Community 4x12: Heroic Origins

While a somewhat haggard-looking Jeff tries to get the study group to actually study for their history final. Unfortunately, Abed would rather talk about the group's origins, which he has traced back to 2008. Annie and Troy went to high school together, which everyone knows, but what they don't know is that Annie flipped out at their graduation party and called him a mindless robot, causing him to have doubts about his future as a football player and fake a knee injury.

She was an angry, angry girl.

Jeff and Britta met in a courthouse after Jeff defended a stripper's right to use her body however she wanted.

She was a different kind of angry, angry girl.

And Shirley and Abed were at the mall on the same day. It's that particular coincidence that leads to the near breakdown of the group. You see, Abed was at the mall to stop people from seeing the re-release of The Phantom Menace, people who included Shirley's kids who were there to see it as a distraction while Shirley and Andre had their anniversary dinner. Because they couldn't see the movie, Shirley had to leave that dinner, and Andre wound up hanging out with Misty, who was the stripper Jeff got off and who ruined Shirley's marriage. Abed also wound up having to go to a psychiatrist for a mental evaluation after Shirley flipped out at the theatre managers and they got a restraining order against him, where he saw Annie stealing the doctor's prescription pad and got her busted for being a drug addict. He thinks that makes him the villain of the group.

In reality, it was just a bunch of crazy coincidences. The real villain was Jeff, who outright told Misty she should go and try to get together with Andre, even though they both knew he was married.

He was one evil dude.

Upset at the revelations, everyone abandons the study room and they all, coincidentally, decide to go for frozen yogurt. As it turns out, the frogurt place in the mall is where all of them were when they first decided to go to Greendale. By sheer, magical, in no way stupid coincidence, they were all there as Senor Chang was handing out flyers for the college. So, they weren't brought together by Abed's insanity or Jeff's evil, but by Chang and their mutual love of frozen yogurt.

Even Pierce was there.

Meanwhile, in a twist that I thought couldn't possibly be true because it was so damned obvious, Chang is working for the evil Dean of City College in an attempt to take down Greendale. He cons Dean Pelton into letting him deliver the school's lease renewal papers and then pockets them instead of mailing them. But, when Abed realizes that Chang was the reason the group got together, he goes back to the school to thank him and invite him to have frogurt with them. That's all he ever wanted, so he mails the lease papers and tells the City College Dean he's out. So, it's on to Plan B.

Which apparently involves a giant robot spider.

What I Liked
-This week's best line: "I am gonna go get crap-on-other-people's-lawns drunk."-Jeff

What I Hated
-Cornwallis has been vacillating between extreme hard ass and complete pushover. Most of the other professors have been relatively consistent characters (Chang was nuts, Duncan was drunk, etc.), but Cornwallis basically seems to be a tool the show uses to dole out random assignments based solely on the plot requirements of the episode.
-Chang says he's about to have his vengeance on this, the anniversary of his empire's destruction. It's not May on the show. It's January at the latest. The entire premise of this season was that Jeff is graduating a semester early. Did the writers forget that? They did a Christmas episode two weeks ago.
-Fake Chevy. Why even bother?

Final Thoughts
They used a comic book graphic thing as a transition throughout the episode. It was unnecessary, and I thought that it detracted from the show.

There wasn't really a lot to like or hate about this episode. It was very much just there. Although, the entire concept of the group having or needing a pre-determined reason for them all to have met is a bit silly. They met because they all took a Spanish class together and Jeff wanted to bang Britta. That's all they needed. Anything else is just 'Oh my, aren't we clever' masturbatory writing.

It's only actually clever if you set it up in advance, though. If they'd shown flashbacks over the years and Abed merely connected the dots, that would've been something. As it is, they basically did a prequel episode and it failed. They had Abed reference that fact within the episode, though, so at least they're self-aware.

Tomorrow night is the last episode. And by last, I mean last since the ratings are so bad that there's absolutely no reason to renew the show. I shall not miss it when it is gone.