Community - "Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps"

Season 3, Episode 5

A good or lazy episode, depending on how you look at it

I believe in authorial intent. I know it’s not a widely accepting theory for analyzing works of art – or at least not as widely accepted as one would think, based on its definition – but it’s one I adhere to strictly.  Hell, I used authorial intent to argue that I could use paintings as a primary source for my undergraduate thesis, and it worked. Television, on the other hand, is a far more complicated beast to apply authorial intent two (with the exception of art collectives and the works Andy Warhol made while stationed in “The Factory”). Though it’s often used as shorthand to imply intent by placing all the blame on the show runner (and if they’re doing their job right, they should shoulder most of it), but some of that intent must be passed around to the various writers who contributed ideas, the producers who gave their own input, and directors. (Being writer-ly medium, television tends not to wax and wane based on directors.) How much blame that gets spread around varies based on the inner workings of each show, but you have to be judicious in how you dole out that intent.

And that’s the thought we have to keep in mind when discussing “Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps”. Look, Dan Harmon and Co. didn’t mean to have two episodes with a similar structure paired back-to-back (okay, with one week off in between), but when the production for “Remedial ChaosTheory” started to become unwieldy, they had to push that episode back a week and move up “Competitive Ecology” (hence the 303/304 ADR-ed joke that started off “Theory”). Even if it was lazy or uncreative for the show to use similar structures for two different episodes that aired so close together, airing these episodes with 3 weeks separating them would probably have lessened the damning comparisons between the two episodes.

Because I think comparing “Steps” with “Theory” does a disservice to the former. Are the emotions as strong in this seven-storied episode as they were is the episode before? No. Is it funnier? Yes. Is it as informative about the characters? Well….

To answer that question, I’ll first have to copy the format I used for my “Theory” review, and list out each story as they are told:

·         Britta – In an attempt to start the experiment where each member of the group, she relies on the most trite of setups: A girl and boy (her and Jeff) making out in a car, and Jeff, playing the vapid hunk type, gets killed with a hook for a hand.

·         Abed – In response Abed tells a horror story that adhere more closely to real-world logic, he places himself and Britta in a log cabin, and when they hear about a noise – long after they heard the news report of the convict’s escape – they stand back to back, holding knives. Britta falls in love with Abed.

·         Annie – Placed in a more medieval setting, Annie (in some very revealing garb) cast Jeff as a vampire, who she teaches to read in an attempt to tame his inner monster. In a twist, Annie turns out to be a vampire-eating werewolf, and in a bloody ending that we don’t see, eats Jeff bit by bit.

·         Troy – He himself and Abed as awesome fighter pilot who crash in woods and seek out the nearby cabin, where a loner scientist (Pierce) who drugs them and sews them together. Together, they develop ESP, which they use to knock Pierce out (and make themselves a sandwich). They get revenge on Pierce by placing his ass on his chest and swapping his feet with his hands. (In the tag, they drink his brandy.)

·         Pierce – Not a horror story so much as throwback to racist and misogynistic 70s television, he presents himself as a mac daddy that has sex with all the girls, and fens off gansta Troy and Abed.

·         Shirley – Using the horror-film-as-morality-tale approach, she sticks all the group members, minus Pierce, in the cabin for the Rapture, and as an angles leave them in the hand of the Devil Dean and the Pilates, the daemon who fests on you genitals.”

·         Jeff – To assuage the members who are freaking out about the test results, Jeff places them back in the cabin, except the time they’re all drinking coco together. Chang is the killer, and he only kills out of fear; they group gives him a hug. The end.

Whereas last episode used the alternate timelines to show us how each member of the group affects the whole, tonight’s stories evolved from a more personal place, and showed us how each member sees the other members of the group. But whose interpretation did we see? Though we saw these stories populated with the members of the group, it wasn’t always explicitly clear whose vision of the story we were seeing. Did Britta put her and Jeff together in her story because it’s convenient, or because she’s still attracted to him? Or was it Annie who envisioned Jeff in Britta’s story, and that’s why she paired herself and Jeff off in her story? Or was it because she’s still attracted to him? Did Troy really mean to put Pierce in his story, or was that Pierce’s interpretation. (We know that Pierce’s story was told from his perspective in reactions to his interpretation of Troy’s story.)

