It’s Valloween! Or
Halloween on Valentine’s Day, for those out of the loop. Since Community was supposed to start airing in October, and most of the episodes were
filmed before they knew that, so yay, warped timelines!
Anyway, almost everyone is in the study room, meeting to get
to Vicki’s party when Troy, dressed
as Hobbes to Abed’s Calvin, gets a
call from Pierce, who has managed to
lock himself in his panic room.
Jeff(a wrestler
to Annie’s ring girl(except how she
thought he meant creepy Ring girl, whoops)) does NOT want to go, but he is overruled
by the group, so they make their way to Pierce’s creepy mansion.
When they get there, Pierce sends them on a hunt for a book
that holds the code to open the panic room, leading to a quick split.
Jeff and Britta head to the creepy bedroom where Britta
tries to get Jeff to admit he has daddy issues. Abed and Annie head in a different
direction, and Abed finds a secret TV
room. He spends the rest of the episode
spying on the rest of the group, while Annie joins Troy and Shirley(Princess Leia to her family’s
Star Wars universe) after they found Pierce’s secret sex room, complete with indoor
swings and collar(which are not for secret dogs, silly Troy).
After a couple of very creepy happenings, including a
picture that continuously changes sizes and hands and a face trying to come out
of the wall, all the group comes together to yell at Pierce to turn off the
haunted house, but he’s laying unconscious on the floor. Everyone starts freaking out, but then Pierce
jumps out, laughing at them for falling for his trick, upset he wasn’t invited
to Vicki’s party. No one is surprised,
but Abed pops out, asking about the secret shadow figure he spotted on the surveillance
tape, dun Dun DUUN!
Pierce has no idea who that is, and starts to FREAK
OUT. Just then, the door opens, and it’s
Pierce’s brother! Turns out he’s been
living in the mansion for six secret weeks.
Pierce asks him to stay, and it’s all awww.
This was an odd episode.
There were laughs, but the high concept part really didn’t go far
enough. It felt very tentative, and the dialogue
didn’t feel like things the group actually say, for the most part. At best, it felt like someone got the basic
gist of how a Community episode should be structured, the details were kind of
fail.
I did get a couple of funny lines for you:
Troy, when Pierce
asks the group to find his code book: “No sweat, Bobba Fett”
Annie, when Troy
tells her about Pierce’s secret room: “Indoor swing? That’s ridiculous, someone’s gonna break a
lamp!”
Troy, when the
group discovered Pierce on the floor: “Please don’t die slightly before your
time!”
Conventions of Space
and Time
And now it’s time for and Inspector Spacetime convention!
It’s the InpectiCon, and Troy and Abed are super excited, obviously. After an extended(pointless) scene of Britta
in her undies, everyone(minus Pierce and
Shirley) head on a road trip to the convention(Jeff and Annie, though are using the trip to go skiing instead).
Abed has a new friend, from Nigeria, natch, and Troy is
feeling left out. The new guy and Abed
are like, mind-melding or something, so Britta therapizes Troy to help him
understand what it going on with Abed and the new guy, before finally settling
into the girlfriend role and being supportive of her boyfriend. Abed, on the other hand, may have found his
match in Toby, who is basically just like him.
When Abed realizes that he needs a more emotional constable to his
incredibly logical inspector, Toby freaks out, and locks him in a phone
booth. But Troy finds him, and saves
Abed by threatening to beat up Toby, and it’s really cute.
Annie and Jeff’s ski trip got axed due to avalanche, so they
stay at the convention, too, where it turns out Jeff looks just the main villain
of Inspector Spacetime. Annie heads to
the hotel room, where she pretends that she is married to Jeff when she calls
room service. Except, whoops, Jeff is in
the bar, flirting with a fan of Inspector Spacetime who REALLY enjoys
Thoraxis. The hotel staff, though, are
not impressed with Jeff’s ‘philandering,’ and tell Annie, who has to yell at
Jeff to save face. They end up talking
it out, and Jeff ends with the super sweet ‘if we were married, you wouldn’t find
me flirting with another woman in a hotel bar.’
Aww.
Oh, and Shirley and Pierce (mostly Pierce) manage to completely destroy the American version of Inspector Spacetime. Of course.
Gah! I love this
show, but there is definitely something missing. I don’t like that these stories aren’t centered
around the school, and I miss the part where everything happened for a reason,
even if it wasn’t an immediate punchline.
As several discussions I’ve read have noted, Britta walking through the
fire escape in her underwear was a huge missed opportunity for social
commentary, either on the objectification of women as ‘booth babes’ at the
convention, or in some other way that I’m not smart enough to see. Instead, it was played as a ‘oooo, look at
Gillian Jacobs in her undies,’ which eww.
I did get one funny line for you:
Toby, after Troy
threatens him: “Oh my god, he can make a fist.
That would hurt harder than a slap…He’s in that one!”
