It’s official! The latest piece of mainstream culture to be more Jewish than you expected is Arrow, the TV show about the DC-comics superhero Green Arrow.

There’s no point getting into the nitty-gritty of the plot, but suffice to say, on last night’s episode, characters on the show need to hack alien technology. Ultimately, they are faced with a screen that looks like the matrix, or a screensaver from Windows about ten years ago. One character immediately identifies it as gematria.

Or, rather, he says it heavily accented and exotic sounding, elongating the first syllable and almost rolling the R, a bit like “Gay-matrrria.” Strike one.

“Gematria is the numerology—” he begins, “of the Torah,” another character finishes for him. That would be strike two. It’s from Jewish tradition, certainly, and is often applied to the Torah, but it post-dates the Bible, and is more readily associated with kabbalah.

“For the gentiles and those of us that actually had social lives in high school, what the hell are you talking about?,” Asks a third character. If we’re running with the baseball metaphor (heaven help us), that would be a foul ball, staying on strike two. It’s cute that non-Jewish nerdy teens would be reading up on this sort of stuff, but that seems rather unlikely.

The explanation:

“In Hebrew each letter possesses a numerical value. Gematria” (Gay-matrrria!) “is the calculation of the numerical equivalence of letters words or phrases.”

That’s… actually a pretty apt description for it, yes! Though strike three comes from the lack of explanation of how exactly this translates to a coding language. Something, something, letters become numbers, something something, it makes alien tech go.

One character does point out the obvious— that it’s rather strange that aliens would be using something connected to the “Old Testament” (ugh, that phrase). But perhaps, someone else observes, this lends credence to the theory that a divine presence guides the entire universe.

Sure.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that one of the episode’s writers, Marc Guggenheim, is Jewish. Guggenheim is one of the creators of the show, which may explain details like an underground facility being called “Tevat Noah” to make it sound fancy, or the character of Ragman.

See, Ragman deserves special mention— while he is not as overtly Jewish in the TV show as his comic book counterpart usually is (you know, retcons), he does wear “Devarim rags,” that grant him his powers, so called because they hail from “the ancient time of Devarim.”

So… is the era of Devarim post-Exodus, when that book of the Torah takes place? Or would it refer to the reign of King Josiah in the 7th century BCE, when the book of Dvarim was introduced to the people of Judea (and written, according to some scholars)?

Well, it’s easy (and fun) to tease, but kudos to a modern comic book property for actually having a tie, however strange, to its roots. Green Arrow’s original creator Mort Weisinger was, like almost all comic history greats, a Member of the Tribe. DC continues to trounce Marvel in this department, if in not very many.

Then again, they managed to have a conversation about Jewish tradition without actually using the word Jewish. What’s with the shyness, if you can say the words Torah, gentiles, and Gay-matrrrria? Maybe it sounds more ancient and sci-fi to around the tradition from which you’re borrowing.

That’s OK; you can invoke it next time you have alien technology to hack.

Image via Flickr.

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And as Community itself has gotten both progressively weirder and less easily classifiable, Annie, in turn, has begun to shed her Flickian skin. Season 1’s Annie was an academically focused but emotionally fragile innocent who proudly proclaimed that she was “totally comfortable being uncomfortable with [her] sexuality.” (Her only sexual encounter hadn’t exactly been worth writing home about: “I had relations with my high school boyfriend,” she told fellow Community members Shirley and Britta. “We did it to Madonna’s Erotica on the floor of his walk-in closet … He’s gay now.” Incidentally, this incident recalls one from Brie’s own past.)

Two years later, Annie hasn’t exactly learned to cut loose—but she has morphed into an infinitely more complicated character. The Annie we know today is still an ambitious, rule-abiding gunner who records all her classes to facilitate easier note taking. She’s also still more comfortable playing yenta with the members of her study group than taking charge of her own romantic destiny. But at the same time, Annie’s proven she has a wild streak that enables her to transform into, say, a badass, paintball gun-toting action heroine if need be. Season 1 Annie would have confessed immediately if she had broken her roommate’s priceless Dark Knight DVD; Season 3 Annie elects instead to stage an elaborate fake robbery, claiming that a mysterious stranger nabbed the DVD in question.

And though Annie still retains an aura of erotic inexperience, she’s somehow become Community’s most overtly sexualized character as well. See, for example, “Teach Me How to Understand Christmas,” an absurd and dirty number Annie performs in Season 3’s musical holiday episode. The thin premise is that Annie doesn’t get how to celebrate the season because she’s a Member of the Tribe. Though the song is obviously meant as a send-up of bawdy carols like “Santa Baby,” parodic suggestiveness is still suggestiveness; Annie performs the tune in a barely-there Santa costume that puts the “ho” in “ho ho ho.” By its conclusion, she’s straddling arrogant ex-lawyer Jeff and cooing, “Boopie doopie doop boop, sex!” (That’s literally the last line in “Teach Me.”)

Annie’s evolution is likely the result of the show’s scripts mining the discrepancies between Brie herself—the sexually liberated, worldly actress in her late 20s—and the character she plays. But there’s also an in-universe explanation for her development. It all comes back to Annie’s own fractured childhood: While she identifies as Jewish throughout Community’s run, in Season 2 she reveals that her dad—like Brie’s own—is actually a Christian. Before her parents got divorced, she explains, the holidays at her house were always “a minefield of overlapping rituals.” Annie reacted to the chaos of her broken home by prizing order above all other virtues—a choice that eventually led to an Adderall addiction, which is what landed her in community college in the first place.

But prolonged exposure to the nuttiness exuded by the rest of Community’s cast has thwarted Annie’s best efforts to stay disciplined. Now, with every episode that passes, she’s becoming more like them: unhinged and unpredictable. And as Annie moves away from personifying the archetypal brittle overachiever, she just gets more interesting. This shift means that as the show moves forward—hopefully all the way to a fourth season—we may be less likely to, say, see Annie bristle when her friends call her a Jew rather than Jewish (“Say the whole word!” she urges in Season 1’s “Comparative Religion”). Ultimately, though, it’s a positive sign of growth—even if in this case, growing up means growing progressively more unglued.

Last week on Network Jews: Schmidt from New Girl

Hillary Busis writes for EW.com and tweets here

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