In today’s post, we continue our story of the appalling dump heap of the most deplorable rubbage imaginable, mangled up in tangled up knots, that is Community’s Season Four by looking at the season finale, which features the return of the darkest timeline.
In the finale, our lead, Jeff Winger, is set to graduate from the community college. Having finished his schooling, Jeff plans to return to life as a lawyer, the job he had before being disbarred after the law firm discovered he had cheated on the LSATs. Something, however, stands in his way. Jeff is about to graduate when he stops the Dean from signing the paper. He feels there ought to be a ceremony. The Dean, Dean Craig Pelton, who you may hear of in a future blog post, no spoilers, hastily agrees out of a love for parties and Jeff. He says the party can be prepared by the following afternoon, which is much sooner than Jeff was hoping, having proposed this idea as a way to postpone graduation. As he discusses this with another character, he remembers the “Darkest Timeline” that Abed had obsessed over in the last season- I mean last year. He formulates a plan to cause Abed to spiral.
The next day, Jeff is sitting with all his friends when he suggests they roll a die to decide who will bring the soda to the ceremony. (This is an objectively terrible plan, and it is very below Jeff’s usual standard for schemes. This points again to season four’s poor writing.) He rolls the die and it lands on a crack in the table, not showing a number. Abed nervously grabs the die and says “maybe it doesn’t mean anything”. “Or maybe it means everything!” Troy refutes. Despite these ominous statements, everyone at the table including the two of them immediately moves on with their lives.
The show cuts to Jeff appearing almost fully naked in the Dean’s office through a glowing portal on the floor.
This is, of course, Evil Jeff, and after he’s dressed, he meets up with Evil Annie (an evil doppelgänger of a girl in the study group) and they announce their plan to trick all of Jeff’s friends into hating him so that he will take the job he was offered at the law firm. They go about this in an ineffective and uninteresting way, somehow hurting characters the audience is deeply attached to while leaving the audience feeling absolutely nothing about it, a truly impressive feat. Meanwhile, Abed has been transported to the Darkest Timeline where he meets “Evil” Abed, who is no longer evil and has devoted himself to brightening his timeline. This Abed helps him get home. Real Jeff catches up to his friends and explains his evil doppelgänger has been running around insulting them, and obviously, they don’t believe him until Abed shows up with a fancy paintball gun that can transport whoever it shoots to the darkest timeline. The friends all team up to go attack their evil doppelgängers, who are now all there somehow. (I promise the show doesn’t say. The others show up out of nowhere.)
There is what should be an epic fight where each of them shoots their doppelgänger after a brief interaction between the two of them. Jeff and Abed end up behind a couch, and Jeff says he should surrender himself to his evil self (for no apparent reason seeing as everyone else has already won). Abed says something like “no, it isn’t real anyway”.* Jeff agrees and then agrees to kill his double anyway. He shoots evil Jeff very easily, and suddenly he’s back at the table where he was about to roll the die. He stops and says something along the lines of “on second thought, maybe not”. The ceremony happens. The episode ends with another brief look at the darkest timeline wherein they also flash to another timeline where two of the characters married and named their child Chewbacca.
In summary, I can’t say I recommend it as a piece of media, but it does heavily feature doubles and doppelgängers. Abed has a line in the show that goes “I may not be good with facial expressions, but I know an evil doppelgänger when I see one”, and I felt this was fitting. I hope this recap was enjoyable, and I promise if it felt tedious, the episode is doubly so. See you next time!