A Larger, Warmer Whole

Confession: I was not a big fan of the final three episodes of Community.  Pretty disappointing, especially considering, given the firing of Dan Harmon, they could be the last episodes of Community worth watching at all.  Unfortunately, I just didn’t find them that funny.  Well, to be more precise, I liked the first one, sort of liked the second, and disliked the third. So exactly the opposite of VanDerWerff (that makes me very happy).  But, really, our respective opinions of the episodes’ quality is irrelevant.  VanDerWerff’s judgments don’t bother me so much; it’s his thought process that really gets my goat.  (And I mean that literally.  I’ve been running a goat farm up here near Sheybogan, and Todd stole one of my prized  LaMancha goats.) 

Upon completing “Introduction To Finality,” the third of tonight’s three all new Community episodes, my first thought was, “Man, that would have been a satisfying series finale.” 

Christ, Todd.  You really want this show to be cancelled, don’t you?

There were things that didn’t quite work, and the Winger speech was overly gooey in the beginning. 

So we don’t like gooey now?  And yet—spoiler alert—you’re soon going to be demanding that the characters come together to form a “larger, warmer whole.”  Sounds pretty gooey to me.  

But by the end, when the theme song started up and the characters took us into the season’s final movement—a gently sweet montage that showed us where they all were as their adventures at Greendale came to a close for another season—I was genuinely touched by the journey the show had gone on. 

Shows don’t go on journeys.  People go on journeys.  Shows do not have legs.  Or brains.  Were they to go on a journey, they would definitely get lost.  

It’s nice that you felt touched—Community can be a sweet and touching show.  But are “gooey,” “gently sweet,” and “genuinely moved” really the things you want to lead with in a write-up of a comedy?  Remember, a COMEDY.

There was a rough road on the way here—even tonight—and some of the show’s stranger story complications didn’t make a lot of sense. But by the end, the season had reoriented itself as one about choice, about the times that we choose to stay somewhere that maybe doesn’t make us ecstatically happy because of the people who surround us and the places and people we’ll forever carry around with us in our 

hearts.

 

I must admit that my first reaction to this was throwing up my hands and snorting (the douchey guy sitting next to me on the train must have been baffled).  Congratulations, Todd: your “criticism” is so bad it defies words.  But valiantly I soldier on.

OK—for today, I’m going to accept all this.  I’m going to enter the VanDerWerffian mind, where humor doesn’t matter, but journeys and character growth do.  In a sitcom, mind you.  But ok, fine, let’s give it a try.  What new insights will this yield?

Let’s read this again.

But by the end, the season had reoriented itself as one about choice,

A season about choice.  Was season one about love?  Season two about truth?  Season four will be about justice?  Five—if we’re so lucky, and Dan Harmon makes a triumphant return—about the American Way?  And if there’s a movie—well, I imagine that will be about all humanity.  And Todd will be there to tell us what it all means. 

 . . . about the times that we choose to stay somewhere that maybe doesn’t make us ecstatically happy because of the people who surround us and the places and people we’ll forever carry around with us in our hearts.

Wow, you hit the nail on the head, Todd.  What insight!  A new Susan Sontag, you.  What deep thoughts you think.  Let’s give you the Pauline Kael Chair of Media Analysis.  One question, though: what the fuck are you talking about?

Oh, wait, I get it.  You see, I often have a similar difficulty to the one Todd describes here.  I’m often thinking, why am I not ecstatically happy right now?  Shouldn’t I be ECSTATICALLY happy at all times?  Shouldn’t I be on a Caribbean beach while engaged in coitus after having just won the lottery and found the cure for cancer?  That’s the standard by which I judge my happiness level.  And, of course, I could just choose to have that life.  A choice, that’s all.  But I say, fuck it, fuck curing cancer, fuck that Caribbean beach.  I could get on a plane to San Juan, but I’m staying here on my goat farm in Sheybogan because of all the people (and goats) I know there, as well as all my warm memories of summers slogging through goat excrement that I carry around in my heart. 

Moving on . . .

The episode revolves around Jeff’s need to study for his biology final, something that he puts off to help Shirley in her trial against Pierce for controlling interest in the sandwich shop the two are finally allowed to open. He keeps repeating the phrase “cellular mitosis,” and I think that idea is crucial to understanding the whole season—and maybe the whole series so far.

I keep repeating the phrase, “Todd VanDerWerff’s an idiot”—I think it’s crucial to understanding his write-ups.

Cellular mitosis is the process by which cells split off from each other and replicate, so that all of your skin cells are recognizably skin cells and all of your bone cells are bone cells and so on.

Shit—you’re about to open a can of insight on our asses.  Thanks, Bill Nye.