But there are still other questions that don’t so much depend on the characters interpretation, but our own. Why did Abed place Britta in his story? Why not Troy? Why did Shirley leave Pierce out of her story? And why did Dean show up? Some of this may attributed to logistics of making a television episode, but some of it, in the best Community tradition, is place there for us to mull over. This was an episode that predicated on out love and knowledge of the characters, and you can’t exactly call an episode that does that a failure on the character front.

So how this episode stacks up against just might depend on your personal taste. It was a much funnier in a straightforward fashion, and slightly less weird episode, just how some fans like it.  The ending meanwhile, which assures that all of the group members are in fact crazy/sociopathic/possibly homicidal (except for possibly Abed, but I get the sense he knew how to “cheat” the test), and places them all on the same page. It’s antithetical to the last episodes darker assertion that Jeff was the main cause of the group’s misfortune (which I know some of you didn’t like) and instead places them as one creepy, codependent yet highly dysfunctional group, much like “Ecology”.  It’s a lighter tone, relatively, and even on a holiday as macabre as Halloween, it seems fitting.

Ultimately, however much we rationalize it, “Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps”  is undone by a case of bad luck; like I said last time, this is a show that thrives on surprise and originality, and this episode wasn’t able to supply those as much as it may have wanted. (It’s sort of like last season when the front end was overloaded with homage episodes.) But that doesn’t stop this episode from being fantastic, and a proud carrier of the show’s “great Halloween episodes” tradition.

Next Week: “Advanced Gay”. Oh boy.

Quotes, Etc:

Another great thing about the reveal that the whole group is crazy? It underwrote my assumption that Jeff was going to be the one with the problem.

I couldn’t help but notice that two gags tonight seems ripped from How I Met Your Mother: both the name-as-synonym for-failure joke (“Matchmaker”) and the butt on chest joke. (See the quotes of “The Ducky Tie”). They were still funny here, but it was an interesting find for me.

I hate to tell you this, but all of that theorizing that fans did over the last episode? It was wrong. (Don't feel sad. Here’s this to cheer you up.)

Then there’s this. I got Abed, of course.

Also lifted from last episode’s review: Which was your story? Go!

“So the lights will work on November 1^st?” “All Saints Day…”

“Are people using my name to mean ‘small mistake’?” “Yes.”

“Let’s make this fast and furious, in that order.”

“I hear there’s free taco meat from the army.”

“Once upon a time there was a couple making out in car or something…”

“A hook thing where his hand should be, you know what I mean?”

“That makes sense. I’m turned on by how logical you are.”

“I hope you are fertile as I am tonight.” “More.”

“I love y-” “Shhh.”

“I’m fine with this.”

“Teach me to read.” “Awww.”

“You should be proud of how much I changed you.”

“Then she flossed her teeth with his tendens.”

“See? There was twist.”

“Wow Annie, I didn’t know you such a fan of…gore.”

“Me and I my partner are Top Gun fighter pilots, the best of the best.” “Pew-pew.”

“You tried to destroy us, but you only made us…MORE AWESOME.”

“And give us all your expensive brandy and hubcaps!”

“You…are…still…relevant!”

“Okay time for my birthday spanking. You can count to thrity?”

“Oh man, my drugs are wearing off. Whose got more?”

“Aww man, end of days. Can anything be any worse?”

“Pilates is the demon who eats your genitals.”

“Oh look, it’s out friend who we used to pick on for being Christian.”

“HAHAHA! GAY MARRIAGE!”

“You ruined a Britta party. That’s like letting poop spoil.”

“Fear. I kill because I’m afraid. Somebody please give a hug.” “Awww.”

“Wow. You Birtta’d ‘Britta’.” “Yeah, way to pull an Abed.”

“TROY AND ABED SEWN TOGETHER!”