COMMUNITY: VCR Maintenance and Educational Publishing

The end of the Save Greendale meeting results in a few interesting developments: Jeff and Hickey’s checks will be late; Rachel, Abed’s girlfriend, got Abed a 1993 VCR game for their anniversary and Annie’s brother is in town. There’s also a storage room that needs cleaning and so we see the group split into two groups for the episode.

Annie’s brother, Anthony, is one weird guy and that raises the question if he or Rachel should move into Abed and Annie’s apartment. The dinner with all four of them is really awkward and soon in order to decide the new roommate, everyone must play the game, Pile of Bullets.

Vince Gilligan is playing the narrator of the game and it confuses everyone in the room as to how to play it. This won’t end well. The game is now a competition between Abed and Annie for that last roommate. Neither Anthony nor Rachel want to move in and Rachel walks out frustrated by the whole game and what it did to Abed.

Anthony lays a really good truth bomb on Annie as he leaves: Troy has left a huge gap in the lives of Abed and Annie. Abed goes to apologize to Rachel and reveals most of his issues and why he wants to rush the relationship.

Clearing the storage unit reveals that there are hundreds of copies of the current Chemistry book and Hickey, Jeff and Shirley are faced with the dilemma on what to do with them. Shirley, for someone who’s very pius, you have a devious idea on how to unload the books. Britta wants to get half the profits from the book sales when presented with the option and then is forced to stay. Change is forced to make a video about why he stole the textbooks and that video is blackmail if he won’t cooperate. Jeff wants out of the project too, but then is roped into staying.

Chang and Jeff, tied up, are planting seeds of doubt in the rest of the group about how to handle the exchange and in the end, Shirley ends up alone with the books and no idea what to do. But that doesn’t matter because the books are misprinted ones and aren’t worth anything.

The tag shows how Gilligan’s character got the job. He probably should have stayed with that job at Apple and the stock options rather than the game. But hindsight is twenty-twenty, don’t we know…