Posted By Arturo Garcia on March 20, 2013

“Kevin” (Ken Jeong) tries on some headwear on NBC’s “Community.”

Once again, the show reaches back to the past for a course correction, as Dan Harmon and Hunter Covington make ample use of a story trope — this is the show’s fourth go at a mockumentary — while remembering to attach it to a solid plot point, which helps ground a larger story that could still go off the rails.

And most gratifyingly, the duo is able to use Abed’s “propaganda film” for Dean Pelton to lower the implausibility of a story that amounts to the Idiot Ball being passed around by most of the Group.

In this case, it’s up to Jeff to break through the collective negligence regarding “Changnesia,” the not-at-all-made-up condition, for realsies, afflicting “Kevin.” While the Dean has turned the other cheek on rehabilitating totally-not-Chang — and turned to Abed to help him get the funding to do it — Jeff is the only one not buying the former Señor’s story. (It’s not a spoiler, I don’t think, to say that Chang is pulling a con. But we’ll get to the exact reveal shortly.)

But after Jeff, in turn, dupes the rest of his friends into helping him out Chang, we see bursts of cleverness that slightly undercut the idea that all of them would be so quick to let him off the hook. Annie scores the best moment of the episode when she turns Troy’s essential Troy-ness into an impromptu interrogation tool, revealing that Chang put in a typically ludicrous amount of work for the sake of his scheme. But Britta also shows some cunning, if nothing else, when she tricks poor Shirley into some sort of off-camera confession while plugging the sandwich shop.

Abed’s own empathy toward Chang is a little easier to accept, given how he phrased it (“He’s practicing smiling and frowning. We’ve all done it.”). But it could also be suggested that he, along with Shirley, and to a lesser degree Pierce, had something to gain by playing along, since he’s able to play the Dean and Jeff against one another in using them to enhance his production. But otherwise, the whole group turning on Jeff once his ruse is discovered strains just a little, compared to the one-by-one turning of the Group in, say, the glee club episode.

But otherwise, the episode moves along cleanly, and it plays fair with viewers by letting them be the only ones to learn Jeff was right all along; Chan does have a scheme in mind — or, at least, is implementing somebody else’s. Which brings to mind the assignment facing the current creative team: Harmon did the job of introducing this plot gambit. Now comes the hard part: making it come off more comically than cartoonishly.

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Categories: Other Categories, Reviews, Shows and Shorts
Tags: Community, Dan Harmon, Hunter Covington, Ken Jeong