Last week, Yahoo posted the final episode of Community’s sixth season, and possibly the final episode of the series. Dan Harmon has whisked himself away from the internet to avoid answering questions, and Yahoo hasn’t made any official decisions on a follow-up season, despite claims that the show has been extremely successful on their platform. This season also fulfilled the first part of the “six seasons and a movie” fan-joke that originated way back in season 2, and ended with a “#andamovie” hashtag, suggesting that perhaps the TV series portion of Community had concluded. Combined with a season finale that actually felt like a series finale, there is a strong reason to believe that Community will soon wrap-up entirely with a movie.

But stepping aside from what might happen, let’s talk about what SHOULD happen. Even putting aside the self-fulfilling “six seasons and a movie” prophecy, Community has reached the perfect ending point in Dan Harmon’s “story circle.” The story circle, essentially a graphic explaining the narrative function of Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey,” is all about characters wanting more, stepping outside of their comfort zone, achieving their goal, losing something, and returning to their status quo, albeit changed. It is the basis for almost all storytelling, whether the creator is conscious of it or not. It’s the most basic distillation of what we call “story.”

Typically, Harmon refers to the story circle in terms of individual episodes of television. However, intentionally or not, Community’s series arc has now followed and completed the same structure. Let’s go back to the beginning: Jeff Winger goes to Greendale so that he can legitimize himself as a lawyer. However, as he gets close to his study group, all seven of the central characters begin a journey of self discovery. They step out of their previously-defined categories (the cynical lawyer, the goodie two-shoes, the out-of-touch old guy, the single mom, the socially-conscious girl, the jock, and the socially unadjusted TV geek) and start to inherit new personas within their new community (the man too caring to be a successful lawyer, the sexy-and-confident professional, the slightly-less-out-of-touch old guy, the independent business owner, the naive-buzzkill-goofball, the nerd-jock, and…well, Abed’s still a TV geek, but he understands other people much better now).

While different characters progress at different rates, it’s safe to say that most of them have at least adapted to their environment at Greendale, the “special world” bottom half of Harmon’s story circle, by the end of season 1. That’s number four out of 8 in the story’s progression. Over the next two seasons, the characters individual storylines tend to be pushing them from number 4 to number 5, when they get what they want.

The fourth season of Community, the one in which Dan Harmon was removed from the show, ran into some trouble by having Jeff Winger graduate from Greendale. In a way, this was the end of Jeff’s story circle: he could now go back “home” to being a lawyer, having become a more compassionate and empathetic human being.

At the start of season five, Harmon seemingly accommodated for the end of this story by jumping ahead to when every member of the study group had graduated, and making their brief absences something of a false return. The beginning of the season posits that Greendale had broken them all and made them dysfunctional in the real world, but as seasons five and six continued on, this was not actually the case.

As real-life got in the way of several cast members, their characters were written to achieve success in a way that brought them out of Greendale and allowed them to truly complete their story circles. The finale began to do the same thing with Annie and Abed and, despite both actors being available for another season. Instead of treating the dispersion of half of the cast as a black eye, Harmon instead tweaked the story to make that dispersion thematically integral. This was now a show about the coming together of a community in the “special” world, and the return home on their individual journeys. By the end of season six, everybody has completed their circle. They have not, however, been in unison.

What’s fascinating about Jeff’s arc is that it subverts the idea of the “ordinary world” and the “special world” in Campbell’s structure. Normally, the special world is the crucible in which change occurs. But what if, instead of changing somebody in a way that makes them more suited to their ordinary world, it instead SUPPLANTS the previous world and becomes the new normal?

At the end of season one, when everybody else was slowly progressing around their circle, Jeff’s circle flipped upside down. In his new arc, he wasn’t a lawyer connecting with a bunch of kookie kids and becoming a better lawyer for it: he was leader of a bunch of outcasts who, upon trying to be a successful lawyer again, realized that his own compassion and attachment to Greendale made him ill-suited to the job. His true return was to Greendale, his “change” being the realization that this was the only place he fit anymore.

This lack of cohesion with the other characters’ stories is the central conflict of the season six finale of Community. It’s about Jeff accepting that, while his friends and colleagues are completing their journeys, his own has been finished for quite some time. It’s about a man coming to terms with his stasis in the face of change.

This is why season six is the perfect ending point for Community as a series, but still leaves room for a movie. The finale shows that there are plenty of ways in which Harmon and his writers could take the show, and it would still be entertaining. But more than anything, it would be about starting new stories and allowing them to play out. In the context of a movie, Community could revisit all of its departed characters one last time, give them a tiny bit more closure, and use the central story as an opportunity to give Jeff a happy ending within his Greendale norm. If they want to spin-off into a Jeff Winger-led “new class” scenario, then there’s nothing wrong with that. But by giving the original Community its send-off with #sixseasonsandamovie, the show has an opportunity for long-term narrative clarity that few ongoing series can achieve.