Recap / Community S 6 E 06 Basic Email Security

Greendale's computers are hacked by someone threatening to publish everyone's emails unless a controversial comic's on-campus appearance is cancelled.

The Community episode Basic Email Security provides examples of:

• Affectionate Parody: The episode's final scene is a nod to the existential dialogues Hart and Cohle of True Detective would have while driving to assignments.
• Ambiguously Gay: Frankie according to some of the committee members.
• Ambiguous Situation: It's unclear if the hacker really was righteously furious about a controversial comedian coming to Greendale, since he's a little kid more furious about a former friend betraying him onscreen, or if he was doing it For the Evulz. After all, he didn't look remorseful about the whole scenario causing a riot among adults.
• Baby Talk: The Dean dials up his helplessness as a sympathy ploy when he wants Elroy to take a look at his computer problems.
  Dean Pelton: Elroy? Elroy, hey! [pouty voice] Computer no worky...
  Elroy: Please don't do that.
  Dean Pelton [acquiescing, in adult voice]: Computer no worky.
• The Bet: The group has one going about Frankie's sexuality.
• Big "WHAT?!": Frankie and Elroy share one when they learn Chang used to be a teacher at Greendale.
• Bait-and-Switch: Frankie admonishes Abed for torrenting the lunch lady's leaked emails... because that's costing the school money since the school newspaper published the emails there and it pays the school back with ad revenue.
• Brick Joke: At the start of the episode, Elroy sends the Dean on a Snipe Hunt by telling him to look for the "mainframe hardline". In The Tag, this turns out to be a real thing.
• Bridal Carry: A completely nonconsensual one done by the Dean to Jeff's robot body.
• Bus Crash: According to the lunch lady's emails, Buzz Hickey.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • Neil is literally the only person outside of the "Save Greendale" committee to show up to Gupta's performance. Once he tries to flee upon realizing that his emails will get hacked if he stays, the committee physically restrains him and forces him to stay. And, as if that wasn't bad enough, he then gets repeatedly made fun of for the entirety of Gupta's "comedy" act. Even though they saved his life back in season two, Neil sends a message to Abed saying he's no longer speaking to the group.
  • Amusingly enough (albeit to a downplayed extent), Gupta himself, as he claims that Greendale is the only school to not cancel his act in a long time and he repeatedly gets manhandled by Britta and forced to continue his act after he initially wanted to quit upon realizing that everyone would get their emails leaked if he continued his show.
• Call-Back:
  • Jeff's Hero Worship of astronauts can be seen as an allusion to how he told Troy in "Pilot" that "Astronauts go to the Moon to impress their high school quarterbacks."
  • Frankie brings up Troy and Pierce's exits from the show with the line "I'm guessing the second chapter would be when your best friend vanished on a mysterious boat trip after the older one masturbated himself to death?"
• Canon Discontinuity: At the end of the episode, Abed names the events as the third installment in a "revealed secrets" trilogy; the first and second installments being "Cooperative Calligraphy" and "Cooperative Polygraphy" respectively. This pointedly ignores "Intro to Felt Surrogacy", which is part of the maligned "gas leak year."
• Category Traitor: The child hacker considers the child police officer to be one, telling him "[he] used to be one of us!"
• Character Development: Abed has learned to be more considerate of others' feelings and decides not to read anyone else's emails or take a moral high ground.
• Clickbait Gag: After the lunch lady's emails are hacked and leaked to the internet, Elroy mentions that one website has put up a list of "Five Bacardi Cocktails Inspired By the Lunch Lady's Most Embarrassing Secrets".
  Elroy: That's the future of the internet: branded content.
• Covert Pervert: Elroy, who is making 3D models of the female study group members for a game he was developing.
• Dirty Old Man: Elroy took pictures of the female members of the "Save Greendale" committee to be used as figure models in a game he's developing without their explicit consent, much to their revulsion. Additionally, below is his reaction to the lunch lady's emails being leaked at the beginning of the episode:
  Elroy: Oh, which lunch lady? The hot one?
  Dean: invoked (gives Elroy a Squicked-out look) ...You mean the one who serves the hot food?
