Community/Recap/S2/E21 Paradigms of Human Memory



"Pierce: You want examples? Okay we'll give you examples. Troy, drop a beat.

Troy: No."

The group discovers that Troy's old monkey Annie's Boobs has been stealing things from them ever since his disappearance. His stash at first prompts fond memories for everyone, but this soon turns to the realization of just how dysfunctional they all are, and prompts everyone to examine whether they should all just go their separate ways.

The Community episode "Paradigms of Human Memory" provides examples of:
"Jeff: Look, just because we're good-looking, doesn't make us villains."
 * Accentuate the Negative: Jeff argues the group is doing this and they had plenty of good times also.
 * Affectionate Parody:
 * The entire episode is a parody of the Clip Show.
 * The Jeff/Annie and Pierce/Abed slow-mo montages are parodies of shipping music fan-videos which take particular moments and exaggerate their romantic meaning to imply a relationship between the characters, and one specific Jeff/Annie fan-vid in particular. Dan Harmon, however, contacted the creator in advance to alert them of the 'treat' in the episode for her, and has insisted that it was meant affectionately, not maliciously.
 * Air Vent Passageway: Played straight; Chang crawls through the ducts to retrieve Annie's Boobs' stash. It should be noted that Chang is the smallest one of them and even so he had to apply a thick layer of Vaseline.
 * Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: “The truth is, it’s been a dark year. Pierce got hooked on painkillers, Shirley’s having an unplanned baby and, apparently, Chang is in the group now.”
 * Art Shift:
 * from the period of "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas".
 * The Dean's animation.
 * Beauty Is Bad: Mentioned, and denied, by Jeff.

"Annie: This group is toxic! We fight about fighting about fighting!"
 * Behind the Black: No one notices a greased-up Chang in a speedo until he speaks up. Almost Offscreen Teleportation, because he's only out-of-frame for a few seconds.
 * Big No: Troy screams this when swamped by a group of people who think the group are giving out free iPhones.
 * Chang also screamed one when Annie's Boobs took his spoon.
 * Bottle Episode: Stunningly inverted (and quite possibly the only example to date). Most Clip Shows are employed so as to save production money and time, with very little money spent on taping and writing new material, the Clip Show is usually a type of Bottle Episode. This episode spoofs the very nature of a Clip Show by having the acutual clips be a bunch of Noodle Incidents to a variety of locations and situations never actually seen in the series. Financially, this episode was expensive, even to the point that Dan Harmon himself paid for the Sara Barellis song to be used in the Shipping Goggles portion of the episode. Interestingly the episode after this one is a true Bottle Episode because of the expensiveness of this episode as well as the season finale.
 * Bus Crash: Literally. Remember the  introduced in last year's paintball competition? Turns out they all died in a bus crash.
 * Call Back: The rampaging robot that nearly ran over Annie is labeled Boob-A-Tron. Also, Dean Pelton's cartoon has the characters dressed as they were in the pilot episode.
 * Jeff asks Chang how many vents he is going to crawl out this year. Chang crawled out of an air vent in a police station in Custody Law and Eastern European Diplomacy.
 * Cerebus Syndrome: Troy points out that this year has been darker, with Pierce getting addicted to drugs, Shirley having an unplanned pregnancy and Abed having a mental breakdown. Not to mention the obvious Glee Club bus crash and being attacked by a racist prospector in a Ghost Town.
 * "...and apparently, Chang is in the group now?"
 * Clip Show: Spoofed -- the setup is all there, but the episode is actually entirely original material, with the flashbacks either providing a new view on earlier episodes, or events we've never heard about before. The ending takes this to extremes -- the flashbacks start triggering flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks, provoking a near-mental breakdown in Troy. Furthermore, Jeff's final speech is composed entirely out of flashbacks.
 * Complaining About Complaining:

"Troy: Didn't we decide at the beginning of the year that for the good of the group we wouldn't allow any intimacy with each other or ourselves?
 * Complaining About Things You Haven't Paid For: "There is no such thing as a free Caesar salad."
 * Continuity Nod: All over the place, when it's not just making things up. Most normally, Annie finds the pens she flipped out over in "Cooperative Calligraphy."
 * Crack Pairing: In-universe.
 * Abed and Pierce
 * Chang /  receives the same treatment at the end.
 * Creator Breakdown: In universe; as the tag shows, the Dean did not react well to Jeff pointing out exactly how frequently he burst into their study room wearing a ridiculous costume.
 * A Date With Rosie Palms:

Jeff: Troy, we never said "ourselves".

Troy: ...Okay. Now I am really mad."

"Jeff: Oh come on, my forehead is not this big.
 * Disproportionate Retribution: Mega-Dean in the tag; upon Jeff being quite rude about his costume, he seems to think it perfectly appropriate to horrifically butcher the entire study group.
 * Easter Egg: After the group leaves and Chang runs back in to share some memories, a Chang-doll can be seen standing outside the diorama of the study room.
 * Everything's Better With Monkeys: Annie's Boobs is back, and is finally brought to justice for stealing Annie's pen in "Cooperative Calligraphy".
 * Fan Disservice: Greased-up Chang in a Speedo.
 * Fan Service: A quick clip of both Jeff and Britta in their underwear during one of Abed's specific flashbacks.
 * Fan Vid: Annie's montage of 'moments' between her and Jeff, set to Sara Bareilles 'Gravity', is a spot-on parody of a real Jeff/Annie fanvid from 2009.
 * Forehead of Doom:

Everyone else in the room quickly avoids eye contact with him."

