The episode revolves around Jeff’s need to study for his biology final, something that he puts off to help Shirley in her trial against Pierce for controlling interest in the sandwich shop the two are finally allowed to open. He 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.