Mitosis involves a complicated process of splitting off, of one cell becoming two individual units. Throughout this season, we’ve watched as the members of the group have pursued their own interests and run off into their own little stories, and we’ve watched as more and more of the students of Greendale became characters in their own rights. But as the individual “cells” of the study group—or of Greendale—split off from the larger organism, they still carry the things they learned from being with each other.

Excuse me, I just had to go wipe a little bit of vomit off the train seat. Getting a bit gooey in here. This is just a model of your insidious influence on your readers, isn’t it, Todd?  As they go off into their lives they can “carry” the bullshit things they’ve learned from you about journeys and growth and spread it over the internet until all comedies are just people hugging and congratulating each other on how much they’ve learned. 

The longer they’re together, the more they’ll influence each other. But when the time comes for them to finally split off from each other for real, they’ll be ready to spread the things they’ve learned from each other even further.

The Greendale virus!  We’ve got a stage three contagion going on here!  Run for your lives!

Wholes split into pieces, but they’re still wholes, because we carry those things forward in our hearts.

I just…oh my god. The things we carry forward in our hearts, you mean plaque right?  Arteriosclerosis?  Since you’re getting all science-y and all. 

And that’s a lovely message to leave us with

Yes. Embroider that shit.

in a season that’s been sometimes messy but always ambitious, always pushing the limits of what the show could do, and always trying to find new ways to tell stories about these people.  . . . But when I look back on this season of TV in the years to come,

When it’s off air, because of asshats like you.

I don’t think I’ll remember all of the struggles that got us to “Introduction To Finality” or even the moments in that episode that I didn’t like. I’ll remember the group walking down the hallway, the theme song starting to play under them. I’ll remember Shirley letting Jeff throw the case for his own good. I’ll remember Abed admitting Britta’s the best therapist he could have. I’ll remember Troy realizing that his potential and his friends don’t have to stand in each other’s way.

Wow, are you watching the same show I’m watching?  You know what these moments you mention have in common?  They’re not fucking funny!  You know what I’ll remember?  Jokes, gags, parodies. German Foozball players saying, “I wish there were a word to describe the pleasure I feel at your misfortune.”  You know, comedy. 

And I’ll remember Leonard reviewing Let’s Potato Chips (as well as his tall, muscular, African-American roommate).

See, that’s funny.

Most of all, though, I’ll remember the idea that we all have a choice, that we can all put off our own destinies or embrace them.

Holy shit, this just achieved a whole new level of depth.

We don’t have to put off growing up to be with our friends, just as we don’t have to give up being with our friends to grow up.

Oh, snap—you saw what he just did there, didn’t you?  Switched around the sentence order!  Man, he’s a rhetorical God—it’s like Marx, in “The Eighteenth Brumaire.” Like he says there, history repeats itself twice, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”  That’s pretty much a description of my cycle of reactions to reading this write-up. 

There’s much more to life than just the same stuff we’ve always known,

What, Todd, don’t tell me that!  You mean I can continue to learn?  To know new things!  No, no!  You’ve just overturned my whole worldview!  I thought once we reached the age of twenty it was just “the same stuff we’ve always known.”  But now VanDerWerff, the new Socrates, has shown me the light!  And what a master of writing—“the same stuff.”  Hats off, Todd, hats off.

and when we finally reach the point where we’re ready to head off into our own unknowns,

“There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know.  In addition, there are ‘own unknowns’—these are bullshit, Todd.  Stop mentioning them.”

                                                                                                -Donald Rumsfeld

we’ll carry bits and pieces of each other with us all the while.

I don’t know about you, but I do not approve of cannibalism and dismemberment. I’m kind of a Protestant when it comes to relics. I do not carry around my first grade teacher’s thumb, no matter how much of an influence she may have been on me.  Or perhaps you mean it like how Tracy Jordan meant it on a recent episode of 30 Rock: “I have someone inside me too.  It’s a bath toy of a scuba diver.”

Now that’s a joke, kids!

The title of Community has always been a description, yes, of the place where these people met and the kind of world they built for themselves. But it’s also always been a promise, a hope that someday, we’ll all find people who make us feel at home and become parts of a larger, warmer whole.

Van Der Werff’s last lesson to his followers: we can all get into “a larger, warmer whole.”  A larger, warmer whole.  Todd, Todd, this is supposed to be a family friendly website.  You really shouldn’t bring up your proclivities, no matter how incoherent you become when confronted with “gooeyness.”  Though a journey in search of a “larger, warmer whole” would make for interesting viewing.

And tut, tut Todd.  You’re married.  You should be at home with your wife, not out searching for larger warmer wholes.

Oh, “whole.”  You rogue you, silent “w.” My bad.  But what exactly would a larger, warmer whole look like?  I imagine a huge, circular round of cheese, approaching the consistency of Velveeta.  Mmmm. Gooey enough for you? And now, where Dan Harmon’s brain used to be, it gets to sit on top of a suit as the driving force behind Community. What a final image to leave us with, Todd.