There is a clear feeling going into the start of Community’s sixth season that the show may have outlived its usefulness. The audience knows it, the cast seems to know it, and the writers most definitely know it. This is a show which has lost its showrunner, reclaimed him, gotten cancelled, been picked up by a channel known primarily as a search engine, and lost three of its seven leads. Abed puts it best when explaining his apprehension to the premiere’s new character, Paget Brewster’s Frankie Dart: “My umbrella concern is that you, as a character, represent the end of what I used to call ‘our show,’ which was once an unlikely family of misfit students, and is now a pretty loose-knit group of students and teachers, none of whom are taking a class together, in a school which, as of your arrival, is becoming increasingly grounded, asking questions like ‘how do any of us get our money, when will we get our degrees, and what happened to that girl I was dating?’ as opposed to questions that I consider more important, such as ‘what is real, what is sanity, is there a god, where’s that Pierce hollogram?'”

Indeed, Community is going through a bit of an identity crisis. The dynamic of four old friends, three of which now live together, bears little resemblance to the diverse group of misfits that drove the show through its best seasons. There’s a feeling that the show is something of a corpse, reanimated through the enchanting power of the “Six Seasons and a Movie” fan cry.

All this being said, after a somewhat awkward first episode, Community does begin to settle back into its skin. The second episode, Lawnmower Maintenance and Postnatal care, finds new ground to cover with Britta. As we find out, the other remaining characters have been hitting her parents up for money to reimburse them for the money they have loaned to Britta over the years, knowing that she would never pay them back. However, this incenses Britta, who hates her parents for the strict, hypocritical way that they raised her, even if they seem to be better people now. “My friends,” she says, “they all think my parents are adorable, and they think I’m the bad guy for hating them, but I have a right to hate them, because I had to be there when they sucked.” “Yeah,” Frankie tells her, “Jimmy Fallon syndrome, I get it.”

The plotline gives Gillian Jacobs, who has plenty of reasons to be ambivalent about the return of Community in the face of her role on Girls and her upcoming Judd Apatow Netflix series “Love,” plenty of room to have fun with her character. She gets a lot of funny lines and seems to be having an absolute blast with the physical comedy. In the B-plot, Jim Rash is also given the fun material of navigating a virtual world with his new headset (clearly modeled after the Oculus Rift) and VR treadmill. This plotline also introduces Keith David, who is very funny in his brief screentime and should make for a great addition to the cast.

It is difficult to tell from these two episodes alone whether Community still has a reason to justify its continued existence, but episode two does give some hope that it’ll be able to squeeze out enough stories about the remaining Greendale Four for at least one more season. However, I think Dan Harmon and company should heed the cry for “Six Seasons and a Movie.” Ending Community with a movie (and, hopefully, the return of its departed cast members) would allow the show to end on a high note. Pushing through to seven seasons and beyond might be stretching things a bit thin.