[Jeff] keeps repeating the phrase “cellular mitosis,” and I think that idea is crucial to understanding the whole season—and maybe the whole series so far. Cellular mitosis is the process by which cells split off from each other and replicate, so that all of your skin cells are recognizably skin cells and all of your bone cells are bone cells and so on. Mitosis involves a complicated process of splitting off, of one cell becoming two individual units. Throughout this season, we’ve watched as the members of the group have pursued their own interests and run off into their own little stories, and we’ve watched as more and more of the students of Greendale became characters in their own rights. But as the individual “cells” of the study group—or of Greendale—split off from the larger organism, they still carry the things they learned from being with each other. The longer they’re together, the more they’ll influence each other. But when the time comes for them to finally split off from each other for real, they’ll be ready to spread the things they’ve learned from each other even further. Wholes split into pieces, but they’re still wholes, because we carry those things forward in our hearts.

For all its apolitical, joyful, empty headed zaniness and experimentation, Community is a passionately humanitarian show. Its only religious and political point of view is that all people are good people, and while we often play the roles of villains and stereotypes to each other, it is always an illusion, shattered quickly by the briefest moment of honest connection.