Community “Curriculum Unavailable”

This was, I’m assuming, the second part of a four or five episode arc I’m going to dub “Chang’s Dynasty.”  So far, he’s taken over the school by bribing the board and replacing the Dean with an imposter, and getting Greendale’s favorite study group expelled.  A month out of school they’ve begun to hang out at Troy and Abed’s without much to do they’ve settled down to a pitch in dinner, but of course none of them are good cooks.  The only person in the group that isn’t lackadaisical is Abed who sees through Chang’s ruse, even if he doesn’t know who is responsible for the plan.  He is arrested while digging through Greendale’s trash and “The Dean” gives them a business card to a psychiatrist.  After a decent set up, this episode becomes as lackadaisical as the group, but I have a theory as to why this episode stalled.

The five episode arc isn’t normal for Community.  Normally their stories are contained to one, maybe two, episodes.  This works for the pace of the show because they need to pack as many laughs into an episode as possible.  In an arc this size I’m assuming they sat aside a certain number of episodes for the story, but didn’t have enough plot to fill the time.  That is how episodes like this happen.

When the gang goes to the psychiatrist nothing really happens.  Yet again the sanity of Abed is brought into question and yet again the group defends him and shows how they are all crazy.  It felt old hat to me, although there was a nice twist when the doctor surmises that the group’s time at Greendale was a shared psychosis they experienced while being locked away in an insane asylum.  The shots of them reenacting scenes from previous episodes in hospital gowns and insanity were awesome, but it was short lived as they realized they’d been duped.

They catch the fake psychiatrist trying to escape out the window and continue to question him.  He admits that Chang put him up to pretending to be a psychiatrist and replaced the dean with an imposter, but he escapes as they daydream about Chang’s craziness.  Finally galvanized into action, the gang leaves to rescue Dean Craig.

And that is my main problem with this episode.  It meandered around and showed random clips, which were funny I’ll admit, but nothing happened.  They weren’t actually doing anything until the very end.  Sadly, this episode fizzled out unspectacularly, but I’m interested to see how this “Chang Dynasty” business plays out.