By Alex Brooks
Staff Writer, Bear Wrestler

Welcome to Primetime Rehashed: Community Edition!

The freshman thursday night comedy starring the Soup‘s Joel McHale had taken a two week break before this episode, so with its return should have come a great episode. Unfortunately, this week’s installment was somewhat mediocre. The show can capture an audience with it’s quick wit and sarcastic cast, but the plotlines for “The Art of Discourse” could have been better planned.

Photo from blog.zap2it.com

This week the gang faces three different issues: Pierce finally wears out his welcome within the group after pantsing Shirley, Jeff and Britta go head to head with a few high school bullies, and Troy and Abed go through a “bucket list” of activities to finish before the end of the semester. The show begins with Jeff and Britta talking in the cafeteria when they are interrupted and insulted by a few high school kids who are getting a head start by taking classes at the college. Britta carries this grudge back to the study room with her whereas Jeff completely forgets about them and focuses on Pierce’s terrible guitar playing.

Abed takes Pierce’s guitar from him and smashes it into pieces because he claims that it is a part of his bucket list that he wants to complete before the end of the semester. Troy says he wants in and Abed accepts him as his ‘Morgan Freeman’. Abed chooses to pants Troy and Troy does the same to him making Pierce decide that it is fine to pants Shirley. Shirley’s rampage is where the episode splits off into its three main arcs. Shirley gets Pierce kicked out of the group, Troy and Abed attack the Bucket List head on, and Jeff and Britta try to find a way to break the high schoolers.

Pierce’s absence from the group results in everyone insulting on another and the search for the group’s new scapegoat,  Abed and Troy become pledges for a fraternity, and Jeff realizes that the best way to get back at the teenagers would be to sleep with the leader’s mom. Jeff’s conquest is remarkably hilarious, but it backfires when the teenagers find out and tell the mom the real situation. Pierce admits to Shirley that he respects her the most out of everyone in the group and they realize that they are truly the parents of them all. Abed and Troy don’t get any attention until the end of the episode when a giant food fight breaks out.

The end scene is something from a typical college movie and Pierce & Shirley’s epiphany as the groups parents lead them to pants all of the high schoolers. The show’s be all end all results in the combination of all three plotlines in one of the most interesting scenes in comedy TV history. The episode’s downfalls were the absence of Troy and Abed and the actors playing the High School students horrible acting ability. They were supposed to come of annoying and that’s what they did, but the reason they were annoying was because of their obvious inability to keep up with Joel McHale and Gillian Jacobs. However, the light at the end of the tunnel came up when the preview for next week’s episode was enough to entrance anyone until 8pm next Thursday.

Quotes of the Night

1. “Knitting is hip, Winona Ryder knits!” – Britta Perry (Jacobs)

2. ” I’ll be like your Morgan Freeman” – Troy Barnes (Glover)

3. ” Actually, I was a lawyer” “Looks like that went well” - Jeff Winger and Mark Cahill (McHale and Kusnitz)

4 . ” Well, I try to keep things where they should be” ” I think I might be where I should be” – Mark’s Mom and Jeff Winger (Rinna and McHale)

5. ” They’re making us walk around with pretzels in our butts and I put mustard on mine like an idiot” – Troy Barnes (Glover)

Rating: 6/10