I’m going to preface this post by saying Season Four of Community is bad. It’s the worst season of the show, and it contains some of the worst viewing experiences of my life, barring the Castaway movie (which made me physically ill). The season is so bad that the later seasons make fun of it in the show, referring to it as the “gas leak year” to justify their out of character behavior and the off the rails final episode. I am amazed it survived to another season at all. The actors all deserve awards for making it through the train wreck, the disaster, the deplorable rubble heap that was Season Four of Community.
That being said, we’re going to talk about Season Four of Community.
For those of you who don’t know, Community is an American sitcom taking place at a community college. It ran from 2009 to 2014, producing six seasons with 110 episodes total, and it was created by Dan Harmon. The show has spawned plenty of memes and pop culture references, and it’s going to be made into a movie, to its loyal fans’ delight. The show’s gimmick tends to be taking stereotypes of people and situations and making fun of them, and while it’s mostly handled in a tasteful way, it certainly has its shortcomings. That’s not what I’m here to talk about, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it. Later seasons improved on this, and none of the errors seemed to be aimed to tear down minorities, but there were certainly parts of the show that did. It also often plays on common tropes in a very comedic way, such as parodies of Star Wars or Old West films, or using classic sitcom tropes like the two dates at one event trope. Overall, it’s an enjoyable watch.
Now, the show features a cast of quirky and comical characters, but if I described the entire plot and each character in depth, you’d be looking at a five thousand word blog post. No one wants that. The only character you need to know about for the sake of this blog is Abed Nadir.
Abed Nadir is a pop-culture obsessed aspiring screenwriter. A lot of his jokes center around references to shows/movies/etc., and the others are often him being meta. Another thing to note about Abed Nadir, he is clearly portrayed as and first implied/later stated to have autism. (They call it Aspergers at the time, but this phrase has been widely rejected by the autistic community because of its association with nazis). This portrayal is very stereotypical at first, but it grows over the show. Still, it’s an important aspect of his character, so good representation or not, it needed to be acknowledged.
Abed spends quite a bit of the show commenting on things that are happening through the lens of it being a show. For example, during a “bottle episode”, an episode where the characters spend the entire time in one place, he continually comments on it being a bottle episode and his dislike of those types of episodes in shows. The episode we are discussing today (if we ever get there, I’m rambling, I know, apologies) is also a bottle episode, but Abed is not privy to this information.
The episode is called Remedial Chaos Theory, and it is Season Three, Episode Four. It’s a hilarious episode, but the most important part for our purposes is what it sets up. In the episode, Jeff Winger (another character, you don’t need to know them all) rolls a six-sided die to determine who will answer the door to grab a pizza. We then see six different outcomes play out, and Abed refers to them as parallel timelines. Everyone laughs this off for the time being.
At the end of the episode, however, we see the last scene features one of the parallel timelines, the worst or “darkest” timeline. In this timeline, Jeff lost an arm, one of the characters was shot and killed, one lost his voice due to related incidents, one character became an alcoholic, one character lost her mind and was locked in an asylum, the apartment caught fire, and one character dyed a blue streak in her hair. This version of Abed says to the group that they are in the darkest timeline, and that he believes they should commit to this and become evil. Their goal will be to return to the original timeline and corrupt it, also possibly to replace themselves there. Most of the group members laugh it off, but his best friend Troy agrees, making them Evil Troy and Evil Abed.
The plot thickens. Evil Abed returns in a later episode (Season Three Episode Twenty-Two) after Troy leaves the school. Abed has a tough time dealing with this, and he starts to … hallucinate? It’s unclear… he starts to see Evil Abed. Evil Abed “takes over” and forces Abed to be very mean to one of his friends, watching the timeline darken. We see him walk down a hallway, insulting people and popping a child’s balloon. He changes Abed’s catchphrase of ‘cool, cool cool cool’ to ‘cruel, cruel cruel cruel’. “Evil” Abed then goes to find Jeff and attempts to cut off his arm with a bone saw. Obviously he fails, and a speech about friendship snaps Abed out of it and returns him to his body.
You would think this is a fitting end, yes? Well, you’re right, but there’s more.
However, I have far exceeded my word count, so let’s pick this up in my next post where we will ACTUALLY talk about Season Four of Community.
