Here is the bitter truth, die-hard Community fans: your show should have been cancelled a long time ago. After years of abysmal ratings, this past fifth season made no sense from a business standpoint--Sony already got their desired syndication deal by stretching the show into a fourth season. Could it be that, much like they're doing with Parenthood and Parks and Recreation, NBC wanted to give Community a proper goodbye? Is that why, against all self-interested P.R. logic, they hired creator Dan Harmon back?

The existence of season five is a mystery, but it’s also undeniably a gift. When we spoke to Harmon back in March at SXSW, he explained how NBC actually helped him come at season five with a whole new attitude and why that translated into one of the best seasons in the show’s history:

It’s not that nobody can tell me what to do on Community, but nobody wanted to anymore. Having hired me back, it was sort of pointless to have that conversation, [...] That wanting to connect with people? The darkest side of that is ex-communication. The thing we fear most about people not understanding us is that they’re going to kick us out, kick us off the playground, beat us up and leave us in a ditch and play kickball and graduate without us. And once you experience that fear it stops being scary. I’m not worried about getting fired anymore and I’m not worried, therefore, about ratings and I’m not worried about pleasing anyone in a suit. I’m not really worried about the fans or the critics. Because I watched them watch season four. I watched the world go on without me. I watched that nightmare happen and came back into it not more confident but definitely less prone to define myself by how other people perceive me. Now it’s just me and a room full of writers going ”what’s funny what’s compelling what’s sad?” By and large I think it was a lot of unhealthy stuff that got expunged by that experience and I think everyone’s going to win in the end.

You may not have gotten the six seasons and a movie you wanted, but you got a proper good-bye. You got Lava Jousts, Ass Crack Bandits, a farewell to Pierce and Troy, and one last rousing game of D&D. That’s something the network didn’t have to do. They didn’t have to hire Harmon back. But they did and I’m damned if I can find a bottom line reason behind it. As Harmon put it in this morning’s blog post about why Community won’t be going forward, “Ninety seven episodes. Over eighty pretty good ones. Mission accomplished.”