"It's like we're touring Willy Wonka's chocolate factory, dropping off one by one. "
The Office 3.12 - "Traveling Salesman"
The pairing up for sales calls this week was such a great device for showing the complex web of relationships that have formed between these people who have come to know each other through spending so much time together at work, even though they don't maybe even like each other, to illuminate the things that drive them. Structurally, it was neat the way all of these events unfolded as interactions between two people rather than larger groups. And it all revolved around the sales meetings, the place where we got to see how this incredibly dysfunctional company manages to stay afloat, why these people are working these jobs, a lovely little reminder that underneath the Office Olympics and pretzel days, they lurch toward some semblance of productivity. So:
Andy and Michael: Andy engineered the entire exercise, and chose Michael as his partner, because he is the master of his own little workplace game of Stratego, placing the bombs and moving the men. I completely believe him when he says that every success he's ever had, in sales or with the ladies, came from wearing them down, because one of the trainwreckiest things I've ever seen onscreen was Andy's intense need to ingratiate himself with Michael collide with his compulsion for one-upmanship and his need to actually make a sale, and the way making the sale dropped out of his view as a consideration. Tales of shooting sharks from the crow's nest of his daddy's boat was not the way to make a deal with this customer, and Michael knows that--for Michael, the sales call is an opportunity to connect with someone else, and that's the basis of his improbable success as a salesman, and Andy stomped all over it. And I love that despite Michael's fragile ego and need for reassurance, Andy's brand of flattery and carefully planted barbs just rolled off Michael's back like water off a duck--"Who knows how words are made?" None of Andy's sycophancy or sabotaging of Dwight even registered with Michael until Andy hit on the winning strategy, prying at an old wound, resurrecting the specter of Dwight's previous betrayal.
Ryan and Stanley: Stanley, of course, picks Ryan, because Ryan is going to stay out of his way. But Ryan is going feral, experimenting with the use of his elbows to get ahead, and Stanley lets him measure his own rope and hang himself. Stanley doesn't care; it's no skin off his nose, and it's funny. I LOVE YOU, STANLEY.
Phyllis and Karen: I just adored Phyllis's quiet slyness with the trip to the beauty salon before her sales call with Karen, the way she had sized up the customer and figured out exactly the way to nail the sale every time, her matter-of-factness about it. (And I adore the show for letting it all unfold without a word of explanation beyond a brief shot of the customer's wife in a photo. That's good writing.) Phyllis has always been friendly with anyone who responded in the office, and someone who watches and takes note of what's going on around her, but I can also believe that she takes Jim and Karen's relationship at face value, that she's genuinely happy Jim has moved on, that she likes Karen (after they got off on the wrong foot over the unfortunate Bob Vance perfume incident). To Phyllis, telling Karen that she and Jim are a good couple, that it's good to see Jim move on after being hung up on Pam, is just girl talk. But I thought Karen's reaction hit the nail on the head, because you could see her putting the pieces together--Jim's squirreliness about Scranton and about her living near him, the way Phyllis talked about Jim's feelings for Pam as if they were common knowledge. Suddenly, she's the outsider, because she was the only one who didn't know. I love that she reminds him that she moved there from Connecticut--that he encouraged her to--and that he owes her the truth. Even though she accepts his reassurances, like all secrets like this, the fact that he kept it--that he initially tried to deny it--gives it added weight. If it really was a small thing, a minor crush, he would have mentioned it, it wouldn't be something so difficult for him that he couldn't acknowledge it. He doesn't quite give her the truth, but I think he gives her as much as he can talk about with anyone; he tells her the story that he wants very badly to be true, that it was a crush, that Pam rejected him, that he's moved on.
Dwight and Jim: No matter how little they get along when put in the same room together, Dwight and Jim have a history and that history has weight, they know each other. The picture of them at the beginning, with the bad hair and the open, fresh faces, was such a good indicator of that. Dwight's pedantic obsession with combat and safety drive Jim up the wall, Jim retaliates with petty pranks (ones that don't always reflect well on him--Jim, if you smack Dwight again, I might have to smack you, and my God did I never imagine I could possibly get protective of Dwight, but there it is). Jim knows--even if he doesn't understand--that Dwight needs to psych himself up for the sales call with heavy metal and karate chops, and that he'll have to stand outside the car and wait him out. But it all comes together during the sales call, where they work together like a well-oiled machine, both using their personal styles to work different sides of a pincer movement.
Dwight and Angela: Dwight and Angela's romance has become something improbably luminous and fairytale--they are both so invested in that knight-in-shining armor narrative, and they have made it come to life in the most mundane and gray surroundings. We all need things in our lives that elevate us from the everyday, and they have become that to each other in the story they're creating together. The irony is that Angela encouraged Dwight to go to Jan behind Michael's back in the first place, and it was her missed deadline that lead to the fatal toll booth receipt, and in the end, Dwight would rather keep her secret, adhere to the intricate code of honor they've constructed together, than keep his job. Oh, Dwight. But it's ridiculously easy to buy into the fairytale when you see the look on Dwight's face when he talks about Angela, and Angela's uncharacteristic joy when Dwight rescues her and becomes her knight in shining armor--she's so happy she's pleasant, it's like watching ice melt, she's even friendly to Pam.
