YMMV / Community S3 E04: Remedial Chaos Theory

• Accidental Aesop: The final and happiest timeline gives one of these through Jeff. Sometimes, letting your friends have fun is worth your own discomfort/annoyance, since if you don't let them act out, they resort to more self-destructive activities instead. In this case, Britta being allowed to sing "Roxanne" by The Police allows her to avoid getting high in Troy and Abed's bathroom.
• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • It's fair to assume that each roll of the die is just Abed playing out each scenario in his head. Each moment is exactly what would happen when every person's number came up as Abed is a great student of the group's character. Abed knows Annie would get herself a gun because he knows she lives in a bad neighborhood. He knew Pierce would be jealous of Troy moving in with him and would try to get back at him, and, presumably, Troy told Abed about the Norwegian troll watching Troy sleep. Crosses into Fridge Brilliance.
  • Many theorize that different timelines are meant to be the main one. Word of God says no, he's not that evil.
  • The effects of whoever leaves to get the pizza are implied to represent what would happen if that person left the group for good. Or is it meant to represent what would happen if that person became The Leader? Pierce's timeline has the most Ship Tease, Abed's timeline has everyone getting over-emotional and arguing with each other, Britta's timeline has a number of characters trying to confront problems in their own, ineffective ways, Troy's timeline ends in disaster, etc. Why else, then, that Jeff's timeline is the one with the Happy Ending. With Annie's and Shirley's timelines being the first shown and focus primarily on exposition, it could be indicative of their own independent experiences and capabilities, demonstrating that in either of these interpretations, little would change.
  • Pierce not telling the "Eartha Kitt airplane bathroom story" in the prime timeline. On the one hand, it's very likely that it's just a result of him being cut off before he can reveal the story (even when he's actually given an organic opening in the conversation here to bring it up, unlike literally every other timeline shown) and doesn't get another chance. Alternatively, with Pierce musing "airplane bathroom..." to himself instead of loudly jumping in to tell his story, Pierce decided against pushing his own story that no one wanted to hear. There was even a point made to show Pierce smiling in contentment as he delivers the line. In the end, it would mean a lot more to Pierce's arc in the episode if he finally got a chance to have his story come up organically, only to realize that there's no need to tell it at all - not him just being too slow and getting cut off. In the same timeline, after all, he throws away the "present" he got for Troy, showing two instances of maturing and being able to let go of things.
  • Jeff often uses the excuse of "getting a drink" to avoid uncomfortable topics (i.e. when Pierce brings up his Dad). He does this in the timeline where Annie leaves after Troy raises concerns about Annie living in a bad neighborhood. On the surface, this can be interpreted as him being callous to her situation. However, in another timeline he seems genuinely worried after hearing a story about a neighbor getting stabbed, suggesting he does care. Was he excusing himself because he didn't think Troy, who Jeff still views as a child, wasn't mature enough to have this kind of conversation? Another possibility is that he's making good on the promise he made to Annie in Geography of Global Conflict to stop treating her as a kid. In this reading, he's trying to respect her decisions as an adult, even though he's worried about her wellbeing.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • Abed's decision in the "darkest timeline" that since this is obviously the worst of all possible timelines, they should go full Mirror Universe and become evil, complete with goatees he made out of felt. His friends (aside from Troy) aren't amused.
  • The events of Timeline 5 in general.
• Crowning Music of Awesome: The Police's "Roxanne," which plays throughout most of the episode. While Chris McKenna mentioned that it cost enough money that they weren't able to afford almost any other music on the show for the remainder of the third season, it's generally seen as Worth It by both the fans and cast & crew.
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: It's possible to interpret every single timeline as how each member influences the group or what their personality is like. When Abed leaves the room, the group gets overwhelmed by their emotions. When Jeff and Pierce leave the room, the group became more cheerful and united.
