"I wrote it on my hand, but then I washed it."
The Office 5.20 - "Dream Team"
Some of Michael's best (best = least cringeworthy, even genuinely touching) moments in this show are with Pam. (Although, now that I think about it, some of his most cringeworthy moments are also with Pam. Hm....) This episode is bookended by two scenes that explain their dynamic so wonderfully: Pam pep-talking Michael through his despair and panic at the beginning of the day, getting him started on a list of small, achievable steps; Michael doing the same for Pam at the end of the day, when she can't even face getting out of the car. When one of them is freaking out, it makes the other one calmer; they can get each other through this. And I love that Michael admits he does his best work when people don't believe in him, and that his anecdotes totally do not support that theory at all, but that we've seen it for ourselves before on the show, like when he made the big sale in the face of Jan's rolling eyes in "The Client."
That's why it was especially sad that the "local investor"--the one thing Michael had done that day, the thing that had impressed Pam so much--was actually his nana and her investment club. And even sadder that nana was a really tough interview.
Michael is, above all, consistent and loyal. He remembered Vikram as a good salesman (and Vikram was also sane and sensible enough to flee the scene the minute he realized Michael was hitting up his grandmother for startup funds). And he recruits Ryan, despite Pam's (and my!) understandable horror and resistance. And Ryan, in return, is a complete and total asshole. Here he is, getting a second second chance to do something other than rent shoes at a bowling alley, and he immediately reverts to his former entitlement. Shut up, Ryan!
And finally, I sort of love Charles Minor for being the anti-Michael, for giving Stanley the stink-eye for doing crosswords in meetings, for somehow bringing out the worst and most awkward in Jim, the show's golden boy. And I also love how happy that makes Dwight. Those things are both signs of how off-kilter the office is in Michael's absence, but they're interesting to see.
But... Isn't the free office space Michael scrounged up the storage room where Dwight and Angela used to sneak away to have forbidden sex?!?
The Office 5.21 - "The Michael Scott Paper Company"
Dear NBC Promo Guy, I hate you so very much for making official use of the "Jam" portmanteau. STOP IT.
I spent a great deal of this episode wanting to punch Ryan. What Pam's doing right now--trying for a better position, tying her fate to Michael Scott, for crying out loud--is so brave and scary, and Ryan, who has done nothing but be a jerk, text his friends, and look at porn on the office laptop, uses all his fratty wiles to establish dominance over her in the office hierarchy, to climb over her, to shove her back down in that administrative service role. I suspect his behavior is something that will ping particularly hard for women, because it's a particularly blatant form of a recognizable pattern. And of course Michael's going to let them sort it out on their own, because he just wants his copies, and because he's got a peculiar and gaping blind spot when it comes to Ryan's many faults. Watching Pam go to Charles Minor to ask for her job back, and finding out she'd already been replaced, was heartbreaking. The only thing that even marginally redeemed Michael and Ryan is the way they gathered around Pam to coach her on her first sale at the end.
And it's a sale made in the face of some real obstacles--the grim little closet with the flushing toilet noises, the poker table from "Casino Night," the single laptop, the lack of real business cards and Michael's giant, paper-shaped pancakes. It's lovely to see her triumph.
Michael has a lot of blind spots, and Jim has made a very comfortable and unchallenging career out of exploiting them, so it continues to be incredibly interesting to me to see the way he can do no right with Charles Minor. Every word, every action, comes out wrong, makes him look wrong. If he tries, it ends in disaster; if he doesn't try, it works out about the same. I think that, outside of his romance with Pam, this is the first time we've seen him be this helpless and out of his depths and, quite frankly, humbled.
I love this strange friendship that's growing between Andy and Dwight, which started from their mutual heartbreak and is flourishing on the strength of their weirdness. When they were talking about their upcoming hunting trip, all I could do is marvel at how times have changed, because Dwight's plans did not include shooting Andy and hiding his body in the woods; after they both started flirting with Receptionist Kelly, I was not sure he wouldn't end up doing that. Fortunately, they're both competitive enough, and intense enough, to scare Receptionist Kelly off; her shy delight at their duelling banjo and guitar turns quickly to horror, but by that time, they've forgotten she's there, because they've started jamming together. (And then Toby has to make them stop, because that is what he's there for; he's a professional wet blanket. Oh Toby. Hee.)
