My god, what an infuriating episode of Community. I hate giving this show bad reviews, because it’s always been the shaggy dog story that the whole Internet can get behind. But even our favorite shows can betray us. Community has been experiencing a dip in quality over the last few weeks, but “Intro to Recycled Cinema” and “Grifting 101” had their moments. “Basic RV Repair and Palmistry” is just bad. Like, fourth season bad. I know that sounds heretical to say, but bear with me. Season four of Community felt like Moses Port and David Gurascio trying to make a Dan Harmon show; “RV Repair” feels like Dan Harmon trying to be Port and Gurascio making a Harmon show. It’s Community several degrees removed from itself.
Everything on display here has been done better in previous episodes. The bottle episode? “Cooperative Calligraphy.” The RV angle? “Basic Rocket Science.” The ever-changing flashbacks? “Remedial Chaos Theory” (arguably). And so on. This feels like nothing more than a placeholder. Usually it’s good for a show to change its scenery, especially when one set gets used so often, i.e. the study room. But Community just changed the scenery to have a bottle episode. The plot is simple: the Dean, for reasons unknown, buys a giant hand, and the whole group goes to pick it up in Elroy’s RV, which both breaks down and runs out of gas on the way home, stranding them by the highway. Bottle episode frustrations and revelations ensue. (I will say that Elroy got my favorite line of the night; after the batteries have died, he says “I know I’m not going to find a cartoonish vampiric orgy of electrical devices plugged into one socket.”)
By far the worst part of “RV Repair” is Abed, who, no bullshit, brings Community close to jumping the shark in just this one episode. Community has always been steeped in absurdity, and it rebounded from its “gas leak” fourth season to deliver one of its strongest seasons since its second. Do you have any idea how hard it is for this show to jump the shark? This is a show that lives in mid-air above the shark. But Abed’s incessant talk of flashbacks – even referencing the real-life second season of Community, when he swore that he could differentiate between real life and TV – nearly pulled it off. This was my complaint about Abed’s behavior in “Ladders” writ large. His detachment from reality has been something that the show has hung its hat on for many seasons, usually to positive effect, but in “RV Repair” he comes off as genuinely insane. It seemed, for a second, like Jeff was going to bring him kicking and screaming back to reality, which got my hopes up – but then Jeff basically told him to keep doing what he was doing, at which point I settled in for the rest of the episode.
It didn’t help matters that Abed’s “three weeks earlier” flashback kept evolving to the point that I was wondering if there was a supernatural element at play. Do you hear me? I WAS WONDERING IF ABED WAS TIME TRAVELLING. Community played it so straight, and there was such a dearth of laughs to be had (save for Abed and the Dean’s enthusiastic “extra thick straps” dance) that it was giving me flashbacks of my own to the season four finale “Advanced Introduction to Finality,” wherein the darkest timeline version of the group was just Jeff’s way of letting go of his present.
And there we go again, looping back to “RV Repair,” the theme of which appears to be the importance of both letting go and holding on. This, too, has been done before, most notably in last season’s “Geothermal Escapism.” Goddamnit, I hate when Community coasts on the good will it’s earned from the Internet.
And we need to talk about the tag, too. I’ve been a big fan of season six’s tags, especially “Butcher and the Baker” and the weird Yakuza one from a while ago. But this one got dark quick. And like everything else about “RV Repair,” the mood wasn’t earned. The reveal that the guy (Matt Besser) wanted to buy a giant hand to wear a giant watch was kind of funny, if only for the sight of the huge watch. But the reveal that his son was missing and probably dead was WOW not funny. South Park can pull off a dead kid joke (watch “Stanley’s Cup,” maybe one of the darkest episodes the show has ever produced), but Community isn’t quite there yet. The show can be cynical, sometimes bordering on nihilistic, but it’s never nasty. There’s a reason that almost every episode ends with a physical or verbal hug. The silver lining of “RV Repair” seems to be that the season can’t get much worse than this.
Oh, I thought Space Elder Britta was hilarious. So there’s that.
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