Community-"A Fist Full of Paintballs"

Josh Holloway guest stars as Black Rider on "Community"
Credit: NBC

My thoughts on the first part of the Community season finale are after the jump.

The first thought that popped into my head after I finished watching this episode of Community was "this show has balls". 

When an episode of television is as amazing as "Modern Warfare" was it takes guts to try to follow it up with anything. Before watching the episode my mind was in two completely different places. One was fuck yeah Community Paintball! And the other was a sense of worry, how do the follow up the perfect episode? Well they found a way to create a fantastic sequel to this episode. Yes, it did have a sense of incompletion but that isn't something I want to focus on in this review. This is about part one of the episode, the western spoof. The dean wanted a simple game of paintball, but what are the chances of that happening? Instead of that, we got an amazingly fun episode.

I find it very interesting that out of all the characters in their ensemble, they choose Annie to focus on during the episode, and I'm really glad they made that choice. Annie is one of the characters who I can't get enough of and this episode reminded me of this. Allison Brie is freaking awesome (and very hot as well) and she did a fantastic job playing everything she was given in this episode. She's a very funny person who can play serious very well and this episode gave her an opportunity to play both. She was fantastic in her scenes alone (and very convincing as the star of a western) and her scenes with the others.

The episode featured Josh Holloway as the mysterious "Black Rider" and he couldn't have been more awesome. It seemed like he was having so much fun doing this show. That ended up playing really well in the episode. He has this sense of badassness that worked really well for him. Black Rider was a real threat and Holloway did a great job playing that. He was also great with Allison Brie, there was great chemistry between the two of them. Their standoff int he cafeteria was a great example of this. I wish that Holloway wasn't "killed" off in this episode, even though the development with the Storm Troopers was a very interesting one. 

This year's problem the show tried to address was the problem of Pierce. I've written many times about how they've taken the character too far into the role of a villain this year. I just don't know if this was enough. If the show wants me to take Pierce seriously as a member of the group the relationship between him and the study group needs to be mended, although we might have to wait for part two for that. Although, the one good thing about him this week was Chevy Chase had a lot of fun playing the western crime lord.

Some other thoughts:

• That may have been the creepiest Dean outfit I've seen during the show's run. 
• Poor Chang, he can't seem to play for the right side, can he?
• Loved the shot with Donald Glover jumping out of the garbage can when Pierce's crew corners in the other members of the study group. Great callback. 
• That last shot with the Storm Troopers leaving the van was AWESOME. And so was the tag (aka a promo for next week).
• Those alternate credits were great as well, they set the mood very well.

Although this episode was freaking awesome, there's only so much I can say because this is only part one of a two part episode. I can't wait for next week and I'll have longer thoughts for you guys then.

What did everyone else think?