The Office 5.22 - "Heavy Competition"
It's not like Dwight hasn't gone after Michael before, but each time he does, it's a surprise. Dwight's loyalty is only superseded by his ambition, and by the pathetically small amount of attention it takes from Charles Minor to turn his head. The worst part of it is that Michael never saw the setup coming, because his relationship with Dwight as his inside source at Dunder Mifflin was, to him, an extension of their friendship. (In fact, I think he made a mistake by offering Dwight six crumpled dollars for his trouble--it made their arrangement a commercial transaction, and might have made it easier for Dwight to turn on him.) Michael's first reaction, when Dwight tries to tell him a hypothetical about what happened, was that somethng terrible had happened to Mose--that Dwight hadn't put the cover on the well. Which, on top of being hilariously weird and random, show how involved Michael is with Dwight's life, that he's been listening when Dwight has talked about problems on the farm.
So watching the two of them go after each other is particularly distressing, because Dwight is so thorough and mean-spirited about it (the setup by the dumpster, the bad meatball sandwich), and because Michael somehow ends up coming out of the whole thing looking like a rational, professional adult. That is just WRONG. It's so fitting that Dwight gets hoist by his own thieving petard, that he can steal Michael's information but he can't understand it, that he doesn't have the key: 90% of the color-codes on the personal client details in Michael's rolodex are meant to tell Michael to keep his big fat mouth shut. (And that was all Pam's doing, over the years! Oh Pam.)
Some really random things I liked about this episode:
The Office 5.23 - "Broke"
I was wondering how long it could last. The Michael Scott Paper Company staff delivers its own paper in a used Korean church van, and Ryan, who spent so much time lording it over Michael that he went to business school, messed up their cost model, and none of it is scalable. It's Michael's dream, and like most of his dreams, a it's a poorly thought-out house of cards that's saved only by his idiot-savant business skills, his arrogance and his pushiness and his ability to, for once in his life, keep a secret. It's a fairly pat ending, a smooth transition back to the regular world of the show, but it does end up feeling earned. Michael and Pam and Ryan sit around their closet floor and look failure in the face. It's weirdly touching the way Michael declares his fictional love for pad thai after Ryan confesses that the entire Thailand trip was a lie, and Ryan can tell that he's never eaten it, but knows it's some kind of gesture.
I think it also feels earned because it comes via the righting of a strange imbalance: Charles Minor's preference of Dwight over Jim. I ended up feeling rather bad for him, when he got that look on his face after Dwight suggested filling Michael's office with bees, when he realized he'd hitched his wagon to the wrong steed, and finally understood why David Wallace was suddenly so distrustful of his judgment. The especially funny and sad thing is that we saw why Charles got the wrong idea, but we also know why David Wallace thinks Dwight's crazy.
And in the end, what got them their jobs back wasn't just Michael's bizarrely skillful negotiating but also Jim's gentle manipulation of the situation to help Pam. I will let my excitement that Pam gets to be a salesperson temper my frustration that Ryan also got his job back.
... And I'm still behind. Just how many episodes will this season have, anyway?
* * * * *
In the time since BSG "Daybreak" aired, I've had a chance to look back on my relationship with the rest of the show in light of the series finale and have come to the conclusion that while I wasn't that disappointed with it--because I hadn't expected that much from it--it's impossible for me to go back and rewatch the struggles and triumphs of the characters I used to love now that they're covered by the shadow of the mass suicide that they all chose in the end. And that's how I quickly ended up coming to regard the fleet's decision to give up their technology: mass suicide. I understand something about the marginal realities of subsistence farming, about mortality before modern medicine, and about the predictable outcome of any lion vs. man encounter when the man in question was raised in a city and lived on a spaceship. Hera's genes survived, but she herself died as a teenager, and she probably made it a lot farther than most of the rest of them. They came to Earth, and made an end of themselves. I continue to think that, thematically, it makes sense, in that it ended a cycle. But it's impossible for me to be emotionally invested in the struggles of the characters to get there, only to give up and lie down in the veldt and die.
