Clip shows feel outdated. They feel unecessary, they feel boring, and they feel lazy. It seems like you can almost mark the point a show jumps the shark by going a few episodes past or before their clip show. Community knows this, so that's why when Community did their clip show, they made up all the clips. I love the idea that there are so many of these adventures that happened this season that we haven't seen. It does wonders to expand the universe of the show. The sheer number of clips in this episode was mind-blowing, I can't even imagine how long it took to film. But it was all worth it. This is one of my favorite Community episodes ever. In fact, I'd be willing to go as far as to call this episode this season's Modern Warfare.
I also greatly admire the show for using some clips to expand on previous episodes. Many people, including me, stated that they wanted to see the other side of the Christmas episode, with Abed describing what he was seeing in claymation and the group sitting in the study room reacting. The expansions of episodes like the Halloween episode helped to service the plot of this episode, involving Jeff and Britta's secret hookups. Besides the clips, this episode also had many callbacks to previous episodes, my favorite being Chang saying "I know these vents like the back of my Chang".
Out of the clips from the episodes that don't exist, I was particularly fond of the Glee Club (which was a hilarious Glee parody), the fanfic montages (complete with cheesy music), and Jeff's speechifying montage. And who could forget Abed as The Cape? Even though this was a fake clip show, it still managed to be retrospective on the season in general. They mentioned how they've been to fun places, they mentioned how they've gone dark places. They references the fact that whenever the group threatens to come apart at the seams, Jeff gives a speech and everything works out. Just a brilliant episode all around (streets ahead, you might say), complete with a genius tag that even managed to top last week's "Fiddler, Please". My only complaint is they didn't manage to work in a Magnitude reference. Pop pop!
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