After the highly anticipated season opener, Community’s third season continued with something of an oddity. Geography Of Global Conflict saw some of the nerdiest behaviour ever witnessed at Greendale, some of the creepiest father/daughter dynamics ever witnessed at Greendale, and a pop at the United Nations. Never has comedy been quite so bizarre… Suffice it to say that Jeff is the driving force behind the only plausible solution to Annie’s immaturity problem: the world’s first ever model UN off. Being Greendale, this is possibly the nerdiest event ever to have taken place on campus, and this is a college that counts fort-city building types like Troy and Abed among its student body. The UN off of course descends into chaos, and an inevitable sc-ifi ending: Abed, as Switzerland, has access to the Large Hadron Collider. So far so Community, but it also gave rise to the ridiculous tantrum throwing antics of the usually so repressed you can feel it Annie. Hanging a light on it is all very well, but enough already – it’s time to find them both a new love interest. All of this UN-inspired nerdiness was meant to be offset by Britta’s incredibly self indulgent raging against the machine. And by raging we mean being unable to kick things over, and by machine we mean Greendale Security, or Ex-Senor Chang as he’s more commonly known. Greenpeace, she ain’t. What we do care about, however, is that despite the episode being a tad lopsided, thanks to said ineffectual raging, the script stays razor sharp, and as interesting as always. From the naughty moniker fun of Prof Cligoris – a superb cameo from Freaks And Geeks’ Bill, also known as Martin Starr – to Troy’s great UN jokes and the visual gags, there was much to enjoy. Community is a show, much like 30 Rock, that lives or dies by its script. The action is almost irrelevant at times. The true test of a writing team is that the script remains engaging during the irrelevant action, and while Geography Of Global Conflict had much irrelevance, it continued to be engaging nonetheless. So, while not a groundbreaking twenty one minutes of television, it’s a solid seven out of ten for the sophomore episode. Season three is still settling down, so it may well be that solidity is something that we can expect more of. Still, as long as Ken Jeong gets some screentime, it’s money in the bank! Read our review of episode one, Biology 101, here. Follow Den Of Geek on Twitter right here. And be our Facebook chum here.