Anyway, I found myself agreeing quite a lot with rozk's review of "Daybreak" (via
par_avion), and especially her examination of the way in the end, RDM et. al shoved the storytelling mess they had made under a carpet of literal deus ex machina:
God does not have to make sense-he is the ineffable. This means that, in a story, even a story as complex and fascinating as Battlestar Galactica had become right up to that moment, he is bad writing and worse plotting... The fact that God could have saved everyone a lot of trouble, and us hours of ultimately disappointing viewing, by simply telling Helo and some random Eight, to make love and get in a spaceship, is irrelevant, because he moves in mysterious ways, which is very handy for Ron Moore and his writing staff if they have an off day.
In the end, that was one of the things I found hardest to swallow about the finale: that God's plan for them all was so literal, and so wasteful, and ultimately, so dumb. I can't imagine being able to rewatch the show now; I hope someday I can get over that.
* * * * *
Slate recently ran a neat examination of the way ST:TNG handled torture in "Chain of Command", which has always been one of my favorite episodes for its nuance and humanity (minor spoiler for the newest Trek movie).
Today is one of those days when stuck in a cubicle right between two extremely loud phone-talkers is not working out for me. On the other hand, I am wearing my super-cute lime green patent leather slingback wedge sandals with bows over the peep toes, so there is that. Sometimes shoes do make everything better.
Aaaaand this is my first cross-post from Dreamwidth, so we'll see if I borked the tags.
Some of Michael's best (best = least cringeworthy, even genuinely touching) moments in this show are with Pam. (Although, now that I think about it, some of his most cringeworthy moments are also with Pam. Hm....) This episode is bookended by two scenes that explain their dynamic so wonderfully: Pam pep-talking Michael through his despair and panic at the beginning of the day, getting him started on a list of small, achievable steps; Michael doing the same for Pam at the end of the day, when she can't even face getting out of the car. When one of them is freaking out, it makes the other one calmer; they can get each other through this. And I love that Michael admits he does his best work when people don't believe in him, and that his anecdotes totally do not support that theory at all, but that we've seen it for ourselves before on the show, like when he made the big sale in the face of Jan's rolling eyes in "The Client."
That's why it was especially sad that the "local investor"--the one thing Michael had done that day, the thing that had impressed Pam so much--was actually his nana and her investment club. And even sadder that nana was a really tough interview.
Michael is, above all, consistent and loyal. He remembered Vikram as a good salesman (and Vikram was also sane and sensible enough to flee the scene the minute he realized Michael was hitting up his grandmother for startup funds). And he recruits Ryan, despite Pam's (and my!) understandable horror and resistance. And Ryan, in return, is a complete and total asshole. Here he is, getting a second second chance to do something other than rent shoes at a bowling alley, and he immediately reverts to his former entitlement. Shut up, Ryan!
And finally, I sort of love Charles Minor for being the anti-Michael, for giving Stanley the stink-eye for doing crosswords in meetings, for somehow bringing out the worst and most awkward in Jim, the show's golden boy. And I also love how happy that makes Dwight. Those things are both signs of how off-kilter the office is in Michael's absence, but they're interesting to see.
But... Isn't the free office space Michael scrounged up the storage room where Dwight and Angela used to sneak away to have forbidden sex?!?
The Office 5.21 - "The Michael Scott Paper Company"
Dear NBC Promo Guy, I hate you so very much for making official use of the "Jam" portmanteau. STOP IT.
I spent a great deal of this episode wanting to punch Ryan. What Pam's doing right now--trying for a better position, tying her fate to Michael Scott, for crying out loud--is so brave and scary, and Ryan, who has done nothing but be a jerk, text his friends, and look at porn on the office laptop, uses all his fratty wiles to establish dominance over her in the office hierarchy, to climb over her, to shove her back down in that administrative service role. I suspect his behavior is something that will ping particularly hard for women, because it's a particularly blatant form of a recognizable pattern. And of course Michael's going to let them sort it out on their own, because he just wants his copies, and because he's got a peculiar and gaping blind spot when it comes to Ryan's many faults. Watching Pam go to Charles Minor to ask for her job back, and finding out she'd already been replaced, was heartbreaking. The only thing that even marginally redeemed Michael and Ryan is the way they gathered around Pam to coach her on her first sale at the end.
