It's been pretty easy to forget about Community this season — not with any malicious intent, mind you, nor because it's become unwatchably bad or anything; it's just that its sixth, Yahoo-backed run of episodes has been quietly achieving away from mainstream focus and, thus, has fallen somewhat out of mind for being so out of sight.
That said, for the faithful few who have been keeping up — in Australia, the series has a US-matching release date on streaming platform Stan — the sixth season has been surprisingly solid, especially given the collective effect of the departures of founding cast members Chevy Chase, Donald Glover and Yvette Nicole Brown in recent years.
Indeed, while new cast members Paget Brewster and Keith David have both done admirable jobs of making their fresh characters three-dimensional people, some of this season's standout performances have come from the incumbent cast — most notably, Jim Rash, whose forever-put-upon Dean Pelton has basically stolen the show every time he's featured in-frame.
To that end, and the point of this story (it's coming, promise), it should come as little surprise that it was Rash, once again, responsible for a scene-stealing performance in most recent episode Modern Espionage — the title of which also demonstrates one of the most unlikely things about Community's sixth season (aside from it even existing): that paintball-themed episodes are still working for this show, somehow.
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Modern Espionage takes the paintball conceit and makes it a little more clandestine, and yet even though this marks the fourth time the show's creators have tapped this well, it's still brilliant, made all the more so by an inspired scene in which Dean Pelton (accidentally) takes out an elevator full of opponents, in a triumphant homage to a scene from Captain America 2: The Winter Soldier in which the Great American Hero dispatches several would-be attackers in a SHIELD lift. Granted, the Dean might not be the skilled super-soldier that Steve Rogers is, but, hey — he holds his own. Check it out below.
As The Daily Dot notes, the parody takes on an extra dimension of sweetness when you realise that ex-Community directors Anthony Russo and Joseph V Russo (who between them have more than 30 episodes between them) also directed The Winter Soldier (and will direct the upcoming third Captain America film, Civil War) — so it's one big happy familial circle shining through in this scene.
Get amongst it and then, if you haven't already, start catching up with the rest of season six as soon as you can.
