On its own terms, it’s a not-bad episode of the show, in a not-bad stretch of episodes that’s made me think if the show is renewed for a fifth season, it won’t be the worst thing in the world. Yet it’s also an episode explicitly designed to flatter the audience for knowing these characters’ back-stories, for remembering jokes and gags from past seasons. To a degree, all flashback sitcom episodes are like this. The aforementioned Cougar Town episode certainly was. (What put the New Girl episode a step above was the way that it used its flashbacks to tunnel down to the lonely adolescents that remained at the core of its characters.) In the first three seasons of Community, Greendale was a special place because it functioned as a tabula rasa, yes, but also because it forced its characters to confront their own shortcomings. In this season of Community, the shortcomings are all largely in the past, and something like Annie’s pill addiction or Britta’s political activism is played almost exclusively for laughs. Say what you will about the puppet episode, but at least it was trying something—even if you felt that something was against the characters as previously established or whatever. “Heroic Origins” turns knowing this show really, really well into an exercise in trivia contests.

The argument this whole season has been, “You wouldn’t be saying any of this if Dan Harmon was in charge!” And maybe that’s the case. Maybe Dan Harmon would have still been in charge of the show and would have turned the whole thing into exactly what we see before us. If you primarily watch the show to hang out with these characters or hear some funny jokes, I can absolutely see feeling like the shift has not been as palpable as those of us who feel it’s been detrimental have expressed (though I’d wager the show is also much less funny than it used to be). But I can think of maybe one or two moments this season when I felt like the show was really trying to expand my thought processes or what television can do, instead of just providing some laughs that boiled down the show to its most basic essence and tried to appease me with gentle comedy based in characters I’d loved. Put another way: Community has probably been a better show overall this season, but I’ve felt far more challenged by The Big Bang Theory, which is doing some interesting things in trying to push its core audience to new readings of its central characters (particularly Sheldon).

All of this might be a lot of words that aren’t really about this episode but about issues around this episode, but watching “Heroic Origins” left me with a smile on my face and an empty feeling in my belly. The old Community was very much an attempt to challenge the audience—and, not coincidentally, an occasionally terrifying trip through its creator’s brain. It didn’t always work, but it was reaching for something more 75 percent of the time. The new Community is fine, as these things go, but it’s also primarily interested in making sure the fans are happy. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not as interesting to discuss and dissect, at least for me. I’ve been detecting a certain detachment from the show in my own reviews this season, and in some of your comments. At first, I thought that was just holding the show to an impossible standard, but the more I think about it, the more I wonder if it’s just the natural response to a TV show I once loved becoming more and more about protecting the brand. There’s nothing wrong with still loving Community, but it’s become almost entirely a show about getting you to love Community, and that’s something I’ll always find just a bit hollow.