It’s getting really easy to pigeonhole episodes of Community by what movie genre critics think it’s aping. Tonight, it wouldn’t surprise me if a great many commentaries on “Intro to Political Science” focus on the main plot’s nods to Election with how it pits the popular Jeff Winger against the cares-too-much-about-the-issues Annie. Let’s get this out of the way as soon as possible: Community is so much more about its characters than it is about the genre gimmicks, and it is because of under serving its characters that tonight’s episode was a good deal weaker than the past few.
The dean informs the study group about an impending visit to Greendale by Vice President Joe Biden, although the announcement comes in person, presumably to fit in the joke about a female-cut Uncle Sam outfit. With the political figure visiting, Greendale needs to elect a student body president and eight candidates enter the race, including minor character favorites Leonard, Star-Burns, and the newly introduced Magnitude. The show does a good job of showing how ridiculous the election process is at this level and how apathetic the students are about the entire debate process.
One thing that Community has learned very well is that Jeff and Annie have the best romantic chemistry of anyone on the show and have wisely kept any of those types of plots on the backburner. The progression of the dueling candidacy follows an obvious line: Annie cares, Jeff doesn’t and stays in the race in attempt to prove to her that the effort isn’t warranted. This builds through a sometimes funny but overly-typical debate, the best part of which consists of Abed and Troy covering the debate for local television in a wonderful extension of their fake morning show “Troy and Abed in the Morning!”
Where the episode succeeds in unlikely fashion is through a subplot in which a Secret Service agent played by Eliza Coupe, or Jo from the last two seasons of Scrubs, becomes infatuated with Abed and finds a bunch of excuses to question him and search his room in order to continue seeing him. It’s a wonderfully subtle progression that continues through the last bit during the credits where Abed watches Kickpuncher while she observes from a surveillance van. It’s a strangely sweet moment — one that is appropriately weird for Abed — and at the same time out of place in an episode with very little other than a rehash of the Jeff/Annie chemistry plot and too little of the rest of the cast.
At the beginning of the episode, the study group wonders about whether or not they should actually study anthropology, and while that joke played well as a meta-commentary on how the show has strayed from its first season in Spanish class with Chang, it points out a glaring flaw in this type of episode. Without an original spin on the ways in which campus politics affect this group, the writing goes toward broad jokes with light touches of deeper drama. Those far more muted moments, between Jeff and Annie and Abed and the Secret Service agent, work well and plumb the depths of the characters, but the jokes this week had very little specificity or originality to the Greendale location or the study group. After the heavy lifting of the Pierce story line this is hopefully just a lull in what has been a fairly strong run for the show.
Final Grade: B
Other Notes:
Shirley, Britta and Pierce are barely in this episode with Shirley’s absence the most egregious. When the show came back from its winter break, it let all of the plot buildup from the first half of the season out in one big gust by revealing Shirley’s pregnancy and the possibility that Chang is the father — and the show has not revisited the ramifications of that since. With next week’s episode titled “Custody Law and Eastern European Diplomacy,” I can’t help but think the custody part will have to deal with Chang and Shirley.