Making Lasting Friendships Over Three and Half Seasons (And a Movie?)

For a look back on the first episode of Community’s epic three-part finale, click here. This is a review/analysis (revalysis? reviewlysis?) of the final two, “The First Chang Dynasty” and “Introduction to Finality.”

Releasing three absolutely golden pieces of television in the same week is no small feat. It definitely feels like the Community crew thought this would be their last season and wanted to end something as legendary and flipping-the-bird-to-NBC as possible. And they did it. Of course, it is coming back next season, and I fully expect to be high quality. Maybe it’ll even be more fun for the actors, writers, and production staff. But without Dan Harmon, it’s hard to see anything approaching the greatness of Thursday’s three episodes.


That said, “The First Chang Dynasty” raises an important question: Is dictatorship an okay thing to satirize? Yes, satire and comedy are some of the most effective ways to tear down the power of societal ills. But what Sacha Baron Cohen’s thus-far-not-well-reviewed The Dictator (only 61% on Rotten Tomatoes through its first weekend) and “The First Chang Dynasty” both have in common is they are Western productions. A Syrian mother with two dead children or a Chinese factory worker putting in 100-hour weeks might not find this stuff as funny. The argument is distance: as Americans, dictatorships are very far-off and foreign to us. The most famous dictators to Americans are Arabic, African, and Asian. Even though they’re dead, I’m sure the first names on any American’s mind when it comes to dictators (exceptions being archetypes like Hitler and Stalin) are Saddam Hussein, Moammar Gadhafi, and Kim Jong-Il. Maybe Fidel Castro.

In a plot that’s been building for a while, Chang positions himself as a Kim Jong-Il caricature (is it even possible to make a caricature out of that crazy dead bastard?), which is certainly Ken Jeong’s right, being of South Korean descent. He could’ve told Harmon and the writers that he was uncomfortable with the part, but he didn’t. Plus, he was funny, and it was a logical development for his increasingly psychopathic character. The show earned this episode by building it up slowly over time, and they did well to show Chang’s student rights abuses as little as possible—security checkpoints at building entrances, sycophantic Board members, a puppet Dean—nothing too radical here.

Another trick the show used was to focus the episode on an Ocean’s 11-style heist, with the stolen goods being Dean Pelton. It’s a short vignette, but it’s the meat of the episode, what this episode will really be remembered for—other than Chang playing keytar in a George Washington costume decorated with bottle caps. It wasn’t about overthrowing Chang so much as it was getting the Dean safe and clearing their names. This is a wise move—centering the show on trying to overthrow a dictator would be impossible to make comedy. Dictatorships and corrupt governments are very hard cultures to shake, and to satirize it from a Western high horse would be insulting.

That doesn’t address whether this episode is insulting/otherizing. With oppressive government regimes at best fresh remembrances or at worst the norm on three continents, is it okay to joke about them from far away? Ken Jeong, a Detroit native of Korean descent, plays Chang. Baron Cohen, a British Jew, has used his half-Isreali parentage to create racially ambiguous characters from North Africa, Kazakhstan, and Germany. Neither are that far removed from oppression, but these are Hollywood productions. Not to take away from their excellent work, but how long will it be before we think of this as a Millennial version of blackface?

It’s hard to have any real answers, and I don’t want to Britta this column. But it’s worth thinking about, especially since this seems to be becoming a more common joke.

After Chang is ousted, “Introduction to Finality” explores the opposite of dictatorships: selfless good. It’s safe to assume that it was filmed as a series finale, and you can’t end a comedy like Community on something as horrible as the group finding out their last three years at Greendale have been completely wasted thanks to a crazy, Spanish-speaking Korean. So every loose end is brought up. Jeff has a foot out the door: “I am here to replace my fake bachelor’s so I can resume my life as a lawyer.” Abed is melting down, Tyler-Durden style. Troy is ready to commit to Air Conditioning Repair School, leaving all his friends behind. Britta realizes she’s average. Shirley and Pierce are bickering over who owns the sandwich shop, solely because there’s only one dotted line on the contract. The episode begins with evil characters, and they eventually turn good.



Duality. At first, I thought it was out of character for Community. For a show that regularly lampoons easy binaries and TV clichés, why have Evil Abed vs. Abed, Jeff vs. his old best friend/nemesis (and by extension, his old self), Shirley and Pierce battling over a petty clerical error, Britta accepting she’s average and thus giving up on helping people, and Troy’s love for his friends vs. AC school. But that’s the crux: Troy’s love for his friends.



After sacrificing his freedom so the group and the Dean could be freed from Chang’s clutches, Troy was forced into the AC school, where almost no time at all passed before he was read a prophecy with a Christlike tagline (“the truest repairman will repair man”) and thrust into a duel with the evil Murray in a hellish “Sun Chamber.” The objective is to fix an AC unit faster than your opponent while the temperature steadily rises. It’s literally a good vs. evil matchup in a Hell stand-in.

Everything is done over a classic Jeff Winger Speech. Seeing as Winger is a stand-in for Harmon, and the show is based on Harmon’s experience taking Spanish classes at a community college to save a dying relationship, I have to ask: Is this show about the moral education of Jeff Winger? He is our ostensible hero. He fraudulently creates the study group to get into Britta’s pants, and the group unexpectedly becomes his best friends. Just listen to the beginning of this last epic Winger Speech:


“My client, Shirley Bennett, my friend of three years, she told me [throwing the case] was okay, because what I want matters. Guys like me, we’ll tell you there’s no right or wrong…and as long as we believe that, guys like me can never lose…The truth is...helping only ourselves is bad and helping each other is good.”

He’s learned! He even sold out his former lawyer best friend in court, losing his old firm a valuable account (Pierce) and seemingly giving up the opportunity at a powerful law career. Pierce even renounces homophobia.

It’s also telling that the group never learns, despite a whole episode of trying, what cellular mitosis is (hint: it’s when cells divide. #subtlety!). This entire show is about rejects, failures, and people so down in life that they’d believe a community college was an insane asylum becoming friends. Rebuilding together. For all its darkness, weirdness, and cynicism, who knew Community was about how beautiful companionship is. Instead of being a mean-spirited takedown of what “communities” are, it reaffirms the need for a strong core of friends and family. It’s actually kind of nice.

Now, Dan Harmon is fired, and they’ve got 13 more episodes to create more drama. Then they have to come up with a resolution as good as this one. Future looks bright, folks.