Weak episodes of great tv shows

Just a weak script that doesn't feel like it fits and could be cut out with nothing being missing. The PC, Todd and Mr. Penutbutter's subplot was bearable but Bojack and Diane's story feels like it leads to nothing by the end.

This episode has a problem with telling us about the characters instead of showing us, it's a very basic way of introducing the characters that never gets to this extend again and is an outlier for poor storytelling in this show. At this point Raphael's plan was to mislead the audience into believing that this was your run of the mil family guy knock off and pulling back the curtain in both episode 8 and episode 11. Bojack hates the troops is a much better episode due to it having some fun slices of social commentary elements which represent the show better than this episode.

Just a kind of meh episode that doesn't leave an impact.

I can never really make it all the way through this episode, none of the jokes really land for me.

The plot of two best friends falling out and treating it like a break up is a common sitcom trope but they don't really do much with the concept. The episode also changes Dennis' character to be entirely reliant on Mac to function, which isn't consistent with his character.

The cream pie gag is an overdone joke, sorry not sorry.

"Eh, let's keep flying."

The character dynamics of the crew are great when on display and the voice over from Jet is a brilliant concept that continues the style of his previous episodes and arcs, the 1st being a melancholy romantic tragedy in Ganymede Elegy, the second being a classic Noire with twists and turns in Black Dog Serenade and now a detective tale where the cop has to help out the innocent dame. Unfortunately that's where the positives end, the episode itself is focused on an uninteresting character and a mystery with a dull and nonsensical motivation for the Farther character.

Aside from Hank's PTSD moment this episode is entirely forgettable.

Way to stick the landing.

All in all, I didn't mind season 4. Sure, the absence of Dan Harmon effected the speed of the jokes and the consistency of the characters but the writers still tried to capture the creativity of the previous seasons. Whether they were successful with their approach or not, I still think it's commendable that they tried to keep the point of the show intact. However, I will say that this episode will a complete dud for me. Dan Harmon's story structure has been broken down by a multitude of people and while not every episode has to adhere to a certain formula, having a sense of real progression in an episode is important. By the end of it, it feels like nothing has happened. The puppet story line is so far from reality that it's hard to be invested to any extent and the out of nowhere song numbers are an attempt to be random which do not succeed. An example of musical segments working in Community is the episode Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas. The reason why the gang is singing in that episode is to go along with Abed's delusion and some of the character's, like Annie and Abed, feel more at home with singing while Jeff and Britta don't. This type of character consistency isn't on display in Intro to Felt Surrogacy, it feels like the character's are being pulled along by the writer and are doing things that they normally wouldn't. At the end of the day, it's the worst episode of Community but at least they attempted something different. Even if it didn't pan out.