This week’s Community made me unbearably sad. It reminded me of a truth I’d ignored until now: after this year, we can’t make fun of Grey’s Anatomy anymore. The Mayans were right.
The decline of the hospital drama set in a “a sexy, emotional school[/hospital] where doctors save lives and make love, sometimes simultaneously” with “stories ripped from the headlines [and] passions unbridled” means we’re losing a medium that was more fun to make fun of than Nickelback. Moment of silence, y’all. Shoutout to George Clooney.
This week, the group is cramming for their biology final, and they can’t even remember Kingdom-Phylum-Class-Order-Genus-Species. Honestly, is a degree from Greendale even worth anything? Then they’re informed that Omar from The Wire has the flu and the exam is cancelled (saving the day for the group while doing a major disservice to the audience). They decide to take a three-hour lunch. Pierce is going to watch the first half of three movies (could’ve fit in all of Hoop Dreams), Shirley is going to the fast food restaurant across town, Jeff is doing Winger things, and Annie orchestrates a Troy/Britta lunch under the guise of getting Abed to teach her how the Dreamatorium works.
What’s interesting about this episode is that we don’t get a whole lot of the other characters’ actual thoughts/feelings. It’s all simulations run by Abed. Does Jeff actually want to be with Annie, or is that just how Abed interprets what’s going on? How does Annie really feel about Jeff? We know she thinks he’s hot, and we get some stuff about “if we can make Jeff love us, we’ll never be alone” (a great thing to say to yourself when there’s two of you in the room), but that’s after a few hours of being goaded by Abed. How does she really feel? The scene also goes from Abed as Annie talking to Annie to Abed as Annie talking to Annie as Abed. We get two people in a room being each other and have no idea if we can trust either of them. Furthermore, we get a simulation of Britta and Troy’s lunch, which Abed assumes is going badly. In the real world, it’s going great. We get no indication if it will lead to Troy and Britta being together, but Abed is willing to take that logical leap as well—in the hospital simulation, Britta and Troy “make out” (Abed running back and forth and sticking his tongue out while moaning). This contradiction either discredits Abed’s simulations or is merely multiple consequences. Either way, they’re only tangentially rooted in reality.
In some respects, Abed is the ultimate unreliable narrator—all-knowing yet completely anti-social, cares too much about his friends while disregarding them as “unremarkables,” unable to understand social cues while able to predict how people will behave. We can’t trust a thing he says, but we can’t disagree, either. Annie, on the other hand, is the prefect foil: she empathizes almost too much with how her friends are feeling, and she’s naive enough to believe that she can cure Britta’s bad boy addiction (last week), fix Jeff’s trust/romantic issues, hook Troy and Britta up, and save Abed from his self-doubt, all while being a solid Dreamatorium companion.
Ultimately, this episode is about fear of abandonment and loneliness. No one in this group is able to function in society, but Abed has less of a chance than everyone else: Jeff will eventually get his law license back, Britta will open a thrift store or something, Annie has recovered from her pill addiction and is smart, Shirley is remarried and has a business plan, Troy has plumbing as a fallback, and Pierce will soon be dead. Abed can make films, yes, but his wild Asperger’s makes it impossible for people to understand him. He and Troy weren’t friends until a few episodes in (hard to remember, right?). He and Jeff have a special bond, but only because Jeff’s lawyer friends probably don’t understand TV as well as Jeff does. And when exactly will Jeff see Abed after graduation? These are the best years of Abed’s life because he’s never going to have another excuse for this many friends to live with him. Abed in this episode is feeling the same way you feel when you come home from summer camp, or when you graduate high school, or when you leave your study abroad semester, or when you graduate college. Life is about to change, and the exact relationship you had with the people you spent this time with will never be the same. It’s a strange kind of existential sadness: everyone and everything that’s made your life worth living is changing in a way that means you’re going to have to find a different way of living. Granted, Abed still has another year at Greendale, and his friendship with Troy is too strong to change simply because Troy gets married, but you can understand his fear.
I’ll sum it up the most Abed way possible: he wants to be like seasons 1-5 of Scrubs. And nobody wants to be seasons 7-9 of Scrubs.
Shoutouts: Troy cried to About a Boy—the soundtrack. Hell yes. That was a great soundtrack. Also, apparently Troy and Abed play Dinosaurs vs. Riverboat Gamblers. I need to know what this is.
Pierce Watch: While he still hasn’t done anything of note to forward his character, the group, or the show since the Great Community Return, he did have some funny lines. When everyone is listing their day’s accomplishments, Pierce says he almost sat on his balls, but at the last second, he “made an adjustment.” Pierce has to be the best argument for taking the Hemingway out when you’re 61. Then it’s hilariously revealed that he didn’t actually make that adjustment, saying he “sat right on them,” which leads to the most perfect Shirley “aw Pierce, I’m sorry.” It indicates that Pierce probably won’t make any significant changes soon, and that Yvette Nicole Brown is the greatest.
Dean of Thrones: The "Duali-DEAN of Man" might be the Dean’s most fitting costume yet. To one side, the bald, bad suit wearing, middle-aged dean of a community college that was almost completely undone by a paintball game. On the other side, the fancy, hair-flipping lady who enjoys “putting on the ritz.” Why this two-faced split? He has good news and bad news. At the end of the scene, the Dean finally shows some self-realization. Amazing. “I have to go to the bank today. What am I supposed to tell people in line? ‘I had good news and bad news?’ Come on, Craig. Get your life together.” The Dean going too far (“get your life together, Craig”) shows that while he’s homo-repressed, occasionally a cross-dresser, and has a weird thing with Dalmatians (just furries, or dogs, too?), he works really hard to keep up professionalism. It’s been pointed out before that the inhabitants of Greendale don’t have anything in common except their inability to function in polite society. The Dean (and the fact that you rarely remember his name is Craig Pelton) is probably the best example of that.
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