The thing that makes the weirdness work is the heart, and the thing that makes the heart work is the weirdness. Thankfully there was plenty of both this season, as if to make up for the fairly weak dramatic beats during the gas leak year - Jeff finally meeting his dad and the short-lived relationship between Troy and Britta being particularly wasted opportunities - as the characters "grew up" a little and tried to adjust to how they fit into Greendale after graduating. Of course that was sorted pretty quickly in the "Re-Pilot" as the study group transformed into the Save Greendale committee. From there, though, we had Jeff re-evaluating his place in the world as he both became a teacher and passed the age of 40, the emotional departure of Troy, Abed getting a girlfriend, and Annie's strained relationship with her brother. Heck, even Hickey's unreached dreams of comic strip stardom and Duncan's inability to connect with women had an emotional truth to them, bizarre as they are. Perhaps the high point of the heart/weirdness dichotomy, though, was the two-hander of "Cooperative Polygraphy" and "Geothermal Escapism". Both had fairly goofy premises on the surface - the study group undergo a polygraph test as part of the conditions of Pierce's will and Abed organizes a campus-wide game of "The Floor Is Lava" - but used those sitcom-y plots to mine into what makes it characters tick, with revelation after revelation (even if they're just Netflix-based) in the first episode and a genuinely tearful farewell in the second. It's the weirdness and the heart that make Community stand out from the crowd and have earned it such a devoted following, and it's never been stronger than in this season.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
