Warning: This article contains storyline and character spoilers from this week’s episode of Community.

Even when Community reveals its romantic, gushy center, the show still maintains the caustic bite for which its known. Out of context, Garrett (Erik Charles Nielsen) screeching, “Stacy, will you be my legally incestuous wife?” is revolting, but it’s also one of the most heartfelt and beautiful lines of the entire season — a juxtaposition that few other shows could manage.

We talked with Community creator Dan Harmon about how much his wedding to real-life wife Erin McGathy (who plays Garrett’s on-screen wife, Stacy) influenced the episode, as well as the evolution of Frankie, the most flattering on-screen experience Harmon’s ever had, and the changing group dynamic that could spell the end of the series.

So we find out about Frankie being called a “cold, off-putting, incompatible person” this episode, and we almost hear more about one of her sisters. Is there a bible on Frankie’s character somewhere, or are you filling in her back story as you go?

There’s a lot of conversation we have at the beginning of the season; we never consider it locked. But, because we get busy, there’s a good chance that most of the conversation we had at the beginning of the season, there are decisions that don’t get made. We decided that Frankie would be an unprecedentedly professional and qualified person — given Greendale’s environment — and that she had to have a reason to be there. We didn’t want it to be because she had fallen from grace or screwed up her life somehow.

So why would an incredibly untapped, organized, problem-solving person be at Greendale? And we decided the answer was probably about her capacity for solving problems being part of her personal life as well: She was in Greendale because it was a reasonable job for her to have while she took care of a member of her family. She mentions that as early as the first episode, that she’s there to take care of somebody. I have a sister who’s developmentally disabled and that just seemed like the natural thing to draw upon — the idea that Frankie had a sister that she was taking care of. But we also learned in the email episode that she has a sister she writes to who is dead.

I always imagined, early on, that Frankie belongs to a very remarkable family that’s also incredibly unstable. Sort of the same way that Marilyn Munster was the ugly one because she was beautiful — Frankie is the hero of her family because she’s sane. That usually doesn’t get you a lot of ribbons, but if you grew up in the Hemingway family or something where the life expectancy was literally affected by the genius and imbalance of the rest of family — if there’s a person in that family who’s talent is for being predictable and solving problems, I imagine that person would be looked at as a superhero by the crazy people around them. That’s how she’s always lived her life. And she enjoys the company of the screwed-up. She doesn’t say, “Ew, that’s gross; I want to get away from that so I can be happy.” She doesn’t blink when she’s faced with craziness; she enjoys cleaning it up and helping it.

So that was the conversation that we had about Frankie when we were creating the character. The specifics always come in the form of someone’s joke or just some off-handed dialogue. And then we pay attention to each word that’s been said because we know it’s now entered canon and we’re automatically keeping track of that stuff. So all we do is we just don’t contradict anything that’s been previously said and over the season organically this biography is born.

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