That. Was epic. Holy goodness. I love it when Community fucks around with genre. When the credits started rolling, I was like "Best. Episode. EVER!"

And then I thought about it some more, and I got a little pissed.

Why did the big emotional learning moment go to Jeff? In a three part story arc about Troy and Abed's friendship, why did the end focus on Jeff's emotional growth? It frustrates me that Community has such a diverse cast, and yet even after three seasons, everything still has to go back to Jeff. Everything's about Jeff.

And it pisses me off that Jeff's emotional growth comes at the expense of Troy and Abed's. They were having a legit fight. There are legit problems in their relationship, most of them stemming from a lack of mature communication. It was dickish of Abed to let his friends work off his debt and then start racking up some more immediately, but a part of that was because Troy did his best to hide the seriousness of Abed's situation from him. He divorced Abed from the consequences of his actions and then didn't understand when Abed didn't learn from the experience.

Troy and Abed don't know how to fight with one another. They don't know how to communicate problems. And they don't learn. They start a two and a half day pillow fight because they don't know how to fight with each other, and the episode ends with fucking "Magic friendship hats. Okay, everything's cool again."

Abed owes Troy an apology. Some of the shit he's done is not acceptable friend behavior. It's not unforgivable-horrendous-awful, but it's the kind of stuff you're supposed to apologize for. And I don't expect Abed to already know that. He's not neurotypical; he needs to have this shit explained to him slowly and carefully and repeatedly until he understands. Troy needs to learn that if he wants to stay friends with Abed, he will have to explain slowly, patiently, in detail when there's a problem or Abed has done something to hurt him.


Maybe we'll get that in a later episode. But we should have gotten that here. Instead, we got magical fucking friendship hats that swept the problem under the rug and "AWWWWW, JEFF WILL MAKE A FOOL OF HIMSELF FOR HIS FRIENDS!"

I mean, it was cute. I awwwwwwwwwwwwed when we saw the footage of Jeff actually going back to the dean's office to get the hats, and his journal entry. Lord knows I'm a sucker for Jeff doing silly things for his friends. But this wasn't his god damn story; the resolution shouldn't have been all about him.