'Now This is Why I Came to America': Community Recapped

At the end of last season, I wrote that Community and NBC should do everything in their power to make John Oliver a full-time cast member. Not to toot my own horn (too late), but lo and behold, they did! If you watched the first two episodes of this season, though, you wouldn't have actually realized this joyous event happened, since Oliver was nowhere to be found. For the good of the show and comedy everywhere, that changed on Thursday night.

Keeping up the narrative in a way that would probably make Ryan Murphy jealous -- if he actually knew or cared about coherent narrative, that is -- Oliver showed up as the replacement for Betty White's crazy anthropology teacher. Inspired! Also inspired? His very first scene: "So, what is anthropology? (Long pause) Seriously, does anyone know?" That he also followed this up by referring to Annie as "you with the boobs" also won him major brownie points in the halls of Movieline HQ.

Most important, however, Oliver's presence acted as an antidote to Ken Jeong's pervasive form of anti-comedy. See, Oliver's Professor Ian Duncan has a restraining order against Jeong's Professor Student Chang and the "force field" keeps him from ever getting closer to Duncan (and the audience) than 25 feet. This helped save "The Psychology of Letting Go" from any Gollum references or dance competitions, a welcome respite. (That Chang got his own restraining order at the end of the episode, thus insuring "mutually assured destruction," was...fine.)

Elsewhere, the heart (haw!) of the episode dealt with Pierce's mother passing away, which predictably led to many jokes and some pretty heady thoughts about religion, life and what happens when we die. For Pierce and his neo-faux-ridiculous Buddhism, death means being vaporized and stored inside a lava lamp. For Jeff, it means you're dead -- which, coupled with an upsetting high cholesterol count, gave Greendale's resident beefcake a crisis of faith; when you believe your body is a temple, where do you go when cracks form in the facade? And for Annie and Britta death means...it's time to wrestle in room-temperature oil.

So, yeah. As you can see, there weren't too many introspective musings to bring everything crashing to a halt. There also weren't many pop culture zingers, as Abed was noticeably absent from the proceedings on-screen. (As commenters have pointed out, he was in the background in his own subplot that went unspoken of.) Being Community, this was referenced (of course) by Shirley, but it does make you wonder: As much as everyone loves Danny Pudi's embodiment of Abed, does the show work better when it isn't lost in an avalanche of his meta commentary? Possibly. Though without the existence of Abed and what he's brought to the show, would Community have gotten the chance to let Betty White explain Inception during the closing credits? Definitely not.