Nightmare Fuel / Community

Given that Community is an extremely Troperiffic show, moments like these were bound to come up.

• "Epidemiology":
  • The fact that the events in this episode turned out to be real is extremely messed up in general, as any viewer would have expected it to be a case of All Just a Dream or some form of Loose Canon. Aside from the horror of a real-life Zombie Apocalypse, this means nearly the entire school had an extremely high chance of dying from brain hemorrhage.
  • The "taco meat" was on sale at a military surplus store. Anyone could have bought it.
  • The Men in Black were going to nuke Greendale if all the zombies weren't contained.
• The scene when Chang begins talking to himself, a la Gollum. It doesn't help that he was meant to be talking to the twin sister he ate in utero, and that she would eventually appear "in the flesh".
• "Basic Rocket Science" when Pierce imagines that the Colonel Sanders A.I. was talking to him.
  Sanders A.I.: My readings indicate Pierce! He's going to die alone!
  Pierce: Why is he saying that?! Stop it!
  Sanders A.I.: I won't stop because Troy is giving me life force!
  Pierce: I KNEW IT! I KNEW IT! (gets up and starts throttling Troy)
• All of Abed's breakdowns:
  • "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas" had Abed see everything as stop-motion because he was in denial his mother wasn't going to visit him because she started a new family. When Duncan gives him irrefutable proof, he goes catatonic!
  • "Virtual Systems Analysis" has Annie mess with the Dreamatorium's engine in an attempt to make Abed consider other people's feelings before he acts like a Control Freak. Abed flips out and drags Annie into "Hospital Administration", forcing her to find the real him. When she does, he's chained up in a metaphorical locker. Why?
  Abed: This is where I spent most of my time in junior high. This is where people like me get put when others get fed up with us.
  • "Introduction To Finality" might have one. See below.
  • "History 101" introduced us to Abed's Happy Place: "Abed's Happy Community College Show", where everything is a typical sitcom that runs on Status Quo Is God and everyone is Flanderized into one-off jokes. Abed goes into it to cope with the changes going on in the real world, slowly becoming catatonic. But when those changes start causing changes in his happy place, the happy place Abed goes into his happy place: Greendale Babies. It's as terrifying as it sounds.
  Baby Abed: Greendale Babies will be back! Forever!
  • "Geothermal Escapism" might be the worst of the bunch, since Abed is actually aware he's having a breakdown. Troy's about to be Put on a Bus, so Abed celebrates by spearheading a campus-wide game of "The Floor is Lava". Why this particular game? He's actually seeing lava, and he wanted everyone to see it too.
    • The fact Abed has had this many breakdowns is Nightmare Fuel alone.
• "GI Jeff" is another medium switch, with the study group transplanted into a G.I. Joe cartoon. But though Abed's present in the cartoon, and knows that something's up, it's not his breakdown this time. Jeff keeps getting flashes of reality, including the show glitching out to a toy commercial that insists nothing is wrong. Once the group makes it to Greendale, and Jeff makes it to his office, he finds a drained bottle of scotch, empty bottles of pills, and a letter left there from Pierce...
  Hey, Jeff! Welcome to the club!
  • Cobra Commander dies trying to get out, getting stripped down to the bone before Jeff reaches the commercial.
• A Freeze-Frame Bonus in Season 5 informs us that Troy and Levar Burton were captured by pirates.
• Episodes like "Cooperative Calligraphy", show just how quickly the study group can turn on each other, even if Played for Laughs.
• "Remedial Chaos Theory":
  • The Norwegian Troll doll.
  • Abed's attempt at a smile.◊
  • The Darkest Timeline. Troy knocking over the boulder on Abed's Indiana Jones model resulted in Disaster Dominoes that ended with Pierce dead from accidentally getting shot in the femoral artery, Annie going mad from guilt, Shirley jumping Off the Wagon, Jeff losing an arm, Troy getting electro-larynx after trying to swallow the aforementioned troll, Abed convinced they should go to the Prime Timeline and take over, and Britta dyeing a strand of her hair blue.
• "Introduction To Finality" gives us two options:
  • Evil Abed was able to cross dimensions and take over regular Abed when the latter was on the verge of a break down over Troy leaving for Air Conditioning Repair School. His plans have changed from "kill and replace the 'Lame' Timeline" to "make the 'Lame' Timeline just like the Dark one". He gives Britta a Breaking Speech (she ends up wanting to dye her hair) and almost cut Jeff's arm off (the cord was too short, and by the time he got an extension Jeff gave a Rousing Speech that allowed Good Abed to take back control). Fridge Horror gives way when you realize what would happen if he found Pierce, Annie, Shirley, or Troy.
  • Or, Abed did have a break down, and took the guise of Evil Abed. Meaning our Abed broke Britta, tried to dismember Jeff, and almost did worse to the rest of the study group.
• "The First Chang Dynasty" showed us what would happen if Chang had all the power he wanted. He kidnapped the Dean and tried to kill the study group, and in the process, almost burned down all of Greendale and everybody in it.
• "Introduction To Film" gives us a peek at Abed's childhood. He had a lot of testing involving needles and brain scans done.
  • In "Curriculum Unavailable", it's mentioned that Abed refuses to be alone with doctors as an adult and has even gone so far as to attempt Self-Surgery (removing his own tonsils) in order to avoid them. This suggests that whatever tests he went through as a child were extremely traumatic.
• Vinnie threatening to break Abed's legs if the gang screw up in "Celebrity Impressionists". Especially since it comes out of nowhere.
  Vinnie: If you guys mess this up, then his debt is overdue. And I don't send another bill. No, I send two guys that look a lot like Ving Rhames and Michael Chiklis, and they do a very convincing impression of breaking your friend's legs. The secret? They actually break them!
• Paranormal Parentage shows that it is possible for someone to secretly live for weeks in Pierce's mansion (even watching Pierce when he sleeps) without him noticing (granted mainly because Pierce apparently doesn't bother looking at the security recordings). The why and how of it turns out to be a combination tearjerker/heartwarming thing (it was Gilbert, Pierce's half-brother, who went to give Pierce the deed to the house and ended up taking care of things in the background like he had done for Cornelius for years because he felt lost without doing it), but with how easy it was, what if someone less well-intentioned had done it?
• John Goodman manages to make the dean of an air conditioning school terrifying at times.
• Jeff's subplot of Biology 101, when his attempts to exclude Pierce end up with him being excluded, and slowly becoming more Pierce-like, culminating in him attacking the study table with an ax.
• Pierce in "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons" repeatedly mocking, belittling, and attacking Neil. He knowingly and relentlessly pushed a suicidal person closer to the edge out of sheer pettiness at not being invited to something. In any real life circumstance he would have been kicked from the group without remorse.