Andy and Angela: My only consolation for the way Andy manipulated Dwight right out of a job--by using his best traits against him, no less--is that Angela is going to fucking destroy Andy in the most painful way possible. And Andy doesn't even know it, he doesn't understand why the camera is focusing on anything but him and his triumph and his odious oompa-loompa song, he doesn't see Angela lurking in the background. And as awful as it was to see Dwight quit, and unbearable as the idea of a Dwightless Dunder Mifflin is (seriously, I do not know how I got to this point, but here I am), I love that the show followed through on the rivalry, that it didn't pull its punches, that Andy is that petty and Machiavellian, that there's no hidden heart of gold there, he's just a weasel.
And of course, Michael made the machine say "boobs," because he is five.
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I have no impulse control, and couldn't wait for Stargate to start airing in the US.
Stargate 10.11 - "The Quest Part 2"
It felt like once the dragon portion of the storyline was dispatched, the episode actually got down to business and became surprisingly intense and emotionally fraught. The dragon looked like a tiny puppet on strings, even if it was CGI, and I'm glad the plotline treated it with the appropriate camp, winding up the D&D portion of the quest with the saying of its name so that things could move into the more interesting territory of Ancient technology and gate engineering.
* I'm still not sure what I think of Morena Baccarin's Adria, but I find that I buy her best as someone with a tremendous amount of power but the emotional maturity of a child, so at times her certainty comes off strangely, too far-seeing for that level of maturity, while at other times it strikes just the right note of black-and-white worldview, of unwillingness to have her properly ordered world challenged by other people and their petty concerns and ideas and feelings.
* Vala has a lot of faith in Daniel's ideas--enough to run in front of a pissed-off dragon who just swallowed a bunch of C4 in order to try to say its name, enough that she didn't really understand, at first, how dangerous his tinkering with the Ancient knowledge device could be. I thought it was interesing that it was Cam and Vala in the cave with Daniel when he took that plunge rather than Sam and Teal'c. One of the constants about Daniel is his willingness to do impulsive, and incredibly dangerous, things in the pursuit of knowledge, his disregard for personal consequences in those situations, and I think this is something Sam and Teal'c understand about him on a much more instinctive level than Cam and Vala do. Sam and Teal'c have been down this road before, have had first-hand experience with this device and what it can do to someone they care about, have seen Daniel throw himself into danger to grasp at information, and might have been more active about trying to stop him before he got started, while Cam and Vala are both more willing to defer to Daniel's experience and much less willing to openly challenge his judgment. I think the situation would have played out much differently if Sam and Teal'c hadn't been outside messing with the gate.
* The episode felt very arc-y for a Stargate episode--the episode plot moved the ball forward, but didn't really resolve much, the ending was just the beginning of bigger things. It was also surprisingly emotional, which meant that Ben Browder got to take the leash off and show the anguish of Cam Mitchell, nominal leader of a team he can't control, caught up in a situation where making sacrifices for the mission was unavoidable. The scenes between Daniel and Vala and Cameron, as Daniel starts losing more and more of himself and Vala is getting progressively more scared and Cameron is making the decision to go ahead and let him do it, trying to keep Vala together when he was having enough trouble holding himself together, explaining to himself as much as her that they can't stop him and that they need that weapon and that risking your own life is easy compared to risking the lives of your comrades, was intense. And Claudia Black pulled out the Puss-In-Boots eyes, which never fail to slay me.
* I really enjoyed Sam and Baal working together, because while they are different in most every respect, they have that same technical ability, and the grudging respect for each other that goes with it. (It's something that has always set Baal apart from the other system lords--he isn't just evil and badly dressed, he's smart, he doesn't just sit back and rest on the work of his minions.) I don't for a second think Baal actually looks down on Sam for being human and a woman (well, maybe for being human), but I completely believe that he knows how much it would bug her for him to taunt her that way, and that he enjoys bugging her, especially when he's bored or frustrated. And I love that Sam flattened him for it.
* I thought the ending was actually more tense than the dragon cliffhanger at the season hiatus, because I am actually afraid for Daniel, with his unresolved feelings about the Ancients and his tendency toward black despair and his fried brain, in Adria's hands.
According to this, SkyOne has scheduled episodes in production order, not the order they were intended to air, which is:
10.11 "The Quest Part 2"
10.12 "Line in the Sand"
10.13 "The Road Not Taken"
10.14 "The Shroud"
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Ever wanted to own your own country? Now's your chance, if you have 65 million British pounds lying around.
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There's a very good chance I'll be in the Dallas/Fort Worth area on and around February 6th and 7th for work. I don't have any details yet, but let me know if you're in the area and are interested in trying to meet up for lunch or dinner.