It was Halloween this week on Community, which satisfied my need for some holiday themed chicanery to help me pass my Thursday night. There’s something magical (if all to overdone) about the Halloween episode of a show. It gives you insight into the characters as you watch them dress up, and it generally allows shows to have a little fun with their own premise. “Introduction to Statistics” was more the former than the latter, but the laugh quotient in the episode hasn’t been this high in several weeks.
The main storyline tonight gives us a welcome break in the Jeff-Britta saga as Jeff courts his statistics teacher who notoriously doesn’t date students. Jeff tries to argue that he is older than her, and has no friends on campus, but unfortunately, the rest of the cast tend to show up at the worst moments, begging for Jeff’s help, and giving his teacher the chance to ask, “Are you like a court appointed guardian for these people?” Indeed, the inspired lunacy Jeff’s “friends” get into this week reminds me just how wacky this show can get, and how good it can be at it.
Annie, ever the over-achiever, is throwing a Dia De Los Muertos party for extra credit, and wants Jeff to show up because he’s popular, and her parties are prone to failure. While he tries to resist her tears (“This won’t work. Last time you tried this I saved a vile of your tears and I’ve been slowly building up an immunity”) he ends up agreeing to go to her party. There he encounters Britta, dressed as a squirrel to counteract the stereotype that women dress slutty for Halloween, Troy as Eddie Murphy, Abed as Batman, Shirley as harry Potter (whom everyone hilariously keeps mistaking for Urkel) and Peirce as The Beastmaster. The party leads to a sitcom cliché that always manages to make me laugh—an unlikely character gets a very powerful dose of drugs and bad trip antics ensue. Pierce’s trip leads to him cowering in a fort he created out of desks and chairs, and leads to the return of the always welcome Star Burns, so its pretty hysterical on the whole.
Shirley is busy plotting how to take vengeance on Jeff’s teacher for Britta, who is mostly ambivalent about the whole thing. This leads to another of the show’s now patented heartfelt moments as Shirley confesses her anger at the other woman stems from her ex-husband’s request that she give him her ring back. We also get a nice moment in which Pierce confronts his fear of death, only to be confronted by it and then saved by Abed’s Batman. On the whole, “Introduction to Statistics” is one of the weirder, and more hilarious, episodes the show has done yet.
Grade: A-
Notes:
-“Are you trying to be formidable with me?” “It worked on Pierce…” “Infomercials work on Pierce.”
-“Which is actually quite offensive to people familiar with Mexican Halloween as a sexual position.”
-“I was so unpopular during high school the crossing guard used to lure me into traffic.”
-I loved Pierce’s visions of Annie taunting him about his age. “Tell me about the Beatles, Pierce. Tell me about Woodstock. Tell me about Sputnik.”
-“Jeff, get over here! Pierce is going to kill himself and you’re the only one who can help!” “How do you know that?” “Is Jeff out there? He’s the only one who can help!”
-Abed’s Batman monologue at the end was the perfect amount of ridiculous.
-“It's like Grumpy Old Men, only not hilarious!”
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