Community - "Foosball and Nocturnal Vigilantism"

Season 3, Episode 9

“You don’t know me.”

One of the things that I never really understood was how during the beginning of season two, which was perhaps the strongest stretch of Community so far, there was a small but vocal sector of the show’s small but vocal audience who were expressing displeasure with the dearth of homage/spoof episodes, and were clamoring for those that they deemed “normal” (as if there is such a thing when it comes to this show). While I agreed that perhaps the show was over-loading its slate with too much of one type of episode, it wasn't something that truly bothered me given the fact that most of the episodes were just fantastic, and I found it hard to believe that people could be upset when the results were this good. So here we are in season three, with more “normal” episodes than not, and given how last night’s episode played out, I have to wonder if some of those detractors aren’t rethinking their original positions just a bit.

Now, don’t get me wrong. “Foosball and Nocturnal Vigilantism” is still a good episode. Of course, apart from some of the rough early episodes of the first season where the show was still finding itself, there’s yet to be a bad episode of the show, but that’s beside the point. There was a lot to enjoy about the episode, both in terms of comedy and character development, but I’m not sure that it congealed into a whole as well as I would have liked. The best episodes, in my mind, connect all the characters, either through the same plotline and/or homage, by using competing plotlines to comment on each other, or by simply having the group stay together in the same place.

“Foosball” had none of that. Shirley and Jeff were given a strong, emotional A-plot, while Troy, Abed, and Annie were stuck in a silly, though still very enjoyable B-plot. (Britta and Pierce meanwhile were relegated to the opening and closing minutes, and while I don’t want to say that I missed their presence – the body of the episode was entertaining enough that I didn’t really notice – and I understand the needs of story economy, and that actors sometimes have other commitments, but makes me a bit sad when the show can’t find ways to use the entire fantastic ensemble that it has. On the same note, there was no Change or Pelton tonight at all, but only one of those absences bothered me.) Yet despite the enjoyable nature of the plots, the fact that they felt so separated from one another, and thus limited the amount of character interactions, seemed to hold the episode back from being a good as it could have been.

That being said, I liked the Shirley/Jeff storyline for the fact that it was a great exploration of the relationship that the two of them share.  Now, given that we haven’t seen that much about their relationship since season one, we can be forgiven for thinking that maybe there really isn’t a relationship between the two of them, but maybe that’s the point. While there are several pairings among the study group that can be considered to be "polar opposites", I get the strongest sense of that from Shirley and Jeff, specifically because they are both strong-willed and very vocal about their opinions. It places them at great odds, and seeing how they each were informed by their chance meeting as children casts a new light on their relationship. It’s the exact opposite of a meet-cute, and while serendipitous flashbacks can become cloying, here it’s used to tell us things we didn’t already know about the characters, and that makes it work.

Yet, while I appreciate that the show is giving us insight into these two characters, I think it works better for Jeff than it does for Shirley, and that’s because we know more about him than we do her. Now, this also lessens the impact of this new knowledge about Jeff, as it doesn’t seem quite as “new” as the knowledge dispensed about Shirley. However, I would argue that this bit of knowledge about how Shirley acted out against her peers due to her embarrassing growth spurt, much like the reveals about her failed marriage and her past as a drunk, don’t yet add up to whole a person, and they especially don’t tell us about why she clings to her faith so fiercely. I get/assume that the show is trying to present a woman who is holding on to the moral code of faith as a preventative measure against her darker impulses, but until we see how her faith relates to these darker events in her life in a more concrete fashion, she’s still not going to seem like a complete person. I’ve said before that I think the show's depiction of Shirley’s faith rests too much on the cliché, and prevents her from being as nuanced as the other characters, and while that’s still true, at this point I’d just like the show to sort out the timeline of her event first, so we can understand her journey.

Things were of course much sillier over in the Annie/Troy/Abed plot, but I think it was a silliness that was needed, both for the episode (to counter the more seriousness of the A-plot) and for the sake of the characters moving forward. Though “Studies in Modern Movement” showed us that Annie moving in with the boys was going to create some problems, the exact kind of problems wasn’t exactly specific, and I think this was an important step in fleshing out how they will work. While “Studies” was all about how Troy and Abed are a burden on Annie, “Foosball” shows us the inverse of that; Annie is essentially the outsider in this equation, and it makes sense that the show would explore that, and I think it will make for better/more interesting storylines than just the same ol’ Troy & Abed antics week in and week out (however much I may love said antics).

More importantly, this storyline carries on the theme of hidden identities from the A-plot (and perhaps a bit too subtly, given that it didn't serve to really connect the two), as we see Annie embrace her own more conniving tendencies in an attempt to avoid blame for breaking Abed’s DVD, and we see Abed’s most extreme break with reality yet as he assumes the Batman persona in order to deal with this personal tragedy. This didn’t work as well as the A-plot – none of these character beats were in anyway new, and I have to agree with Troy; I thought Annie moving in with them would tone them down, but instead we got just really silly tonight, and I’m not too sure how much farther the show can go in that direction before it breaks its own sense of reality.

I try to resist placing my own metatextual analysis on shows, but considering that Community is about to go away for a few months, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that we go out on a high note, and I think that sense of anticipation may be bleeding into my analysis of these last few episodes. Again, nothing the show has produced in the past few weeks is bad, or makes me love it any less, or anything like that. But next week brings us the show’s annual Christmas/holiday episode, which have always been among the show’s strongest effort, and if they can’t pull a real win out of that one, I might be more than a little sad.

Quotes and Other Thoughts:

Community News Update: As you may have heard, the show’s audience tick up again last night, topping out at almost 4 million viewers, and a 1.7 in the demo, both series high, and for the first time this season the show managed to do better than Parks and Recreation. However, let’s not forget that there was practically nothing else on last night (especially no new episode of The Big Bang Theory), so don’t get too excited. However something that you can get excited about is the fact that all threeseasons of the show are now available through Hulu Plus, which is a great sign among many for the show’s chances of renewal, as this further proves its economic worth.

About that anime scene: I wanted to like it, I really did, and though I laughed at it and got the joke, I just don’t think that I found it epic or effective as I was probably supposed to. I’m not sure why that was – maybe it was too random, maybe it shielded the scene from becoming emotionally intense enough for my liking, maybe it paled in comparison to “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” – but there it is.

“Animal hospital!?” “The animals are the patients.” “That makes sense…”

“I can’t exactly buy him a cat monocle, can I? It’s pretentious.”

“I wish there was a word to describe the pleasure I feel at viewing misfortune.”

“Jeff, you don’t need to worry what foreigners think about you. That’s your birthright as an American.”

“The stakes have never been higher.” “Shut up Leonard! I found your YouTube page! What’s the point in reviewing frozen pizza?” “You’re talking about it.” “Oh, that is true.”

“You called me ‘Turkey’. I love it!”

“Say, you look familiar. Did I ever pretend to shoot a guy in front of you to teach you about gun safety?...I’m really good at faces.”

“Women’s shoes? Rick doesn’t have a wife…or women’s feet.”

“And I’m getting tired of saying this to people, but these things wouldn’t happen if you’d invest in a simple shoe safe.”

“Apology accepted. But I wouldn’t say that to Abed. That guy’s pretty ruthless, and that’s coming from Batman.”