  Pierce: I cast "Shapeshift" on Ducane.
  Abed: What shape do you choose?
  Pierce: FAAAAT!
  Abed: How much?
  Pierce: Make him as fat as Fat Neil!

• One would expect a lot of this out of "Horror Fiction In Seven Spooky Steps" since the whole point of the episode is Britta having the study group tell ghost stories to find out which one is a murderous psycho (especially since they all are with the exceptions of Abed and possibly Jeff), but only two stand out:
  • Annie's story is about her trying to befriend a vampire Jeff who gives into his urges and attacks her, only to find out "Annie" is really a werewolf. This wouldn't be particularly bad apart from vampire Jeff having some dialogue that wouldn't be out of place coming from a domestic abuser, but Annie's description of her werewolf character tearing him apart is extremely graphic.
  • Shirley's story has caricatures of the study group being left on Earth after the Rapture, with a Deanmon going into graphic details about the torture he's going to inflict on them (including Pilates, a demon that eats your genitals) until he's temporarily banished by Shirley's character, who forgives her friends for bullying her when she was alive but doesn't take them to heaven with her...meaning they're all but screwed when the Deanmon comes back with a chainsaw.
• In Digital Estate Planning, while Annie and Shirley end up killing the blacksmith and his wife while in Hilda’s village, it’s apparent thorough a bump in the blacksmiths wife’s stomach that she was very likely pregnant when she was killed by Shirley in-game, meaning both her and the future baby were killed- definitely a darker implication within the episode!