This was probably the weakest of this show's three Halloween episodes (but let's face it, topping last year's zombie mania was pretty much never going to happen), however, it was still pretty hilarious. I liked this episode for many of the same reasons I liked last week's installment, "Remedial Chaos Theory." It gave us the group in a bottle-episode situation with a twist, and we got a little bit of insight into each character (and their potential homicidal tendencies) with each scary story.
The premise is straightforward: Britta is throwing a pre-party for Halloween with just the study group so that she can figure out who among them ranked alarmingly high on her psychology survey, indicating that the person in question may be "deeply disturbed" and possess "homicidal tendencies." She naturally decides that the best way to out this person is to trade horror stories, trusting that the most deranged study group member will out themselves in the course of telling their tale. The gang is pretty bummed about missing the school's Halloween dance, but it is probably a blessing in disguise, as the dance is serving taco meat from the Army surplus store (and we all remember what happened last time...).
Britta tells the most generic and dispassionate possible story, and is pronounced "embarrassing" by Abed for being so darn unoriginal. Abed goes next, weaving a very logical, believable tale with textbook screenwriting elements, which concludes with the two protagonists standing back to back in the middle of the room holding knives (which, of course, is the obvious solution to just about every horror movie scenario). Annie goes next, and her largely nauseating story involves Jeff as a vampire who just wants to become literate, and the innocent tutor who turns out to be...a werewolf! Oh, and she also describes murdering the vampire in gruesome, graphic detail. Also, this show's werewolf transformation effects are just plain bonkers.
Troy wants to one-up Annie, and his tale has Pierce as an old, racist doctor who sews Abed and Troy together, also inadvertently granting them the power of telepathic communication, which of course is a pretty happy ending. Pierce follows with the grossest story yet, and one which isn't even scary (which is definitely not the most cringe-worthy thing about it). But Shirley's story takes the cake, primarily because it is so obviously the product of her imagination and no one else's. The gang is doing drugs and engaging in all manner of debauchery, when a radio report reveals that "all the good Christians have been raptured up to heaven" and that "the world is over." They are then visited by angel-Shirley, who smugly forgives them, but insists that she can't save them. I think the most frightening part of this story is that this is almost exactly how Shirley acts in reality.
The debate continues over who is the maniac in the group. Is it Britta? Is it somehow Chang, which Jeff posits in his tale, intended to distract the gang from turning on one another? Is it Jeff himself, who reveals that he filled out the test at random, which likely yielded the singular batch of wacky results? But the answer comes in the form of a kind of Occam's razor solution (the simplest explanation is usually the right one): Britta "britta'ed" the test by feeding them into the reading machine upside down. I have to admit, the coining of this as a term for messing up really does make me feel bad for Britta; she has consistently gotten the short end of the character stick for a while now, and I'd like to see that change.
With story time now over and the gang having thoroughly abused Britta for her failures as a "practitioner of the mental arts," we get the biggest twist of all, and one that is at the same time wholly unsurprising: the tests actually yielded only one set of normal results. Which means the gang, as we all know more than well by now, is chock full of lovable, yet sometimes worrying, crazy. So all in all, a charming and feel-good Halloween episode.
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