The story of how Adam, Blake, and Anders met during college is a perfectly natural place for Workaholics to go. The humor is already steeped in a sophomoric attitude, and the guys are basically stuck in a state of arrested development, so going back to a college setting is perfectly in line with the show’s attitude. But a lot of what I find funny about the show is the way in which all the guys’ antics fly in the face of whatever location they’re in at the time. Workaholics is about how these three maladjusted buffoons navigate a world they just don’t fit into at all, be it the workplace, a courtroom, or a funeral. So “Flashback In The Day” works, but that’s because it has a lot of really funny bits, and not because of the premise, which puts the characters in an environment where their normally delightfully incongruous refusal to act within societal norms make more sense.
In the dormitory halls of Rancho Cucamonga Polytechnic, Blake has a full-on afro when he shows up with his unsanctioned microwave, and walks into his room to find Adam (with another douchetacular hairstyle) masturbating with Vanessa Carlton’s “1000 Miles” as a soundtrack. So Adam is basically just as raunchy as he is now, but with an added 16-year-old religious girlfriend from his hometown—but not so religious that Adam can’t talk about fingerbanging all the time with her around. Blake is a little more demure, not yet into drugs, and focused on his calling as an actor—which earns some laughs simply because of how convincingly terrible Blake Anderson is when trying to conjure up tears. He wants to impress the director of a college production of Les Misérables, and his hand-wringing nervousness is kind of endearing. Thanks to other theater kids, he knows where to look for drugs—Karl, who shows up with a nod to Good Will Hunting—but isn’t yet ready to take the plunge himself.
The most different of the guys is Anders, who’s still in full-on scholarship-swimmer mode as the buzz-kill RA who confiscates Blake’s microwave and shuts down a very tame party featuring Blake’s excruciating attempt at a Napoleon Dynamite impersonation. He’s just perpetuating a cycle of bullying, since another jock from the swim team bosses him around and sends him to change lane lines at the pool late at night. Blake and Adam decide to liberate Anders from the swim team by pouring so much chlorine in the pool that it gives the swimmers chemical burns, leading to Anders getting kicked off the team and losing his scholarship. So they go from being nemeses to drinking buddies, and their first ever guys-only drunkfest gives birth to the idea that they throw a raging party with all of the alcohol Anders has confiscated, and use the profits from a cover charge to keep him in school.
The party is the moment that bonds the trio together as friends, even as they separate into their own mini-plots. Karl gives Blake the drugs he needs to calm down before his planned dramatic audition for the snobby theater director, but he ends up high and carefree enough to not give a shit about the stuffy beatnik in a turtleneck. Adam moronically proposes to his girlfriend so he can have sex, but she sticks to her faith and dumps him. While he’s proclaiming his hatred for love, another random, small-town girl walks up to him, and minutes later they’re going at it on the 10-meter high-dive platform. Anders has enough money for a semester of school, but the swim team shows up again and the captain tries to steal the profits.