Wishful Thinking...

[Wisp]

SpaceAnJL, that's utterly fucking terrifying.

This topic has obviously been bothering the hell out of a lot of characters here.
The amount of mad business they could get away with on a show about FOUR GODDAMN SCIENTISTS (I mean, good grief, where do you begin!), and what do we get…a cloying, overly-masticated, formulaic romcom, that’s bitterly wasting the actors’ abilities. Also wasted is the dark surrealism that I suspect lurks in a few of the writers, and CERTAINLY in Chuck Lorre. The man who wrote the spiel about painting the sacrificial chicken blood on the groin can do a hell of a lot better than some tepid pussy-footing around the marital and coital status of two brain-glazingly dull couples, as they putz around from one predictable scenario to another, shedding their brilliance with every tawdry step.

They had the right idea straight from the gate, with The Nerdvana Annihilation, for example. The variations in the reactions to a potential Time Machine were splendid, and the Morlock dream-within-dream is unparalleled in the show thus far. In my opinion…

Nowadays the Morlocks would probably go to bloody lamaze classes or something...

Oh, the amount of tricks they missed... I totally agree that they could have got away with some weird-ass shit. With the old writing, anyway. I wouldn't trust them with a bit of mild cosplaying nowadays. My favourite episodes are the ones that are self-contained and don't involve "We're geeky losers, we need girls" angst, or, as it is now, "we're geeky losers, we've got girls now, oh what emotional whiplash, day in day out" angst. The show needs some escapism from itself.

I think the reason why I have taken a serious liking to Community lately is because of the fabulously executed AU/just plain surreal episodes:

• A labyrinth of blanket forts
  
• Spaghetti Western Paintball Tournaments. A FIST FULL OF PAINTBALLS. ORGASM.
  
• Zombie-making Taco Meat
  
• Bottle Episode
  
• Christmas Stop Motion Episode
  And Abed's Dreamatorium for fuck's sake
  

Also A LOT of crossdressing. That's always a yes for me, providing said crossdresser pulls it off.
I can watch about 17 in a row and not get tired because some episodes are like a completely different show.
I could go on... I think I've got a crush on the whole show.

---

One way of looking at the show is that we've been watching a slow mental disintegration of one man when the core of his identity is stripped away from him.

That's what that has occurred to me too. Can it be that TBBT is in fact the tragic story of how the genius gets mocked, loses his mind and wastes away, with his spirit broken and his identity taken away from him, once he is put in the wrong place, associating with the wrong people, once he is made to doubt himself, made to become 'normal', made to fit in?

Not that I believe tptb are deliberately and consciously telling such a story, but the show these days indeed comes across, to me anyway, as one huge, tragic story of the genius and the different being defeated by - and made to show respect to - the mediocre and the "normal".

The moments in TBBT where the characters have self-doubt are often a tad unsatisfying to me, as the characters still seem bothered by themselves at the end of the episode, e.g. when Penny shouts at Leonard about his Time Machine. Although she apologises and was just mad, I still get the impression that she'll never truly "get it" and that will perpetually bother Leonard. In Community there are moments when someone has a moment of self-doubt, but they are reassured, and so am I, that they are fine how they are. TBBT has become increasingly ambiguous with its message; I'm no longer sure whether they care about their characters or not.