A surprising amount of this season of Community seems to be designed to re-do episodes that didn’t work during last year’s Dan Harmon-less Fourth Season. That’s given this (very strong) season something of an identity crisis. When you spend all your time looking back, you just aren’t able to move forward. So it’s equally exciting and frustrating to see the show treading familiar ground again by going back to Dungeons & Dragons. The Community that last entered the realms of wizards and goblins and necromancers was a very different series. The episode that resulted was a series highlight, perfectly integrating high concept and character building.

Community’s references to movies and other television shows have become the show’s defining characteristic. Sometimes they’re just peppered over the top of a story that could have been told in several different ways, and sometimes the reference itself is the reason that the episode exists. “App Development and Condiments” is built to be a parody of dystopian tales of future societies separated by arbitrary ranking systems into an elite class and a proletariat class.