treborbasset

What happened to Community? Season 1-4 were such gold, just perfection all the way through.

The loss of Troy and Pierce would obviously affect the show negatively, as does changing the whole dynamic with Jeff being a teacher. But I still think it could have worked.

It just seems like the writing is off. The atmosphere is off. It just feels so wrong.

Much as I love Jonathan Banks - he is fantastic in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul and other shows - he just isn't funny in Community. His presence is pointless and weird. I guess he's meant to be a kind of a foil, but it's just lacking something, and has no rapport (good or bad) with anyone. He just kind of exists. He's certainly no Pierce.

But fundamentally, the writing just seems off. What happened to the Dan Harmon Story Circle? It's broken and not working any more. I don't care about any of this. And it's not funny.

Padding it with lots of guest stars won't change that; in fact, it looks desperate. The show used to be funny on its own merit, because of the sharp writing and clever plots. Exactly the same happened to The Office when they starting adding expensive big stars - it doesn't make it funnier, it makes it look like you're finished as a comedy show, lots of money but no ideas.

This episode of Community is almost like a clip show, except it isn't - at all. It's entirely new content, with a new plot, but repeated flashbacks to new content we were unaware of.

It's foreshadowing some of the storytelling techniques used in Dan Harmon's later creation, Rick & Morty. We experience characters reminiscing repeatedly about increasingly absurd memories, almost relentlessly one after the other, like in Total Rickall or Morty's Mind Blowers. There's also the idea of the cast being in a room with a psychiatrist, who acts as a foil for how ridiculous their lives are, like in Pickle Rick.

The episode works really well and is very entertaining for anyone familiar with the characters and the show. It has a little twist that makes you doubt your sanity, and it's absolutely brilliant.

Community as a show always skirts the ridiculous, but it does it so well.

The premise for the show is quite a good one - basically Stargate meets Star Trek Voyager, with a kind of Battlestar Galactica atmosphere, and darker and grittier than SG-1 or Atlantis.

Where this pilot episode fails is in the execution. The decision to have repeated time jumps intermixed with flashbacks was very confusing. I struggled to follow what was going on or what had even happened.

This could have been really good if it had been told in a linear way, starting with Eli being recruited, following his journey on a spaceship to another base on a different planet, then them being attacked and going through the Stargate with the ninth chevron.

All of what I just wrote I didn't get from watching the episode, I had to look it up online after I got too confused. The way it kept flashing forwards to after all the above had happened made it really difficult to follow when we don't even know these characters yet, or what the situation is.

The acting performances of most of the cast are good (Elyse Levesque was probably the weakest). Dr Rush is an immediately intriguing character, with questionable motives. I didn't particularly like Eli as a character in this episode. He seemed very out of place, and not at all like a super maths genius, and it was hard to suspend disbelief that this is really the guy they needed out of everyone on Earth.

This isn't a review of the show, it's just a review of the first episode. Showing scenes out of order seems to be unique to this episode rather than a part of the show.