And it's a sale made in the face of some real obstacles--the grim little closet with the flushing toilet noises, the poker table from "Casino Night," the single laptop, the lack of real business cards and Michael's giant, paper-shaped pancakes. It's lovely to see her triumph.
Michael has a lot of blind spots, and Jim has made a very comfortable and unchallenging career out of exploiting them, so it continues to be incredibly interesting to me to see the way he can do no right with Charles Minor. Every word, every action, comes out wrong, makes him look wrong. If he tries, it ends in disaster; if he doesn't try, it works out about the same. I think that, outside of his romance with Pam, this is the first time we've seen him be this helpless and out of his depths and, quite frankly, humbled.
I love this strange friendship that's growing between Andy and Dwight, which started from their mutual heartbreak and is flourishing on the strength of their weirdness. When they were talking about their upcoming hunting trip, all I could do is marvel at how times have changed, because Dwight's plans did not include shooting Andy and hiding his body in the woods; after they both started flirting with Receptionist Kelly, I was not sure he wouldn't end up doing that. Fortunately, they're both competitive enough, and intense enough, to scare Receptionist Kelly off; her shy delight at their duelling banjo and guitar turns quickly to horror, but by that time, they've forgotten she's there, because they've started jamming together. (And then Toby has to make them stop, because that is what he's there for; he's a professional wet blanket. Oh Toby. Hee.)
The Office 5.22 - "Heavy Competition"
It's not like Dwight hasn't gone after Michael before, but each time he does, it's a surprise. Dwight's loyalty is only superseded by his ambition, and by the pathetically small amount of attention it takes from Charles Minor to turn his head. The worst part of it is that Michael never saw the setup coming, because his relationship with Dwight as his inside source at Dunder Mifflin was, to him, an extension of their friendship. (In fact, I think he made a mistake by offering Dwight six crumpled dollars for his trouble--it made their arrangement a commercial transaction, and might have made it easier for Dwight to turn on him.) Michael's first reaction, when Dwight tries to tell him a hypothetical about what happened, was that somethng terrible had happened to Mose--that Dwight hadn't put the cover on the well. Which, on top of being hilariously weird and random, show how involved Michael is with Dwight's life, that he's been listening when Dwight has talked about problems on the farm.
So watching the two of them go after each other is particularly distressing, because Dwight is so thorough and mean-spirited about it (the setup by the dumpster, the bad meatball sandwich), and because Michael somehow ends up coming out of the whole thing looking like a rational, professional adult. That is just WRONG. It's so fitting that Dwight gets hoist by his own thieving petard, that he can steal Michael's information but he can't understand it, that he doesn't have the key: 90% of the color-codes on the personal client details in Michael's rolodex are meant to tell Michael to keep his big fat mouth shut. (And that was all Pam's doing, over the years! Oh Pam.)
Some really random things I liked about this episode:
- The cheese puff throwing-and-catching montage in the cold open, which had a wonderfully choreographed, sports coveragey quality to it.
- Dwight's distress that his dress shirt's tight sleeves interfere with his attack readiness. And the fact that Dwight's attack readiness has actually come in handy in the past--like when he stopped Roy--and how that makes Dwight both absurd and practical.
- Dwight's sudden, razor-sharp insight into Michael's management style, and the fact that in that chaos, what people wore to work was the least of their worries, and in that environment, Dwight excelled. Which I immediately took to mean that in that environment, Dwight's secret stash of ninja weapons and fixation with superheroes was the least of their worries. Most of the time, it was.
- The way Jim messed with Andy, a little like he used to mess with Dwight--by imitating him. But that he also nipped Andy's poisonous talk about women and relationships in the bud, pointed out that he and Pam are very happy and that what Angela did to Andy sucked, but that Andy will find someone else. Although, in the end, I couldn't tell whether Andy was overwhelmed or enraged by the whole thing; possibly both. Jim's at his best when he's being a friend, because he's too honest to enable delusional thinking, but he's also incredibly kind.
