“What I do know is that the way our paths crossed, even when they were bad, all led us to this point, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
One of the unique aspects of the group of friends on Community compared to other shows is that the Greendale Seven did not just come together by circumstance. They’re not related, they’re not colleagues, and they’re not in a band together. True, they are classmates, but they probably would have remained nothing more if one of them hadn’t been putting together an homage to one of his favorite movies. When Abed turned Jeff’s scheme of passing himself off as a Spanish tutor to Britta into his own Breakfast Club-style band of misfits, he was ignoring his past friendless years and taking control of his own destiny. What others would have considered a pointless tribute has led to the most meaningful relationship of his, and all of their lives.
So to say that the study group was destined to be together, as “Heroic Origins” does, seems to take away from the credit that should go to Abed. It is often fun when our favorite shows present glimpses of our favorite character’s pasts. With Community, a show whose characters have been so decidedly shaped by their past traumas, it is both fun and unusually meaningful. But it is not so meaningful as to suggest that their friendship was inevitable. But, inevitability is not the same as destiny.
Abed did not set out to prove his “destined to meet” theory right from the start. Like discovering the receipt from the Love Hut in Shirley’s sock drawer, it was just a happy coincidence that so many of the tidbits he uncovered happened to be connected. Since he has a robotic memory and he sees life as a movie and/or TV show, he could not help but interpret his findings as the makings of a superhero origin story. As for the matter of this story being one of destiny, a useful comparison is Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, who posited that the meaning of one’s life cannot really be known until one has started living. Put another way, meaning comes from within, not without. With that outlook in mind, Abed is right to say that the group was destined to be. Taking stock of the community they have created and how it has changed their lives for the better, it is right to call it their destiny because it is what it is. That does not take away from Abed’s doings in the pilot – he created his own destiny, and in so doing gave the whole group the chance to create this destiny with each other.
The actual moments of the study group’s past interactions may have struck some as too coincidental, but life is coincidental. Besides, Greendale may be a small enough town that it is logically possible that their paths would cross. And they must have had some motivation in common that led them all to Greendale. The fact that the Dean and Chang were handing out Greendale fliers at the mall lent some explanation to everyone being at the fro-yo place the same day. Their actual interactions with each other did not ensure that they would meet again, just as surely as random interactions they had with other people did not ensure that they wouldn’t meet those people again. Despite that lack of ensurance, they did meet each other (but not those other people) again. Thus, Troy was given the chance to make up for never noticing geeky Annie (who proved that it’s impossible to uglify Alison Brie), Jeff was given the chance to make up for carelessly defending the stripper who went on to break up Shirley’s marriage, Abed was given the chance to make up for freaking out Shirley’s kids and ratting out Annie, etc. They did not need to make any grand gesture to rectify these issues in this episode – they had already done so by being good friends.
As for the Chang resolution, it was not surprising. City College Dean Spreck was on the other end of the phone, of course. And Chang’s ultimate decision to go Greendale, though heartwarming, also was not surprising. But Ken Jeong and Danny Pudi played it beautifully. Abed’s incredibly straight-faced insistence that “only you know who you really are” was exactly what Chang needed to hear and a great statement of where Community itself is at this point. Our destiny is what we are doing now, and whatever we do from here on out. A-
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