The Office recap: Bittersweet Moments

Buncha meanies! No, not you, the writers ofThe Office. Staging a Hot or Not debate about a somewhat androgynous actress who has trouble picking roles? Mean. Crushing a sweet little family business so that your boss can eat what you kill? Mean. Snaking 500 feet of red wire through your office, driving your co-worker up a telephone pole? Mean, but funny. (It’s no Future Dwight, but funny.) This was an unkind little episode, folks, so much so that even Jim was mean — no, to someone besides Dwight. Are we all doing the slow nod of recognition? Thought so.

Ooh, before we go on, I should read the announcements: Your regular recapper, the divine Ms. Whitney Pastorek, will be done screening movies at Sundance and back to watching TV with you next week. Your sub is fading back into the recesses of EW‘s L.A. office, returning to furtively peeking out only when someone buys cupcakes — and not a moment too soon, because she’s wicked sick with a head cold that makes her feel like Phil Leotardo and sound like Froggy from Our Gang. But she’s had a lovely time, and hopes you did too.

Back to Mikey Mike and the Funky Bunch. It wasn’t the best episode, by any means, but there were moments we can clench in our chubby little fists — like that gem of an opening with Dwight discovering that nefarious red wire. Anybody else spend too much time in their heads wondering how early Jim would have to come in to set up those gags? Which means he must have a secret key, right? Or he bribes that grumpy dude in security. And how much time does he spend at home conjuring up plans? Does he keep them in a special notebook? How much money has he spent pursuing them? It was only $20 this week, but add it all up: It’s like when Carrie Bradshaw realized she’d spent her condo down payment on shoes — only Jim hasn’t had the epiphany. Then again, torturing Dwight has to be cheaper than a therapist, so…moving on.

Before we can debate, though, we have to vote: Hillary Swank plotline, hot or not? (Abstain if you want to, Angela. “Nobody cares.”) I vote “not.” It isn’t the mean thing I’m opposed to; I just didn’t think it was all that funny. Sure, Kevin had a couple of good lines, first declaring, “A painting can be beautiful. But I don’t wanna bang a painting.” Then he shut down Jim’s sweet little daydream about Hillary somehow discovering Kevin’s profile on the Webz and making her way to Scranton to find this cuddlebug who works at a paper company. “It’s: Is she hot? Not: Would you do her? Respect the game.” (And somebody holla, because those two assertions seem directly contradictory. Either she’s hot ’cause you wanna “bang” her, or she isn’t. Pick one.) But the overall concept didn’t seem particularly inspired, even if it did give Pam an excuse to throw this out there: “Ladies, are we prepared to let the Kevins of the world decide anything for us? Anything at all? We don’t even give him full internet access.” That might be the line of the night, though it has competition.

NEXT: Michael makes a play for the crown

Meanwhile, Michael and Dwight prepared to dig dirt on the Prince Family paper company, a small mom-pop-and-kids operation headed by a man with an impressive client list and dizzying naivete. First the plan: Michael proposed going in posing as a prospective client, while Dwight pretends to look for a job, then they separate and meet up at the IHOP. Only that little proposition, of course, led to one of the great Coke/Pepsi, Target/Wal-Mart, Roper/Furley debates, because as Dwight will tell you, IHOP is “socialist,” but as Michael can attest, it has better pancakes. (Me? I’m all about Waffle House, because I occasionally indulge in a pecan waffle and/or hash browns scattered, smothered, covered, slapped, pelted, and pushed on a swing. But you just can’t do that every day.) The winner, of course, was Michael, being the bigger shark who eats the smaller shark, who then eats the single-celled shark. (Methinks someone doesn’t understand the food chain. Or biology.)

Michael tried to play it cool, he did. But he bumbled and stumbled his way into somehow getting the nice man to give up his client list. Dwight, on the other hand, busted in and demanded a job. The other contender for line of the night? Telling Mr. Prince he could can his son because, “I’m your son now. You can visit him on holidays.” (And why does that sound like something you’d hear in the prison shower?) Somehow Inspectors Gadget and Clouseau managed to get out of Prince Paper without screwing it up utterly…just not out of the parking lot. Okay, to be fair, once you drive over one of those concrete divider thingies you don’t have much choice but to drive back over them. But after steering his car into a lake awhile ago, maybe a driver’s license is something Michael shouldn’t have. You can’t blame the talking GPS lady for everything.

While Toby voted down Swank (et tu, HR rep?), Oscar busted out the calipers to measure whether her nose is a fraction of a millimeter thick, and Stanley magically strung together more than seven nice words in a row, Michael had a dilemma: Make a play for the throne by killing the Prince, or let the nice old man who fixed his car live to sell another ream of bright white recycled bond. Michael, as we have learned, has a conscience. Oh, Dwight tried to lay it out for his branch manager, dragging the One Ring to Rule Them All into the equation, then asking, “Have you ever seen a lioness devour her cub? Have you ever seen a baboon devour its mate? Have you ever seen a raccoon devour a squirrel?” (Seriously, does no one understand the food chain?) But Mike wasn’t feeling it and ran away with the client list, leaving Dwight in hot pursuit. Or, lukewarm pursuit, really, because neither of them runs particularly fast.

Personally, I love it when Michael makes moral decisions. Again, like the Swank debate, it’s not about whether it’s good or bad, but how it plays out. When Michael does the right thing occasionally — only occasionally — it keeps The Office from devolving into a cartoon. Anything you can do to make people more three-dimensional, I support. Too many of the Officemates get stuck in shallow waters, which is why it’s nice to see Stanley go zen, Michael fight for the little guy, and the mighty metamorphosis that is Phyllis. But I digress.

In the end, Michael realized that he’s not a shark — well, maybe the single-celled type — but Dwight followed his own advice (“Save your heart for love and your brain for business”) and did the dirty for him. That, naturally, made your supercrush David Wallace very happy, and I’m sure had him wondering how it is that Michael keeps managing not to screw up lately. That last scene, where Michael squelched the debate with a vote for Hillary, it kept him on the side of the angels. (Or the agents — you know how this town is.)

What do you think? Was this episode all it could’ve been? Is there any justification for bittersweet chocolate? Is Hillary Swank a “female Boris Becker?” Should we even be engaging in that particular contretemps? And most important: IHOP, Denny’s, or Waffle House? Speak your mind.