Community: “Mixology Certifiction” (2.10)

Throughout all the strange places and odd plots we’ve seen the Community study group get into during the past season and a half, they’ve somehow managed to almost completely avoid alcohol. While this makes a bit of sense, given that several characters on the show weren’t of age, it also means that it’s missed a pretty fundamental part of the whole college experience, community or otherwise. But network television tends to be pretty strange and frequently kinda awful in its representations of drinking, so this hasn’t necessarily been a bad thing—better no drinking at all and have disbelief suspended than give us heavy-handed moralizing.
On the occasion of Troy’s twenty-first birthday (there’s a little bit of ret-conning involved here but Community’s a flexible enough show that it’s not particularly bothersome), the gang decides to head to a bar for celebration. In essence, that’s the plot of the episode, which is arguably directionless in its own right. Much like a real night of friends heading out, you head to the bar, have drinks, and, more often than not, head home with a vague sense of disappointment. Most episodes of Community, in fact, revolve around extremely recognizable plot types, given Dan Harmon’s love for genre send-ups, whereas here we just kind of walk through a night with no recognizable purpose.
Looking a bit closer, though, there’s a mini-plot for every character, even if they may not be as well-integrated with each other as usual. There’s Jeff and Britta arguing about what the best bar in town is while sublimating a certain amount of sexual tension, there’s Abed being hit on by a guy in order to talk with him about Farscape, there’s Pierce stuck in the bar’s entrance, and there’s Shirley scavenging around the place in search of the impressively voluminous photos of her drinking posted around the bar. These are all brief and at least somewhat interesting in and of themselves, though only Shirley’s has any real consequences, as we learn that she used to visit that bar a lot, and perhaps still does. There’s not enough of this plot thread to really say what will occur, but between this and her possible child it feels like there’s a big episode for Shirley coming up soon.