  Elroy: (leering) Yeah, that's the one.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: The lunch lady's email inbox include an e-mail in Bulgarian about Bulgaria's day of independence from the Ottoman Empire, one from Magnitude with the subject (of course), "Pop pop!"; one from Garrett updating his food allergies (March); a Happy Birthday from "Marvin's Devious Dungeon"; an email from Vicki telling her that her daughter misses her; urgent test results from Greendale Dermatology; a string of emails back and forth to Leonard concerning potatoes, a forwarded email from Neil titled "10 Omelets That Look Exactly Like Celebrities," and, saddest of all, an email with the subject heading Buzz Hickey Memorial Service.
• Functional Addict: Frankie believes that Jeff is one. He doesn't even seem to understand the concept, believing it's an oxymoron, and is absolutely infuriated by her calling him that, even comparing the term to a "non-lethal murderer" or "armless javelin thrower."
• Funny Background Event:
  • The Dean nods in thoughtful approval as Officer Cackowski wraps up a short speech advocating for a fascist police state.
    Officer Cackowski: I'm just a cop... born in a small town, raised in the heartland... but I say cancel the performance — and give the government the sweeping powers they need to detect and eliminate people before they become hackers.
  • Frankie gets angry and disgusted with Jeff for calling her a "chapstick lesbian" in his emails. A short time later, Abed can be seen offering her some chapstick.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • Britta encourages "everyone who believes in freedom" to attend Gupta Gupti Gupta's performance, after which she will be petitioning to have him banned from all campuses across America.
  • Britta is all about power to the people, until the people try to stop the show. "We have to stop the people! Their freedom of speech depends on it!"
  • After having pledged not to peek at the leaks, everyone (except for Abed, who kept his promise) is mad about what everyone else wrote.
  • Britta is angered and offended by Chang's emails to Jeff about "Who looks hotter today, Annie or Britta?", but an annoyed Annie notes that Britta still memorized the specific date that Jeff replied and agreed that Britta looked hotter.
• Hope Spot:
  • When the "Save Greendale" committee is furiously arguing with each other, it looks like Elroy's heartfelt confession regarding him pretending to be someone else's cousin will patch the situation up and let everyone get back to work. Then Annie brings up the pictures he took of the female committee members as figure models for his game (which he didn't tell them about beforehand) and everyone instantly starts bickering again.
  • There's another one later where the "hope" is more that the characters will come out as the moral victors than anything else. After defying the hacker and hosting the performance, the gang meets Gupta Gupti Gupta and he earnestly thanks them for not canceling his act, causing Britta to happily declare that they did the right thing. Then it turns out that a) Gupta Gupti Gupta's act isn't just mean-spirited and offensive simply for the sake of it but also amazingly bad, and b) exactly one student showed up to watch it, because c) all the other students have been blackmailed into forming a mob and shutting the performance down. In the end, the gang is left not only feeling like they didn't do the right thing, but that they're not even sure what the right thing was even supposed to be.
• I Can't Believe I'm Saying This: Britta, a Soapbox Sadie extraordinaire, literally states this before emphasizing the need to still let Gupta's performance go on in the name of protecting free speech and privacy.
• Internal Reveal: Frankie and Elroy learn that Jeff and Britta used to date, that the "Save Greendale" Committee used to be a Spanish study group, and that Chang was their teacher.
• The Internet Is for Porn: A variant; According to Jeff, the only thing he uses his Greendale email account for is "porn subscriptions and improv show mailing lists." Also, he looked at boobies "one time" on his work computer.
• Lampshade Hanging:
  • After everyone is awkwardly silent after Officer Cackowski comes into the study room, he snarks "No? Guess you're just going to keep the cop you've known for five years at arm's length?"
  • Played for Laughs and mixed in with Exact Words after Elroy calls out Jeff on emailing astronauts for the sake of emotional validation.
    Jeff: They're national heroes!!
    Elroy: Yes, they are! Leave them alone!
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • It's brought up for the first time in a long while that Chang used to be a teacher during the argument after the committee's emails are all leaked.