  • One possible interpretation of events is that Troy keeps the "chaos" away. Troy's the only one (possibly because he's just too dimwitted) of the group that is genuinely nice to everyone. He gets angry/frustrated like any person, and his choices aren't always entirely selfless or for the best because he's not perfect, but he has no prejudice. Think about it: In the first episode: Pierce hates young people (or all people, or life, or something...), Shirley's extremely judgmental, Abed can only see people as tropes which inevitably leads to prejudice, Annie is a little pretentious/thinks she's smarter than all the others, Jeff definitely thinks he's too good for community college and Britta has her high-and-mighty 'look I'm an activist and I care about issues' thing going on.
  • The key feature of all the bad timelines is that Jeff stays. It represents that even though he acts as The Leader, his presence is not automatically positive, and that he can be damaging just like any other member. Word of God has explicitly stated that the episode's Aesop is "Sometimes, a little chaos is okay." After all, the Golden Ending is the one where Jeff can't be so controlling over everyone else and they all get the chance to relax and think for themselves.
• Funny Moments: From a Black Comedy perspective, pretty much all of Timeline 5.
• Genius Bonus: In Dungeons and Dragons, trolls are permanently killed by using fire or acid. So eating a flaming troll does make sense.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Troy's absence leading to the darkest timeline seems harsher after Donald Glover left the show in the fifth season, which became the last season after NBC cancelled the show. You could say Troy leaving the group really did lead to the darkest timeline. This was later subverted when it was announced that Yahoo! Screen would produce at least one more season with virtually the same budget as the NBC seasons.
  • Relatedly, a consequence of the darkest timeline being Pierce's death becomes a lot more uncomfortable given not only Chevy Chase's already "eclectic" relationship with the show deteriorating to the point that he would outright quit in Season 4, but that his own character (Pierce) would be killed off less than a season after that in Season 5.
  • Similarly, Troy and Pierce's interactions with each other in Timeline 6 where the former gives the latter a vicious "The Reason You Suck" Speech take a much darker turn once you realize that Donald Glover and Chevy Chase did not get along, namely due to the latter's racist bullying of the former.
• Heartwarming Moments: The real timeline's ending to the party, where everyone (excluding Jeff and Pierce) ends up dancing to the Police's "Roxanne", Abed invites Annie to move in with him and Troy, and Pierce throws his troll doll "gift" out the window (avoiding an ugly confrontation with Troy). Additionally, Jeff (despite being the reason the song never got started in all of the other timelines) looks on at his friends dancing with an amused smile.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: This wouldn't be the last Dan Harmon-related show that would deal heavily in alternative timelines populated by potentially "evil" variants of the main protagonists.
• Memetic Mutation: The moment where an oblivious, smiling Troy comes back to find the apartment has become a flaming warzone in under two minutes. The clip of him cheerily entering the apartment and stopping dead in his tracks as he surveys the pandemonium is frequently used as a GIF in reaction to both fictional and real-world events, usually when a situation has suddenly become very dramatic. It's particularly common on social media like Tumblr and Twitter, where someone can leave their feed for a given period of time (say, to go to sleep) only to return to find that everyone they're following has suddenly gone crazy over something.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • Let's be honest - That troll doll Pierce brought over for Troy was really damn creepy.
  • Abed's attempt at a smile when greeting Annie and Britta, which looks more like barely restrained murderous rage.
  • Even though it's Played for Laughs, some of the events of Timeline 5 (most notably Annie going insane with grief and Pierce dying) are still pretty horrifying in how brutally realistic their consequences are.
• Signature Scene: Present on two levels:
  • From the episode itself, Troy returning to the apartment in Timeline 5 (as previously noted under Memetic Mutation).
  • From the series as a whole, both this episode and Season 1's "Modern Warfare" are often considered to be the signature episodes of Community, and are both generally seen as the best episodes of the entire series.
• Squick: Jeff is very turned off in Timeline 6 when Annie tells him that his protective instinct concerning her reminds her of her father, which he quickly lampshades.

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