David Fincher
Season 5 Episode “Basic Intergluteal Numismatics”
Season five showed Dan Harmon’s importance to the show as a highly conceptual episode changed the show’s look and tone to fit the focused parody of David Fincher’s oeuvre. The episode opens with a cold, rainy Greendale and Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown)’s children singing Radiohead’s Creep like Scala’s cover, famously used in The Social Network’s trailer, and then we see the story of the ‘Ass Crack Bandit’, a person in the school who drops quarters down the cracks of students when they are vulnerable.
Seven and Zodiac are key influences to this episode, the murder investigation angle, dark chases and discoveries, a non-ending ending that nails what Zodiac did so well. Not that it stops the trailers for Gone Girl looking anything less than stellar, but a perfect parody can also bolster up the target rather than take it down. A loving homage through and through.
