Origin story

“Heroic Origins” baffles and delights in equal measure. It definitely succeeds at entertaining and delighting for 30 minutes, but without being all that funny, revealing or original. In fact, large sections of the episode are outright frustrating.

More so than any episode of Community this season, “Heroic Origins” coasts on the fumes leftover from Dan Harmon’s reign. Of course, that isn’t much of a surprise once you realize that the episode serves as an origin story for the study group.

With finals and Jeff’s impending graduation looming, Abed has decided to reveal to the study group his pet project. For the past few years, Abed has been tracking down everyone’s histories to very minute details (he knows that Jeff watched Star Wars with his dad in 1982) because he believes that the study group was destined to meet.

Back in 2008, Annie (then Little Annie Adderall) gets blown off at school by Troy, still a hotshot football prodigy. Shirley is going out to dinner with her husband in the same restaurant where Jeff is having dinner with a stripper who he successfully defended in a court case protested by anarchist Britta. Shirley’s kids are going to watch The Phantom Menace when Abed accosts the two of them to protect them from watching the death of Star Wars.

Meanwhile, at a party, Troy sweeps all the class awards despite being a colossal prick, which ends up being the last straw that breaks Annie’s back. She flips out at him, calling him a mindless robot, before running through a pane of glass and skipping town.

Troy, a little bit devastated by this indictment, fake flubs a keg stand and pretends to have seriously injured his leg as a way of getting out of his scholarship.

These memories and flashbacks have made everyone at the study table somewhat depressed when Abed makes a grave realization: the ruckus he made at the movie theater forced Shirley to bail on dinner, allowing her husband to meet that stripper Jeff defended and he ended up outing Annie’s drug problem when he ended up in the same doctor’s office.

He set in motion of the chain of events that led to the study group attending Greendale.

This is one of those times where I think I was little bit happier not knowing the truth. We’d known a lot of the details in snatches – Annie’s pill addiction was mentioned frequently throughout the first season, we got a whole episode about Troy’s football career and Shirley’s relationship with her husband was a major, multi-season arc.

What you imagined to have happened is probably infinitely more exciting than the lame high school set and mall set we got to see in “Heroic Origins.” For an episode that relies so heavily on bombastic, comic-book style flair, it’s a huge disappointment.

The story, or at least the tone they were going for, was far more epic than the cheaply made episode we got. Had the writers exercised more finesse, this could have been a joke about how Abed’s overactive imagination. Instead, the obvious cheapness of the episode deflates most of the revelations and flashbacks.

While the writer would rather have you focus on how Shirley’s about to get screwed (figuratively), I couldn’t help but notice how crappy the restaurant set looked and how they had to get a stand in for Malcolm Jamal Warner.

Instead of giggling at how ridiculously dark Annie’s high school career was, I was too fixated on how lazy the makeup was and strikingly similar her high school looked to Greendale.

“Heroic Origins” is yet another one of those Community episodes this season that could have been something special only to fall short in execution. But, unlike that puppet episode or the Christmas special, “Heroic Origins” does work on a bizarre level.

Despite the numerous problems, the episode has its charms, getting laughs even out of a tired George Lucas jab. Like last week’s episode, “Heroic Origins” gets a lot of mileage out of just putting characters in new and interesting combinations.

And, let’s not forget that “Heroic Origins” manages to wrap up Kevin/Chang’s subplot in the most elegant way possible. I dreaded how this would end from the minute Kevin revealed himself to be Chang, but the conversation with Abed at the end, while rote, was actually kind of sweet. It hinted at a way for Chang to become less of a one-note bit, should Community come back for another season.

Tidbits:

–Obvious body doubles for Malcolm Jamal Warner and Chevy Chase. Come on, now.

–We found out where, “Pop, pop!” comes from and why the Dean likes cross dressing. Both had no right to be as funny as they were.

–I’m surprised and a little terrified that the darkest timeline crap has yet to emerge.

–“Heroic Origins” featured Annie’s Boob’s only appearance this season (so far).

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