Looking for reviews of the other two Community episodes that aired Thursday night? You can find the review of the video game-themed "Digital Estate Planning" here and check out the review of "The First Chang Dynasty here!
Note: Full spoilers for the episode follow.
Our Community cup runneth over - three episodes in one night to sign off on Season 3! One can hardly complain, now can one? Where "The First Chang Dynasty" was a great way to bring the season to a close, "Introduction to Finality" felt a little out of place, with a tagged on series final ending, you know… just in case. This hurt the episode a bit, especially after two such notable outings.
The timeline of the last few episodes has been a bit of a problem for me. We've been skipping months at a time, and with "Digital Estate Planning," we seemed to leave the timeline altogether. The group got expelled, then months later learned that Chang might be behind the whole thing, then took a break to play a video game, then got reinstated to Greendale, and then months later are taking summer classes. Ultimately this isn't really a big deal, but it did hurt the flow of storytelling. When "Introduction to Finality" began, it was another episode that felt out of place, as if it could have been the first episode of next season.
And perhaps it was intended to be. "The First Chang Dynasty" gave us some great endings to multiple arcs and also supplied us with an interesting cliffhanger, having Troy sacrifice himself to the air condition repair school to save the group. As a first episode to Season 4, "Introduction to Finality" would have restarted the story telling be showing us the aftermath of Troy's departure (Abed cracking into Evil Abed) while also putting things back on track be quickly putting an end to Troy's air conditioning journey. Meanwhile, it started a storyline for Shirley and Pierce and their sandwich shop. But this was still Season 3.
So even though the laughs were there -- Evil Abed making Britta 10% darker, the quirky alternate reality of the repair school -- the whole thing felt very disjointed. And the Summer Fun Court storyline was very average, with Jeff's speech at the end being tedious and overwrought. And then the ending montage started and the purpose of this episode became very clear. This was shot months before anyone knew the fate of the series, and Dan Harmon and the writers had put together an ending to give us some closure on the series, if in fact this was going to be the last episode.
It was a nice montage, set to Community's theme song. Had this been the last ever episode, we would know that Jeff was one step closer to graduating and that he was ready to seek out his dad. We'd know that Abed was ready to grow up a bit, though not entirely. We'd know that the future for these characters looked hopefully. And we'd know that Star-Burns lives. But tacking this ending on to what was already an average, out of place episode simply added to the anticlimactic feel following the season true finale, "The Last Chang Dynasty."
But who can really complain? We get a Season 4!
Source : http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/05/18/community-introduction-to-finality-review
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