The arcs of many sitcoms bend towards stagnancy. As the years go by, characters that once seemed dynamic and three-dimensional tend to flatten out beneath the weight of their own history, remaining iconic, consistent – and inert.

So it went with Community. While the previous season was ostensibly about the study group growing up and graduating, it felt less like they finally became the people they wanted to be, and more like they distended into caricatures of the people they had always been.

It's hard not to link that over-Xeroxed sense of deterioration to the departure of creator and former showrunner, Dan Harmon, who was fired after the third season and handed off the reins to two other writers. At first, watching the fourth season felt a lot like squinting at a painting and trying to determine whether or not it was a forgery – whether it could truly be Community without Harmon. By the end of the season, I stopped caring enough to continue the investigation, which was really all the answer I needed.

But just when you were ready to abandon Community to the heap of good sitcoms that trailed off into mediocre ones, the news came that Harmon would return once more to the helm of the show for the fifth season. Now he faces the same question as the two interlopers who occupied his Iron Throne: Can Community get good again? In last night's two-episode season premiere Harmon gave us his answer: Yes, but only by embracing how bad it got.

Harmon hasn't been shy about criticizing what happened on the show in his absence. He's called Season 4 everything from "an impression, and an unflattering one," to "[like] being held down and watching your family get raped on a beach." And in the great meta tradition of Community, the decline of Community is something the show addresses head-on as well. As we rejoin the former members of the study group, they've all set boldly forth into the world to achieve their dreams, degrees in hand – and each of them, in one way or another, has failed. As they sit around the study table again – Annie now a pharmaceutical rep, Brita a bartender, Abed a failed filmmaker – they don't recognize themselves, which is largely acknowledging that over the last year or so, it's been pretty hard for us to recognize them too.

Over the course of the premiere ("Repilot") each of them realizes that instead of bettering themselves over the last several years of higher education, their lives are even worse than the day they arrived at Greendale. Or, as Jeff says, "We went in one end as real people and out the other end as mixed up cartoons." In a catty but funny turn, the fourth season is referred to as the "gas-leak year," presumably the best way to explain away their odd and inconsistent behavior. "When we met you were an eclectic anarchist. How did you become the group's airhead?" Jeff asks Brita. How indeed.

As disappointing as Season 4 was, however, it can't bear all the blame for the show's decline. Even before Harmon stepped down, Community was already drifting towards caricature rather than character. Bravely, the show is willing to acknowledge this as well. "Don't blame it all on the gas-leak year," says Jeff. The last season may have catapulted the show over the metaphorical shark, but it was already wearing the waterskis.

Community has never been a show about success. While series like Revenge and Scandal entertain us with the misadventures of the rich, the elite and the powerful, Community is about everyone else: people who struggle to find the things they're good at, people whose lives didn't work out the way they planned. The ones who wanted something more, but ended up at Greendale because they failed. (Or maybe they failed, and ended up at Greendale because they wanted something more.)

Either way, the repilot succeeds by allowing them to fail all over again – not only in the way the show itself did, but in the way that so many people do after they graduate from college. They meander, they lose focus or purpose, they forget who they are. The repilot is the moment where both the show and its characters come to terms with how they've fallen short in hopes of genuinely moving forward, and it's one of the most mature things any of them have ever done. For the first time, the study group members feel like actual adult students at a community college, the kind that show up with purpose and the sense that they don't have any time to waste – that indeed, they may have wasted too much already.

Abed in particular has turned into a one-note autism spectrum joke over the last several years, so it's promising to see him start to stretch limits in the second episode (“Introduction to Teaching”) where he enrolls in a film studies class called "Nicolas Cage, Good or Bad?" Unlike Abed's previous film studies class, "Who's The Boss?" this ends up being a question with no answer. Like a quantum particle or an M.C. Escher painting, Nicolas Cage defies the brittle boundaries of Abed's linear and comprehensible world, and ultimately shatters it.

After a full-on Nicolas Cage freakout worthy of The Wicker Man that ranks among the funniest moments in the entire series, Abed tosses his movies in the trash, ready to walk away from the media that he feels has betrayed and disappointed him. "This was my religion. I thought the meaning of people was somewhere in here," he says. Ultimately, it's the religious Shirley who helps Abed find the solace – and the flexibility – that he needs to find value and humanity in limitations and shortcomings. "There's a word for people who remind you that you're not God, and invite you to try a little harder," says Shirley. It's an important and promising moment of growth in a series that has always been funniest when it let its characters be human.

Like Abed, and like the rest of the study group, Community has had its share of failures. Embracing those failures and moving forward, on a show about embracing failure and moving forward, may be its most meta move yet, its best shot at success—and the real graduation that fans of the show have been waiting for.