- Pam and Ryan, who haven't even been able to speak to each other civilly so far, joining forces to explain to Michael what people are actually telling him. In note form. Hee.
The Office 5.23 - "Broke"
I was wondering how long it could last. The Michael Scott Paper Company staff delivers its own paper in a used Korean church van, and Ryan, who spent so much time lording it over Michael that he went to business school, messed up their cost model, and none of it is scalable. It's Michael's dream, and like most of his dreams, a it's a poorly thought-out house of cards that's saved only by his idiot-savant business skills, his arrogance and his pushiness and his ability to, for once in his life, keep a secret. It's a fairly pat ending, a smooth transition back to the regular world of the show, but it does end up feeling earned. Michael and Pam and Ryan sit around their closet floor and look failure in the face. It's weirdly touching the way Michael declares his fictional love for pad thai after Ryan confesses that the entire Thailand trip was a lie, and Ryan can tell that he's never eaten it, but knows it's some kind of gesture.
I think it also feels earned because it comes via the righting of a strange imbalance: Charles Minor's preference of Dwight over Jim. I ended up feeling rather bad for him, when he got that look on his face after Dwight suggested filling Michael's office with bees, when he realized he'd hitched his wagon to the wrong steed, and finally understood why David Wallace was suddenly so distrustful of his judgment. The especially funny and sad thing is that we saw why Charles got the wrong idea, but we also know why David Wallace thinks Dwight's crazy.
And in the end, what got them their jobs back wasn't just Michael's bizarrely skillful negotiating but also Jim's gentle manipulation of the situation to help Pam. I will let my excitement that Pam gets to be a salesperson temper my frustration that Ryan also got his job back.
... And I'm still behind. Just how many episodes will this season have, anyway?
* * * * *
In the time since BSG "Daybreak" aired, I've had a chance to look back on my relationship with the rest of the show in light of the series finale and have come to the conclusion that while I wasn't that disappointed with it--because I hadn't expected that much from it--it's impossible for me to go back and rewatch the struggles and triumphs of the characters I used to love now that they're covered by the shadow of the mass suicide that they all chose in the end. And that's how I quickly ended up coming to regard the fleet's decision to give up their technology: mass suicide. I understand something about the marginal realities of subsistence farming, about mortality before modern medicine, and about the predictable outcome of any lion vs. man encounter when the man in question was raised in a city and lived on a spaceship. Hera's genes survived, but she herself died as a teenager, and she probably made it a lot farther than most of the rest of them. They came to Earth, and made an end of themselves. I continue to think that, thematically, it makes sense, in that it ended a cycle. But it's impossible for me to be emotionally invested in the struggles of the characters to get there, only to give up and lie down in the veldt and die.
Anyway, I found myself agreeing quite a lot with rozk's review of "Daybreak" (via
par_avion), and especially her examination of the way in the end, RDM et. al shoved the storytelling mess they had made under a carpet of literal deus ex machina:
God does not have to make sense-he is the ineffable. This means that, in a story, even a story as complex and fascinating as Battlestar Galactica had become right up to that moment, he is bad writing and worse plotting... The fact that God could have saved everyone a lot of trouble, and us hours of ultimately disappointing viewing, by simply telling Helo and some random Eight, to make love and get in a spaceship, is irrelevant, because he moves in mysterious ways, which is very handy for Ron Moore and his writing staff if they have an off day.
In the end, that was one of the things I found hardest to swallow about the finale: that God's plan for them all was so literal, and so wasteful, and ultimately, so dumb. I can't imagine being able to rewatch the show now; I hope someday I can get over that.
* * * * *
Slate recently ran a neat examination of the way ST:TNG handled torture in "Chain of Command", which has always been one of my favorite episodes for its nuance and humanity (minor spoiler for the newest Trek movie).
Today is one of those days when stuck in a cubicle right between two extremely loud phone-talkers is not working out for me. On the other hand, I am wearing my super-cute lime green patent leather slingback wedge sandals with bows over the peep toes, so there is that. Sometimes shoes do make everything better.
Aaaaand this is my first cross-post from Dreamwidth, so we'll see if I borked the tags.