! Isn't he wacky?!' thing.
-When they weren't singing, the puppet audio was often really bad. I'm not sure of the technical terms for it, but it sounded compressed, and I was certainly very aware that it was pre-recorded audio. Even the low-quality pre-release version of the Digital Estate Planning audio was better.
-Bad green screen work. I know they don't have a huge effects budget, but come on!
-The puppet voices don't match up with their mouth movements. That's Puppetry 101, and they screwed it up.
-The Dean's creepy obsession with Jeff. It started off relatively harmless, but now it's progressed to ridiculous levels.

This creepy Jeff puppet is a figment of the Dean's imagination.

Final Thoughts
The songs were atrocious. There's literally no other way to describe them, except with other words that are synonymous with atrocious. They didn't follow any kind of established meter, and half of the lyrics were basically regular spoken lines that they decided to sing for some reason. Plus, they were a huge time suck; they spent more time singing about going on an adventure than they actually did on the adventure itself.

The puppetry also wasn't particularly good. They weren't doing very many complex movements or anything like that, so all they really had to do was get the lip sync right, and they failed miserably at that.

If you're going to do a gimmick episode, and this episode is the very definition of one, it needs to be good, otherwise it's just pointless filler. The only time Community has had a really good gimmick episode was three years ago with Modern Warfare(some argument could perhaps be made for Digital Estate Planning, but I won't be the one to make it). That one had a purpose, advanced the show's plot, and even fit in with the style to some extent. This was basically the producers sitting around saying "You know what we haven't done yet? A puppet episode." Maybe that's why it turned out so poorly. It didn't have any passion or reason behind it; it was just another check box they needed to tick off.