Community: A Fist Full of Paintballs and For a Few Paintballs More - Reflection

After many weeks and me consistently missing the lessons in where we watched these episodes last year, I've finally seen the episodes, even if it took me forever. And I'm not particularly a fan of the show, but hey I saw the episodes and that's what matters. Last year I also saw season 1's paintball episode, so I did manage to get a few of the callbacks in this episode. Such as the black and orange paintball gun (seen in the above image) that was used at the end of the last paintball episode.

In A Fist Full of Paintballs, the most obvious genre is that they're using is western. A few main things are able to tip us off to this, such their choice of fashion during the episode, which again is shown in the image above. Another notable thing when each of the characters is seen for the first time in the episode there's a freeze frame that only shows the character with a background and then their name (the cards they picked in a previous episode). And if I remember correctly there were at least one or two standoffs in the episode.
And then in the second part although they never actually go to space it could be considered slightly sci-fi as while there's still remnants of the western genre from the previous episode it has much more of a focus on Star Wars and references to it. But both episodes much like the entire show itself is, of course, a comedy, not sure how to explain this one besides saying that the show's funny.

One the cooler tropes in A Fist Full of Paintballs is the meaningful names trope, as mentioned above the study group receives freeze-frame title cards with the nicknames shown, such as Ace of Hearts, are a callback to a previous episode when all of the groups' members (apart from Pierce) voted on something. This one has been used quite well as I think having a callback to the previous episode is always super neat for people who watched the previous episode. Another Neato one is Shotguns are just better as the Black Rider wields shotgun styled paintball guns instead of the more colourful guns like the rest of the cast. I feel like him having these guns really adds to his character. And one that happened at the start of the episode was the Dramatic Drop when the dean announced the game of paintball assassin. This trope is always effective as, like the name says, is well dramatic.
And moving on over to a For a Few Paintballs More we have Genre Shift, as this two-parter went from western to sci-fi. Which to be honest is pretty cool seeing it switch between episodes. Another one that follows on from the previous episode is Hidden Villain as at the start of the episode Pistol Patty is revealed to be the dean of a rival school. It was unexpected, to me at least, and it worked quite well and was also a bit of a twist villain at the same time. And one that covers both the episodes is the Paintball Episode trope, not much say about besides it's similar to the beach episode trope or B99 Halloween Heist Episodes.

Overall I found these episodes quite enjoyable, especially for the fact that I haven't seen community outside of the few episodes we've watched in class. I feel like they're successful because it sets up a running theme for the show of having a paintball episode every season (I think they do, I have no idea). Like I said above it's similar to the Halloween Heist so there's always an episode to look forward to each season.