The weaknesses of the season premiere remain, but Community‘s Scooby Doo riff is thoroughly enjoyable.
Remember how this season of Community was supposed to air in October? Well, NBC certainly hopes you don’t. Now, here’s a lovely Halloween themed episode for you to enjoy on, er, Valentine’s Day.
Crap.
This Halloween special opens, in the tradition of all Community Halloween episodes, with the study group getting ready to go to a party. Jeff’s dressed as a boxer, Annie is his Ring (Samara) girl, Troy and Abed came as Calvin and Hobbes, Shirley’s Princess Leia and Britta is a large ham. No, really.
Just as the group gets ready to head over to party, Pierce (not invited) calls Troy for help. Evidently, the old senile fart has gotten himself locked in his panic room without the code for the keypad and spent a day coming up with an awesome dusting cover story before reaching out to Troy. Pierce claims to have freaked out because he saw the ghost of his dead father approach him the night before.
Jeff, as is his wont, doesn’t buy it, but he’s overruled by the rest of the group. The group splits up – Jeff with Britta, Annie with Abed and Troy with Shirley – and explores Pierce’s mansion to find the keypad.
Annie and Abed get separated when Abed finds a trick bookcase and ends up in the house’s control room. Troy and Shirley discuss Britta’s sexual appetite whilst discovering Pierce’s special, uh, “gym.” Meanwhile, Jeff and Britta argue over whether Jeff should try to reach out to his estranged father.
As all of these arcs reach some sort of a climax, spooky shit starts going down all over the house. The room Jeff’s in distorts and starts pulsating, Abed notices a shadowy figure on the security tape and a man starts coming out of the wall next to Troy, Shirley and Annie.
Everyone hightails it back to the panic room where Pierce reveals that everything (as Jeff guessed) was a complex hoax created by Pierce to get back at the group for going to Vicky’s party without him. Everything was a setup, well, save for that shadowy figure from Abed’s video tape who’s currently at the door of the panic room entering in the unlock code…
…and turns out to be Pierce’s half-brother Gilbert, now lonely and adrift without Pierce’s father’s tough anti-love. Pierce offers to take care of his half-brother, warming everyone’s hearts, and Jeff decides to finally call up his long lost dad.
“Paranormal Parentage” features many of the problems from the season premiere – convoluted plotting, shrill, one-note characterization – but works far better as a whole, thanks to the episode’s loving riff on Scooby Doo.
So, I can forgive the writers for splitting up the group and coming up with the increasingly contrived hijinks that ensue in Pierce’s mansion. The actual hit to miss ratio of the jokes is about on par with the premiere, with some magnificent jokes (“Secret dogs!”) and some flat duds (the painfully unfunny guided tour of the mansion gag).
The episode doesn’t suggest much growth or change for the show, but it is far more entertaining and enjoyable than last week’s hodgepodge. Up until the ending, at least, which crams two episodes worth of character development through exposition in about two minutes.
I have a bone to pick with this increasingly common trend in season 4 of Community. It’s not so much where the story’s heading, but how the show’s getting there. The old adage in writing is to show, not tell, yet the characters of Community keep telling: Telling us about all these poignant character beats and telling us (and bragging) about the show’s convoluted continuity.
Some of it is meta-humor, e.g. Jeff’s predictions at the start of the episode, but the vast majority of the exposition exists as the sole means through which the study group’s characterization and growth is communicated.
This is a tendency that will hopefully get fixed as the new producers get more comfortable running the show, and, thankfully, doesn’t completely sink an otherwise fine half-hour of comedy.
Tidbits:
–“I, too, lack the adjectives”
–So, Community pulled off the Halloween episode on Valentine’s Day trick better than I expected. The decision to do something in the vein of Scooby Doo over a straight-up horror spoof made this episode seem less constrained to that specific time of the year. We’ll see if it can pull the same trick for the Thanksgiving and Christmas episodes.
–It might be time to retire some of the recurring gags. I’m not sure if “No sweat, Boba Fett” is poor writing or if I’ve just heard this joke too many times.
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