10 Terrible Episodes That Almost Ruined Great TV Shows
9. Community: Advanced Introduction To Finality
Community Season 4 is a pretty strange example where the showrunnner, Dan Harmon, was fired at the end of the third season and then rehired at the end of the fourth season. So now we have this weird season in the middle of the show with a completely different creative voice, with the remaining writers trying desperately to emulate what Harmon would have done.
The season isn’t all bad, but this finale is a complete failure, and easily the worst episode of the show. It’s Jeff’s graduation, and for a show which revolves around this guy going back to school to get his degree, that should feel like a huge moment. It's, in theory, the climax of the entire story.
Instead, we barely focus on his graduation at all, with most of the episode being a really lame plot involving the darkest timeline crossing over into the real timeline, and then it turns out to be a dream.
The dark timeline was a funny joke in Remedial Chaos Theory, but now the joke is officially dead. We spend all of the episode in this lame, poorly directed paintball fight, and then Jeff’s graduation is crammed into the last few minutes.
It should have been a big, emotional climax, and instead it’s completely rushed so the writers can drive both paintball and the darkest timeline into the ground.