    Chang: ...and frankly, [I] haven't been well-utilized since!
  • Arguably, Chang's daily "Who's hotter today, Britta or Annie?" emails to Jeff are a nod to the fact that this is a not-uncommon topic of discussion on the internet after each episode airs.
  • Later on, after everyone is discussing the Lost Aesop:
    Abed: If you follow a theme of "revealed secrets," the email hack is the third installment of a trilogy that began with Annie losing a pen in what I've come to call "the golden age."
• Leet Lingo: The Dean reads off the hackers' first missive to Elroy and notes that he's "not bothering to pronounce them, but there are a lot of Zs being used."
• Lost Aesop: Discussed. The characters end up not being sure what they were supposed to take away from the episode.
• Mean Character, Nice Actor: In-universe. Gupta Gupti Gupta is a perfectly friendly and polite Nice Guy in person^note Most notably, not only does he sincerely thank the committee members for keeping him on since Greendale's the first school in six months to not cancel on him, but he even offers to just leave when he realizes how everyone will have their emails leaked if he stays, but his comedy act apparently consists solely of him rudely insulting his own audience. It's also something of an inversion, in that him starting his performance in his stage persona is treated as the reveal of his "true self," like how a lot of other shows handle in-universe reveals of someone being a Nice Character, Mean Actor.
• Mood Whiplash: Within the "Save Greendale" committee's hilarious arguments over their leaked emails, there are two surprisingly sad moments that showcase the Hidden Depths of its two newest members - Namely, Frankie sending letters to her dead sister that she uses as a journaling device, and Elroy engaging in a series of embarrassing back-and-forth letters with a family who mistook him for one of their long-lost cousins because he was just happy to be acknowledged by someone else.
• Mythology Gag: The music that Abed cranks up before Gupta's performance is "Daybreak" by Michael Haggins, a musical Running Gag heard throughout the show and which was most prominently featured in Season 3.
• No Sympathy: Elroy can't help but laugh after Jeff's Oh, Crap! realization that it's not just his Greendale email account that's been breached.
• Oh, No... Not Again!: Abed just rolls his eyes when he realizes they're doing another dark secrets episode. He explains to Frankie and Elroy that the group went through this two (technically three) times already.
• Only Sane Man: Britta and Abed share the role this episode. Britta is the only one at the beginning of the episode that can see how horrible what happened to the lunch lady was, and Abed is the only one who didn't read anyone's email.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": The hacker was able to break into Greendale's network by guessing their password: "changeme".
• Police Are Useless: Subverted. It seems at first that Cackowski can't do more other than advise for Greendale to cancel the event while his young hacker expert finds the extortionist. The next day, he brings the little perp in handcuffs to make him apologize to the group for the chaos he caused.
• Political Overcorrectness: The Dean got the notoriously offensive Indian-American comedian Gupta Gupti Gupta to attend Greendale. When the other members of the "Save Greendale" committee point out how terrible of an idea this was, the Dean tries to excuse himself by saying "How could he be racist?! Listen to his name!"
• Resigned to the Call: Jeff agrees to join Britta and the others in taking a stand against the email hackers — not because he believes in the cause, but because he's learned by this point that he'll eventually get dragged into it anyway.
• invoked Ripped from the Headlines: The entire episode's plot about the leaking of Greendale's emails was inspired by the then-recent 2014 hack of Sony Pictures, with even the stated reason of the real-life hackers being that it was inspired by the release of the controversial and inflammatory film "The Interview" reflected here in how the school's email leak was in response to the controversial and inflammatory comedy performance of Gupta Gupti Gupta.
• Running Gag: Of someone (here, Officer Cackowski) pointing at each member of the group and repeating a question (in this episode, "You guys excited for Avengers? Avengers? Avengers?").
• Sidetracked by the Analogy:
  Frankie: I swear, if you people were trapped on a tiger-infested island with no food or water, you would judge every ship that came to save you!
  Annie: How do the tigers survive without food or water?
  Frankie: Oh, it's not cute, Annie!
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After realizing the full picture of what's going on, both Neil and Gupta himself try to get out of his comedy act as soon as possible until Britta forces both of them into line.
