10 Greatest Ever Community "Concept" Episodes
4. Digital Estate Planning
It makes perfect sense to combine the twin pleasures of gaming and Community in an episode that sees Pierce competing against his illegitimate brother (played by Breaking Bad's creepy and awesome Giancarlo Esposito) in a videogame created by their late father to see who is worthy of the Hawthorne fortune.
Weird sentence that.
Anyway, what follows is a bizarre 8-Bit escapade that sees the unusual Abed in his element. He falls in love with a character in the game (after Shirley and Annie unwittingly slaughter her family, of course) and then goes on to raise an army of little Abed babies with her, which he uses to take down the final boss (AKA Pierce's dad) in the most visually strange and literal attack on racism ever seen on a television comedy.
Like any of Community's successful concept episodes, so much of this one's appeal comes from how accurate and genuine it feels in relation to the source. From the retro graphics and the Megadrive era start screen and music, to the Minecraft level of complexity and customization within the videogame (exaggerated here, of course), this episode is another reminder that the people making this show are massive nerds just like us.