After stumbling out of the gate, Season 4 of Community aired what was probably its strongest episode to date last night... although, the fact that "Conventions of Space and Time" qualifies as "strong" tells you how rocky the show's post-Harmon era has been so far.

To make up for the fact that Community's Halloween episode was airing on Valentine's Day as opposed to... well, Halloween, the marketing geniuses decided to give "Paranormal Parentage" the more calendar appropriate Twitter handle: "#HappyValloween." The idea of a Valentine's Day/Halloween hybrid is a pretty funny notion and probably would have made a great episode of Community. Certainly better than the one we got, which after a strong start (thanks largely to daffy costumes worn by the gang -- if Bill Watterson wasn't so tight-assed when it comes to licensing, we'd love a live-action Calvin & Hobbes movie starring Danny Pudi and Donald Glover) began to flatline soon after the gang turned up at Pierce's mansion ostensibly to spring him from his panic room, in which he had accidentally locked himself.

When last we saw the members of Greendale Community College's most insular study group, they had all overcome great (and not so great) odds to achieve some small measure of happiness. Jeff literally had his day in court, giving him back his legal swagger and the impetus to ace his biology final; Troy ended the reign of terror within Greendale's Air Conditioning Repair Annex; Abed gave in to the dark side (a.k.a. Evil Abed) but found his inner goodness and felt brave enough to dismantle his Dreamatorioum; Britta put her fledgling psychoanalytic skills to the test; Annie... continued to look really cute; and Shirley and Pierce managed to open a sandwich shop in the Greendale cafeteria without killing each other first.

Let's all take a moment and breath a deep sigh of relief that last night's triple dose of Community won't be the last we see of the series outside of DVD viewing parties and its inevitable syndication run on Comedy Central. To the relief of many and the surprise of a few, NBC has renewed the series for one more 13-episode season, slated to air on Fridays in the fall. Naturally, we'd be happier with a full-season pick up, but an additional 286 minutes at Greendale is better than none at all.

First off, congrats to the cast and crew of Community for nabbing a fourth-season, 13-episode order. It's nice to know that next week's back-to-back-to-back three-episode finale blowout won't be the last we ever see of the Greendale crew. Funnily enough, though, had things gone the other way, last night's episode "Curriculum Unavailable" could have almost have served as a series finale... provided they had chopped off the last five minutes.

At the conclusion of last week's Law & Order-themed episode, the Greendale student body lost one of its own -- the enigmatic, drug-dealing, pet-lizard-owning and sideburns-rocking Alex Osbourne a.k.a. Star-Burns. Last night's outing, "Course Listing Unavailable," was an offbeat farewell to the character that followed the arc of the five stages of grief... well, maybe three out of five anyway.

"Basic Lupine Urology" (a sly Dick Wolf reference) was the title of last night's Community episode, but they probably should have just gone ahead and called it Advanced Law & Order Studies. Because that was about as spot-on a spoof as we've seen from this show -- or, indeed, any series -- in recent memory. If we're being honest, we probably laughed more at the Ken Burns parody from a few weeks back, but execution-wise, this one both recreated and sent up its source material with the kind of expert precision that can only come with years of wasted nights and weekends watching marathons of Law & Order repeats.

Sometimes it takes an episode like "Virtual Systems Analysis" to remind you what a strange, surprising and all-around special series Community is. This may not have been its finest half-hour and it certainly wasn't the funniest, but it was an utterly unique episode both for the show itself and television comedy in general.

After last week's surprisingly divisive, highly conceptual spoof of Ken Burns documentaries, Community got back to business as usual with "Origins of Vampire Mythology"... if you can call Britta being forcibly locked in Annie's bedroom to avoid her visiting her carny boyfriend "business as usual." (And, in the case of Community, you really can.)

Given that last night's Community installment combined two things that this show always does very well -- spoofs of documentaries and elaborate battles pitting Greendale student against Greendale student -- it should come as no surprise that "Pillows and Blankets" was a Season 3 highlight.