So one of my favorite shows of the past few years (as you two have endlessly heard me proselyte) is NBC's Community, an absolutely brilliant, high-concept comedy centered rather inauspiciously around a community college study-group. It is based on the experiences of creator Dan Harmon (currently of Rick and Morty fame) with a Spanish 101 study group he joined with his girlfriend when he first moved to L.A.; the show was very much his baby, his passion-project, informed and dominated by his sensibilities. Hence, there was probably no way for the show to win when Harmon was fired at the end of Season 3. Season 4 is easily considered the nadir of the whole series. When Harmon was hired back for Season 5, everyone immediately distanced themselves from it by calling it "the year of the gas-leak."
It's difficult to put one's finger on why exactly Season 4 suffered so: most the rest of the same writers returned; as did the same characters, played by the same actors with the same chemistry; there was a similar density of rapid-fire jokes, high-concept episodes, and Post-Modern deconstructions of genre. Nevertheless, there was just this inescapable feeling that something was simply...off. The jokes felt more forced, the situations more contrived, the relationships less natural.
Basically, Season 4 felt less like Community than it did Community-fan-fiction. And when Dan Harmon returned to the show, there was a noticeable return to form.
That's all just a round-about way of saying that that's what so much of Book V has felt like to me: less like Tolkien than Tolkien fan-fiction, written by a faithful acolyte who, despite his most slavish fawning, simply can't reproduce the magic of the original. The situations feel more contrived, the relationships less natural. Gandalf here feels not so much a person than an exposition machine; Strider is less a human than an idol. His prophetic "healing hands" in the Minas Tirith med-bay renders him so obviously a Christ-analogue that even Joseph Campbell might consider it a little on-the-nose; this fascinating character no longer gets to have a personality, he is now only an icon.
There are still moments of brilliance in Book V (as did Community Season 4, for that matter), but they grow increasingly lost in the Professor's mad rush to get to the grand finale of Book VI. But Community Season 4 at least had the excuse that it was missing the guiding hand of its creator; Tolkien, as far as I'm aware, has no one to blame but himself for the blahs of so much of Book V. He produces his own fan-fic.
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