Community 4x04: Alternative History of the German Invasion

It's the first day of history class, which apparently starts after Halloween. The production code on this episode indicates that it was made second, so I don't know why they decided to air it fourth. Anyway, the gang heads to class and finds that the annoying Germans are also taking history.

Well, two of them are. Maybe. I don't care enough to look back to see which of the actors were on the show before.

Their professor is Malcolm McDowell, and he's a hard-assed former Oxford prof who got fired for nailing a student. There first test is in less than a week, and it'll be on reinterpreting history as if it were written by the vanquished, rather than the victors. That becomes the basis for a lot of the episode, and it's really annoying.

When the gang heads to the study room later, they find that the Germans are already there... studying. Jeff wants to kick them out, but Annie favours appeasement and they're allowed to stay. Abed recognizes one of the Germans' catchphrases and realizes that they're friends in an online game. It becomes a thing later.

The next day, the Germans are back in the study room, and they've used the previously non-existent sign-up sheet to annex the territory. So begins the war for the study room. The gang arrives early to try to sign out the room, but the Germans keep beating them to it, resigning them to various crappy basement study rooms.

Even getting to school crazy early doesn't help.

With no way to win the war by conventional methods, Jeff suggests a ruse. To that end, the gang decides to celebrate Oktoberfest in the cafeteria. The head German doesn't fall for it, though. He notices that the giant cake is large enough to conceal someone, and offers to carve slices out with a very large, very sharp knife. Jeff stops him before he can, and Troy pops out in a gas mask, ready to release tear gas. With their ruse exposed, it looks like the study group has been bested yet again. But, no... it was a double ruse! They take photos of the Germans celebrating, and that's a big no-no at Greendale. It's perfectly all right to celebrate someone else's cultural heritage, but celebrating your own is verboten. The Dean bans them from the study room, and the gang is victorious.

Or so they thought.

When they return to claim the spoils of war, they're met with a protest consisting of Leonard, Vicki, Garrett, the Germans, and that guy from last season with the really big forehead who I can't remember. They're all tired of the Greendale 7 pushing them around. For years, the study group has been running roughshod over all the other students, much like the Nazis in Hogan's Heroes; Shirley's even wearing an SS t-shirt.

I had a really offensive joke to go along with this picture, but I don't think the holocaust is really something you should joke about.

During some brief, cake-related introspection, the gang realizes that they follow a charismatic, golden-throated leader, and they really are the bad guys. However, when Malcolm McDowell arrives to have a chat with them, they think that the whole protest was just a ruse to teach them a lesson. They're wrong, of course. He's merely there to tell them that they missed their first test and they all get Fs. Jeff recognizes that he may really be Hitler, and that the group must make reparations. So, they clean up all the other crappy study rooms, and thus Greendale is made just a little bit better.

They even get the dead raccoon out of the vent.

In a sub-plot, Chang is back and may or may not believe that he is a man named Kevin who is suffering from Changnesia. The school's board agrees to let him recuperate at Greendale because the Greater Greendale Mental Health Services Department offered them money. At first, the Dean thinks he's faking, but after Chang turns himself in to the police for all the havoc he caused last season, he has a chang of heart and decides to help nurse 'Kevin' back to health. Which partly involves introducing him to the study group.

They're a little surprised to see him.

What I Liked
-Abed is the one and only Spacetimer8032. Ha, a joke. I get jokes.
-Annie in a German dirndl.

The producers know what the people like, and so do I.

-This week's best line: "Got, zat must be nearly 100 luftballons!"-Lukas

What I Hated
-The annoying Germans are back, but not all of them. They brought the character types back, but at least one of the actual characters/actors was different for some reason. Why even bother? The original Germans were terrible, so who could have possibly thought that cheap imitations were a good idea? I really hope the fact that they're in history class with the study group doesn't turn them into recurring characters.
-Troy and Abed's podcast. I've never been a big fan of the whole Troy & Abed in the Morning thing, and making it even more annoying didn't exactly endear it to me. They're a neat idea, but the end tags are bad about 75% of the time. And that's really unfortunate, because a crappy ending can taint an otherwise good episode. That wasn't the case this week, but it has happened in the past.

Final Thoughts
This was not a good episode. I think the last one that I disliked this much was 'Pillows and Blankets' which, much like this one, was just boring. This is a comedy; it should make with the jokes, or failing that some character growth or something or anything, really. Nothing important happened. Chang returned, but he didn't really do anything. Malcolm McDowell showed up, but he was basically window dressing, and he might not be back. And, they painted some new study rooms that we'll probably never see again. It was all so very pointless.

Which would be fine if the episode were funny, but it wasn't. This tied with the aforementioned 'Pillows and Blankets' as the least-funny episode in the show's history. It's probably not a coincidence that both of them were about war. It's incredibly difficult to make a comedy about war without becoming insulting or offensive, and this is not Hogan's Heroes. Even the first few episodes, with their exposition and mild dramatic elements, were funnier than this.

I'm not going to pretend to be offended by all the Nazi jokes, and I don't think there are many topics that should be off-limits when it comes to comedy. But if you're going to make possibly-offensive jokes about touchy subjects, then they need to be funny. "Ha ha, Jeff is Hitler, ha ha" is not funny.