• Self-Deprecation: The police officer is candid that their department's cyber crimes unit is pretty new and not very good.
  Officer Cackowski: This message was posted online and signed 'The Hackerz' — and we assume it's legit because, well... that's just where we're at.
• Shout-Out:
  • When Greendale is hacked, the Dean's laptop shows a picture of a laughing skull.
    • The same skull image causes the school secretary Rhonda to wonder if she's getting an advertisement for "a new Mask movie" on her computer.
  • According to Elroy, the other members of the committee described his dated fashion sense as "a Houseguest-era Sinbad wardrobe."
  • One of the things Annie read about in Abed's leaked emails was him telling his girlfriend that Annie didn't understand Donnie Darko.
  • After Greendale descends into chaos from everyone's emails being leaked, Jeff describes the situation as "like Road Warrior out there."
• Snipe Hunt: When the Hopeless with Tech Dean desperately insists to Elroy that there has to be a way to fix his computer being hacked in the episode's opening scene, Elroy deadpans that he could "go cut the hardline at the mainframe." It takes the Dean running down the hall and then slowly repeating Elroy's words back to himself to realize Elroy was kidding.
• So Unfunny, It's Funny: Gupta's act is this at best.
• Straight Gay: Jeff's guess at Frankie's sexuality is "chapstick lesbian", a term first used on Ellen to mean a lesbian who isn't any more masculine or feminine than the average woman.
• Stylistic Suck: Gupta Gupti Gupta's comedy act is hilariously terrible, with it basically consisting of him coming up with various mean-spirited and bigoted insults to throw at his audience. Furthermore, all of his "jokes" have no understanding of how to set up punchlines, subvert the audience's expectation, tastefully approach controversial topics, or even use clever wordplay.
• Take That!:
  • A more subtle case, but Elroy's half-assed excuses for why he's using the figure reference pictures he took of the female committee members in his video game being that it's because "They're all strong, intelligent and powerful women on an emotional journey!" can be seen as one directed at male artistic creators who claim to be feminists and yet frequently fetishize women in art along with treating them as eye candy for the Male Gaze.
  • Gupta Gupti Gupta's terrible routine is one for comedians who value shock and spectacle over emotional resonance and cleverness in their acts.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: Played for Laughs; the hacker is a little boy who lives across the street from Greendale. He could easily be anyone's little brother, or son.
• This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: While everyone is attempting to determine the Lost Aesop of the episode and Frankie tries to mix all of the four previously offered Aesops into one:
  Frankie: A free government terrorizes privacy. That's all four, bitches!
• Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: Warburton, the Greendale PD's ten-year-old cybersecurity expert, who's revealed in the credits scene to be so disillusioned by the Sisyphean efforts to prevent hacking that he's a Knight in Sour Armor.
  Cackowski: The thing you said back there about not being a part of anything. Is that really how you feel?
  Warburton: It's not a question of how I feel. I feel like flying. I don't jump off buildings.
  Cackowski: Do you believe in God, Warburton?
  Warburton: You know, there's no rule that says we have to be friends, right?
  Cackowski: How about common courtesy? Familiar with that rule?
  Warburton: The words common and courtesy have opposite values. Common courtesy is just gibberish, hocus pocus, a spell we cast when hoping to cheat reality.
  Cackowski: You're a cynical son of a bitch. I'll give you that.
• Was It Really Worth It?: The "Save Greendale" committee is collectively thinking this after the whole school's personal information is leaked.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Jeff emails astronauts in the desperate hope to gain positive fatherly figures in his life.
• Wham Line: Chang mocks Frankie at one point for writing long, "melodramatic" emails to her sister, who never responds. Frankie's response is by far the most dramatic and serious moment in the entire episode.
  Frankie [furiously]: She's dead. I pretend to write her emails as a journaling device, you wretched, invasive little GREMLIN!
  Britta: ...Okay, why don't we just call that "rock bottom"?
• Wise Beyond Their Years: The 10 year old child in charge of the police cyber unit is considerably more cynical and world-weary than the adult cop he speaks with.

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