Well, shut my mouth. After I made such a fuss about the brilliance of the puppet episode of Angel, Community actually delivered a pretty great puppet episode of their own. Was it still a glorified gimmick, though?
The episode, “Intro to Felt Surrogacy,” (season 4, ep. 9) begins with a down-beat cold open featuring all primary cast members other than Pierce (Chevy Chase) sitting in the break room and refusing to make eye contact with one another. Cue opening credit sequence after which Dean Pelton (Jim Rash) enters the study room equipped with his homemade hand-puppets, which he insists the group use to “puppet therapy” their way through whatever it is they can’t otherwise talk about.
Troy and his hand-puppet.
The strategy works and the group starts talking, initially about the weirdness of the Dean just randomly having the puppets lying around but rather quickly about what it is they are otherwise refusing to discuss. We cut to the group from days earlier, and they are now represented as professionally-produced Jim Henson Company puppets. And they’re adorable, even when arching their eyebrow:
So, we see them all as free-moving and talking puppets even though we know they are actually in the study room with puppets on their hands and telling Dean Pelton the story of a strange trip into the woods? Isn’t this just a tweaked version of the set-up of “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas (season 2, episode 11) in which Abed imagines everything as if it were a stop motion Christmas special and the group pretends with him as part of a group therapy session? Kind of, except there Abed had suffered a mental break in which he truly saw the world as if it were in stop motion whereas here none of them are actually seeing the world the way we are, i.e., them as puppets.
Once puppets, there is a meta-commentary on the show possibly having fallen into a rut as a means of justifying the need for a puppet episode. It’s actually a funny gag in which Troy (Danny Pudi) and Abed (Donald Glover) have devised bingo cards based upon the frequency with which each individual group members says certain things: Shirley will say something Christian, Britta something liberal/activist-y, Pierece something homophobic, Annie something student-like, and Jeff something bossy. The bit is somewhat unnecessary, as it merely serves to built to a fun song about going on an adventure, and a group which has engaged in countless crazy adventures does not really need to realize through exposition they need to go on adventure. However, it is pretty funny, and their eventual song is disgustingly catchy. Actually, that undersells it. I kind of love this song. It’s like a PG-version of a tune from Avenue Q:
It’s during this sequence it becomes apparent what is happening here, if you didn’t get it already. Oh, they’re doing a Muppet Show homage. They are going to randomly break out into song and encounter random celebrities appearing in brief cameos.
For example, during “That’s An Adventure” their balloon ride guide is Sarah Bareilles, a musician whose music was spoofed by the show during its second season.
Of course, in their zest during the song they accidentally set off on their balloon ride without their guide and crash-land in the woods, where they encounter yet another random celebrity putting in a day of shooting for a cameo. Hello, Jason Alexander:
We all know he’s wearing a wig, but so does the show. They even make a joke about it.
Jason Alexander is more than just his Larry David stand-in character George Costanza. He’s actually got some Broadway musical chops. So, if he’s there that means he’s going to break out into song, which is where the episode takes a truly unexpected turn. During a song about living off of the woods, Alexander distribute psychotropic berries to the unsuspecting puppets who trail off mid-song into an instant drug haze. This results in a blissed out campfire scene, post-Alexander’s hasty exit, in which we finally come to why it is the group couldn’t speak to one another:
It turns out that during their drugged-out state each member of the group revealed a deep, dark secret to one another. The kicker is that they remember telling their secret, but nobody else in the group remembers hearing it. As Troy puts it, “Those berries made us real talky, but not real listen-y.” However, Shirley has already revealed her secret to the rest of the group during puppet therapy before they realize how little they actually remembered, meaning they (and, by extension, the audience) know her secret.
The episode concludes with Jeff forcing everyone to reveal their secret, with him volunteering to go first, as they are a family, and they cannot allow Shirley to shoulder the burden alone. The secrets kind-of-but-not-completely call back to the bingo game Troy and Abed had played earlier. Shirley, the Christian, had left her kids at a grocery store all night because she was stalking someone she believed to be her husband with another woman. Annie, the studious one, cheated on one of their history exams through a quasi-sexual favors exchange in which they allowed their professor to touch her feet. Jeff abandoned a perfect woman for him because she had a kid. Britta, the activist, has never actually voted in a non-reality TV election. Troy, the childlike one, has started several fires at Greendale which have ultimately claimed multiple acres of land. Pierce is not the sexual dynamo he claims. It’s all out in the open, and they feel better because they refuse to judge one another.
When I wrote about Angel’s “Smile Time,” I argued they were able to make a gimmick like a puppet episode work because they used it to advance story arcs and further character development. In short, it did not feel like a gimmick. It made sense within the context of the universe of the show, and proved incredibly important to the overall story being told by the show at the time. I am somewhat amazed to report that Community mostly pulled this off as well. There are only real two story arcs going on the show at the moment – Chang’s secret pact with a rival college and Jeff’s maturing after having met his birth father. Well, they sneak in a moment where the puppet version of Chang reveals we should not trust him, and Jeff’s deep, dark secret speaks to his anxiety of becoming like his father. He did not abandon a child of his own, but he did reject a perfect relationship because he could not even picture being a father. Nicely done, even if this “perfect woman” for him he references comes completely and utterly out of nowhere.
I don’t necessarily know if there was any real character development, though. This is a sitcom, not a heavily serialized sci-fi drama. The characters, in general, stay roughly the same. Annie worried about her A-type leanings, Jeff’s self-doubt, Shirley struggling to give her faith due justice, Britta paranoid others will realize how inauthentic she is, and Pierce admitting to having fudged the facts? We’ve seen it all before, and the characters have hugged it out before. Then we came to this episode and see how the pattern repeats itself. However, that speaks more to the convention of the sitcom form than it does any failing of the show or this episode. I just felt the need to make the comparison since it was so central to my argument about “Smile Time.”
So, was this a gimmick? Did Community manage to pull off yet another homage episode that didn’t feel like mere gimmickry? Actually, and much to my delight, yes. It was among the strongest episodes of the season. And they didn’t even need Dan Harmon for that. Because I’ve got more here are a couple more pictures from the episode: