@rosehips Yeah, in a series like Community, where so much of the script is not based in reality, I tend to take things like the flashback scenes in that episode as not actually having happened. What I mean is… you have the timeline for the plot of the show, and certain things happened within that timeline, but the flashbacks are a sort of “what if” oneupmanship, that takes the current joke to a ridiculous extreme. The same kind of thing is done on Family Guy, for example. To a certain extent, it’s not useful in a show like Community to try to say definitively “this happened” or “this didn’t happen”, even if we saw it acted out.
And then, there’s also the possibility that all of the contradictions (the guy making racist comments plus no one having noticed it at the time) are part of a delicately folded reality, in which everything did happen, and all of it is relevant to everything that comes after. And in the context of your timeline comment… that’s probably even more true than what I said before. :P