"Jeff: Abed! Stop being meta! Why do you always have to take whatever happens to us and shove it up its own ass?!"
 * Fully-Automatic Clip Show: Troy freaking out while the rest of the study group argues in the background.
 * Funny Background Event: Blink and you'll miss it, but in the background of the study group's diorama of them making their 19th diorama, there's a Chang doll staring through the library windows at the study group.
 * Funny Aneurysm Moment: It's harder to laugh at Abed's "six seasons and a movie" now that the phrase is being used as part of a movement to keep Community from being cancelled.
 * Ghost Town: One of the group's adventures took place in a wild west ghost town.
 * A God Am I: Pierce shooting up. With flu-jabs.
 * Got Volunteered: The rest of the group other than Britta and Jeff since they did not step forward "and are clearly innocent"
 * Group Hug: A quick one at the end.
 * Haunted House: A setting of one of the group's adventures where Pierce sees the ghost of a Confederate general.
 * Horrible Camping Trip: Apparently, the group had one offscreen, which ended.
 * Ho Yay: The montage of Pierce and Abed's "lingering looks."
 * I Love Nuclear Power: Mega-Dean.
 * The Lady's Favour: The Dean, dressed as Scarlett O'Hara, attempts to invoke this toward Jeff during a flashback.
 * Larynx Dissonance: The Dean voices every character in his cartoon, so this shows up in full force for Britta's and Annie's single lines.
 * Meta Guy: Abed is called out on this by Jeff when he starts triggering flashbacks in flashbacks in flashbacks about the arguments the group get into, causing Troy to nearly break-down.

"Jeff: That show's gonna last three weeks!
 * My Sensors Indicate You Want to Tap That: Abed transcends reality and becomes the living embodiment of this trope.
 * Naked People Are Funny: Chang
 * NameTron: The berserk robot is labeled as another version of Boob-a-tron.
 * Noodle Incident: Several of the flashbacks, most notably Jeff's final speech(es).
 * Prospector: In the first flashback a shotgu n wielding one nearly shoots the study group.
 * Psychic Nosebleed: The end result of Troy's freakout over the group's fights.
 * Revision:
 * The only part that Abed remembers about the Halloween party was . The scene was not planned nor filmed originally during the production of "Epidemiology" - The costumes and scenery had to be remade.
 * An extended version of a scene from "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas" had Jeff ask Britta if she wanted to have sex later, though creator Dan Harmon has said this was planned far enough in advance that it was animated along with the rest of the "Christmas" footage in 2010.
 * We also get to see an unseen part of the episode from the "real world" perspective.
 * Ripped from the Headlines: Britta forces Abed and Troy to watch the beginnings of the Tunisian Revolution with her.
 * Rousing Speech: Jeff's tendency to do this is parodied with a speech at the end composed of flashbacks to fragments of other speeches inspired by the Noodle Incidents seen in the rest of the episode. The result is a confused, contradictory and glorious mess which nevertheless works perfectly as a 'Jeff' speech.
 * Shipping Goggles: Annie's montage shows that she has them on with regards to Jeff.
 * Ship Sinking:
 * Shout-Out:
 * And also a Take That to The Cape.
 * Shout-Out:
 * And also a Take That to The Cape.

Abed: Six seasons and a movie!"

"Troy: Like the Traveling Wilburys!
 * Later, in various flashbacks, Abed can be seen wearing a "Save The Cape" shirt.
 * And they miss the premiere because of the revolution in Tunisia. Thanks, Britta.
 * The Dean's costume montage has references to Tina Turner, Catwoman, and Gone With the Wind.
 * Greendale's barber shop class also has Regionals.
 * Significant Reference Date: The reference to the Tunisian Revolution dates that clip of Troy, Abed and Britta.
 * Stylistic Suck: The group's glee club song is just "sing-a-ling, sing-a-ling-ling-ling".
 * Dean Pelton's cartoon in The Stinger is crudely drawn and animated, and features unconvincing voiceover work.
 * Supergroup: Jeff uses the term for a different meaning, but Troy mentions a band.

Jeff: Yes Troy. Lke the Traveling Wilburys of pain."

""I have no idea what you mean. There was a glee club at Greendale, and their bus was driving on a rainy night, and a downed power line was hanging across the road, and the bus drove through it, and it sliced through the bus and decapitated everyone, row by row, so that the people in the back had to watch all their friends get decapitated, then they got decapitated, and then the bus drove into a pool of lava. And I guess the crazy thing is, the electricity from the power line somehow kept their nervous systems 'alive,' so they could feel the lava. They didn't escape the pain of the lava just because they didn't have heads. They felt the lava. It was terrible but it was not metaphorical in any way. I would never be that petty and envious of another show's popularity.""
 * Take That: The group had to take over the Greendale Glee Club when the real one all died in a bus crash... Jeff and Britta don't seem to miss them. Per Dan Harmon, this was totally not a Take That:

"The study group climbs out of the lake with a flat raft
 * Toon Physics: Lampshaded by Troy

Troy: You can yell at me all you want, I’ve seen enough movies to know that popping the back of a raft makes it go faster!"

"Troy: You can yell at me all you want, I've seen enough movies to know that popping the back of a raft makes it go faster."
 * What Do You Mean It's Not Heinous?: The other group members react as if Jeff and Britta are intentionally trying to ruin their lives, blaming them for all the bad things that have happened over the year and accusing them of "intentionally endangering the fabric of this group" (downplaying the examples of their own less-than-benevolent actions towards the group that Jeff and Britta confront them with). Jeff and Britta don't particularly appreciate this, and over the course of the episode it becomes clearer that it's more about fundamental underlying tensions and dysfunction between all of the members of the group rather than specific members.
 * What the Hell, Hero?: The group round on Jeff and Britta, calling them on their selfish actions. Turned around, however, when Jeff and Britta point out that the other members of the group aren't exactly without their own selfish and thoughtless tendencies either.
 * Whole-Episode Flashback: Lampshaded by the name of the episode itself.
 * Wrong Genre Savvy: