Ok, so it's taken me a couple days to get around to these and last night my xbox live went down for awhile, rendering me unable to access my hulu account so it's been fun....
I guess first off I'd have to say that this season as a whole doesn't have a ton of laughs, at least not of the variety that I found in the first few seasons and this batch of episodes is among the worst offenders; they just aren't THAT funny. I'm not saying I don't find some humor here nor am I saying I don't like these eps, (although it might be one of my least favorite stretches) just that the overall darkness of the season has definitely taken away from some of the funny....
Bondage Still not sure where I stand on this one. I recall when the day it aired I was reading one of those advance preview blurbs (maybe on aintitcool.com.....?) and they mentioned one if the negatives being 'not much Alison Brie' and damn if they weren't telling the truth. I'm always disappointed whenever she doesn't have a large-ish role in any given episode and here she is criminally absent. So I probably dislike this ep more than I should, simply because she's really barely in it. One strike.
I have to admit that despite Dan using this episode to set up the J/B nuptials (that never happened), that's not actually one of the things I most dislike about it. Britta's story with her anarchist friends is a decently good story and the competition over her between Jeff and Ian is pretty believable, regardless of how sexist it may be. My least fave part is actually the Abed and Buzz storyline. I get why they did it, why the need for it was there, but it just didn't resonate with me and I find myself really bored with that whole plot every time I watch. Not sure why.... As for the Chang C-plot.....ehh. It's kind of amusing, but mostly stupid and it feels unneeded to me. I always find myself thinking 'this crap plot is why there wasn't room for Alison?'
AADD So I'm just watching it now, and I'll probably come back to the others. I like this one. It's not as good as the original, in my opinion, but I could see how someone might like it better. One thing I enjoy about it is that they don't attempt to just recreate the previous one, scene for scene. It's a totally new story. I must admit the the stakes don't feel quite as high this time, but I think that's partly because they were still trying to establish Hickey and we really didn't know him that well.
Once again, Abed has a real 'knack' for fantasy names, in other words he'd be better off using one of those online random name generators, but the result of his inability to come up with good names is hilarious. He's great at naming places though, like the Hawthorne Mountains and Brutalitops Memorial Bridge. Sweet!
Well even though the ep isn't about them at all, Jeff and Annie manage to get in some quality time together. I love how in synch they are, shades of Lava World. "Left flank!" "Right!" I have a feeling they'd do alright in the event of the zombie apocalypse and they could certainly make a whiptastic commando squad. I really love the scene towards the end when Annie is sitting next to Jeff on the couch with her legs curled up and it just seems really.....homey. Like this is how they would hang at home, if they were living together. They really do seem so comfortable with each other and I think if that scene had gone on much longer, Annie might have leaned against Jeff, everyone else be damned! Ha!
I love how into it Annie gets (no surprise) when she's swinging her imaginary cock around like it's actually attached. Just the fact that she gets Hector the Well-Endowed again, is fantastic. She might get a little excessively violent when she yells something about shoving it up into them, but hey, give her credit for getting into character. I think little innocent Annie could lay a serious plowing into someone, if she but had a penis..... She'd make a pretty good dude.....but thank god, she's not one. I LOVE her grabbing Crouton's character sheet almost immediately after Shirley leaves, to loot the imaginary body. Interestingly, I just listened to her interview with Marc Maron on his WTF Podcast (from May 2013) the other day and she mentions in it how her emo-goth boyfriend in high school played D&D and she would sometimes go over and watch his group play.....but she got bored of it pretty fast and stopped going. It's just funny to think of someone like her, already having had exposure to table top RPGs.....
The Dean, as always......awesome. Joseph Gordon Diehard.....you shall live forever. And obviously, Hickey's interrogation is amazing. What a well shot scene.
I really liked Abed's monologue about how he doesn't owe them anything but good storytelling, or something to that effect. It's obviously Dan using Abed as a proxy, letting us, the audience, know that he owes us nothing more than a good story. And it doesn't seem subtle either. Maybe he'd been on Reddit too much at the time.
The end tag is really fun and when Annie comes out to complain to Abed that she can't sleep without her stuffies, you'll really have to forgive me for thinking every time...."oh I'll come in there and give you a stuffie, Annie." Every guy is thinking that, I just admitted it..... I like how the outside lock is STILL on Annie's bedroom door. Like they just couldn't be bothered to take it off after using it for Britta way back in S3.....
I guess first off I'd have to say that this season as a whole doesn't have a ton of laughs, at least not of the variety that I found in the first few seasons and this batch of episodes is among the worst offenders; they just aren't THAT funny
I'd theorise that that's because Community wasn't acting very sitcom-y in S5, arguably. The lighting was dark, atmospheric and moody, and the dramatic potential for characters mined more for pathos than for laughs. As a result, most of the eps aren't laugh-out-loud funny (though for me I can get some good laughs) because the tone/style was more dramedic than it had ever been before throughout the entire series. It makes me wonder if S6 will keep that dramedic consistency since from what we're getting of the new set photos there's lighting that looks similar to S1's and is generally brighter but that tone was set in S6 so it intrigues me if they'll continue it subtly.
I guess first off I'd have to say that this season as a whole doesn't have a ton of laughs, at least not of the variety that I found in the first few seasons and this batch of episodes is among the worst offenders; they just aren't THAT funny. I'm not saying I don't find some humor here nor am I saying I don't like these eps, (although it might be one of my least favorite stretches) just that the overall darkness of the season has definitely taken away from some of the funny....
Bondage Still not sure where I stand on this one. I recall when the day it aired I was reading one of those advance preview blurbs (maybe on aintitcool.com.....?) and they mentioned one if the negatives being 'not much Alison Brie' and damn if they weren't telling the truth. I'm always disappointed whenever she doesn't have a large-ish role in any given episode and here she is criminally absent. So I probably dislike this ep more than I should, simply because she's really barely in it. One strike.
I have to admit that despite Dan using this episode to set up the J/B nuptials (that never happened), that's not actually one of the things I most dislike about it. Britta's story with her anarchist friends is a decently good story and the competition over her between Jeff and Ian is pretty believable, regardless of how sexist it may be. My least fave part is actually the Abed and Buzz storyline. I get why they did it, why the need for it was there, but it just didn't resonate with me and I find myself really bored with that whole plot every time I watch. Not sure why.... As for the Chang C-plot.....ehh. It's kind of amusing, but mostly stupid and it feels unneeded to me. I always find myself thinking 'this crap plot is why there wasn't room for Alison?'
More later......
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Once again, Abed has a real 'knack' for fantasy names, in other words he'd be better off using one of those online random name generators, but the result of his inability to come up with good names is hilarious. He's great at naming places though, like the Hawthorne Mountains and Brutalitops Memorial Bridge. Sweet!
Well even though the ep isn't about them at all, Jeff and Annie manage to get in some quality time together. I love how in synch they are, shades of Lava World. "Left flank!" "Right!" I have a feeling they'd do alright in the event of the zombie apocalypse and they could certainly make a whiptastic commando squad. I really love the scene towards the end when Annie is sitting next to Jeff on the couch with her legs curled up and it just seems really.....homey. Like this is how they would hang at home, if they were living together. They really do seem so comfortable with each other and I think if that scene had gone on much longer, Annie might have leaned against Jeff, everyone else be damned! Ha!
I love how into it Annie gets (no surprise) when she's swinging her imaginary cock around like it's actually attached. Just the fact that she gets Hector the Well-Endowed again, is fantastic. She might get a little excessively violent when she yells something about shoving it up into them, but hey, give her credit for getting into character. I think little innocent Annie could lay a serious plowing into someone, if she but had a penis..... She'd make a pretty good dude.....but thank god, she's not one. I LOVE her grabbing Crouton's character sheet almost immediately after Shirley leaves, to loot the imaginary body. Interestingly, I just listened to her interview with Marc Maron on his WTF Podcast (from May 2013) the other day and she mentions in it how her emo-goth boyfriend in high school played D&D and she would sometimes go over and watch his group play.....but she got bored of it pretty fast and stopped going. It's just funny to think of someone like her, already having had exposure to table top RPGs.....
The Dean, as always......awesome. Joseph Gordon Diehard.....you shall live forever. And obviously, Hickey's interrogation is amazing. What a well shot scene.
I really liked Abed's monologue about how he doesn't owe them anything but good storytelling, or something to that effect. It's obviously Dan using Abed as a proxy, letting us, the audience, know that he owes us nothing more than a good story. And it doesn't seem subtle either. Maybe he'd been on Reddit too much at the time.
The end tag is really fun and when Annie comes out to complain to Abed that she can't sleep without her stuffies, you'll really have to forgive me for thinking every time...."oh I'll come in there and give you a stuffie, Annie." Every guy is thinking that, I just admitted it..... I like how the outside lock is STILL on Annie's bedroom door. Like they just couldn't be bothered to take it off after using it for Britta way back in S3.....
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I'd theorise that that's because Community wasn't acting very sitcom-y in S5, arguably. The lighting was dark, atmospheric and moody, and the dramatic potential for characters mined more for pathos than for laughs. As a result, most of the eps aren't laugh-out-loud funny (though for me I can get some good laughs) because the tone/style was more dramedic than it had ever been before throughout the entire series. It makes me wonder if S6 will keep that dramedic consistency since from what we're getting of the new set photos there's lighting that looks similar to S1's and is generally brighter but that tone was set in S6 so it intrigues me if they'll continue it subtly.
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