Spoilers for “Safety Training” below.

Things that happened

It’s safety training day at Dunder-Mifflin, inspired by a seemingly bizarre practical joke Michael played on Darryl — relying entirely on the literal definition of the word ‘hanging’ — that resulted in the warehouse worker suffering a busted-up ankle. This means all the employees will be getting safety training sessions on both the warehouse downstairs and the office upstairs.

Guess which one goes disastrously wrong!

It’s a trick question, really, since they both sort of do. They do warehouse safety first, delivered by Darryl. He repeatedly singles out Michael for misuse of warehouse equipment, which is a pretty sneaky callback to the awesome “Boys and Girls” episode in season two, where Michael drove the forklift into pretty much everything in an effort to spite women everywhere.

Michael continues his streak of never acting normal in the warehouse ever. He continuously tries to excuse himself from the rules requiring that only licensed people operate the machinery. Then he has further issue with the lone female warehouse employee (Madge). Then he develops an intense fascination with the baler, which is incredibly dangerous but is so deceptively, as it doesn’t have spikes or breathe fire or contain nicotine like most other things we associate with danger.

It all adds up to the warehouse staff growing increasingly frustrated with their upstairs boss — a frustration that boils over when the warehouse workers attend the upstairs safety session. Though it’s supposed to be delivered by Toby, Michael almost immediately takes over and tries to highlight the real dangers of working in the offices of Dunder-Mifflin. He fails of course, not only because computers can’t explode, but also because how dangerous can an office environment be, particularly as Dwight was recently disarmed of his throwing stars after the pepper spray incident?

The warehouse staff, led by Darryl, calls Michael out on the general wussiness of his workplace, even going so far as to call it “nerf-like.” Which is just cold, especially because he was probably referring to one of those standard nerf footballs and not, say, one of those giant plastic guns that could shoot about a hundred suction cup darts in less than a minute. If he had meant it in that sense things probably wouldn’t have taken the turn they did.

But the turn was taken, and we end up with Michael and Dwight on the roof. Michael’s grand plan to add interest to the safety training session is to stage a rooftop suicide. If he laments about the dangers of depression — a common workplace ailment, what with the lack of natural light and all those damn TPS reports — and then seemingly jumps to his doom, he reasons that those theatrics will make his safety demonstration way better than the warehouse one that simply focused on a machine that could crush all the bones in your arm in less than a second.

So Michael’s on the roof, ready to jump. His plan for a safe landing involve both a trampoline and, after the trampoline totally demolishes both a watermelon and Stanley’s car, a carnival-style bouncy castle. Neither one really would have been that effective, a fact that the Dunder-Mifflin employees pick up on really quickly when they figure out their boss’ plans.

Darryl manages to talk him down, giving a heartfelt and oddly accurate speech about the amount of bravery it would take to wake up every day as Michael Scott. This speech, coupled with Pam’s promise of a special present if he comes down without jumping, causes Michael to abort his plan. And then, later, declare himself a hero for preventing his own suicide.

I bet that sounds like a long episode! In fact, I will bet you $10 that it does!

Haha, you see, what I’ve just done is make a humourous reference to tonight’s B-plot, which involves all the major Office characters not named Michael or Dwight hanging out and making random bets about things going on at Dunder-Mifflin. It’s all inspired by Kevin feeling particularly bored since March Madness ended.

The bets are numerous and storied and actually generally awesome, particularly a barn burner involving Kelly Kapur and Netflix, but there isn’t much of a plot pay-off beyond the hilarity and a hint of Karen feeling out of place in Scranton. The girl is totally ready for a major breakdown.

And, lastly, in our wonderful C-plot of the evening, Andy Bernard makes his official return to the office, having completed five weeks of anger management courses. His new attitude seems to largely consist of referring to himself only as “Drew” and smiling a little bit more. The guy is totally ready for a major breakdown. Drew’s involvement in this episode is limited mostly to ordering the bouncy castle, but he does contribute some great scenes regardless, most notably the brilliant cold open where Dwight, still “shunning” Andy (he learned it from the Amish) gets pranked by Jim and, well, all the other scenes where Dwight shuns him, choosing only to talk to him after prefacing their conversation with “UNSHUN!” and ending it with “RESHUN!”

Apparently it’s an Amish thing.

Things that were good

• Darryl getting more screentime is an unexpected fringe benefit of Roy’s departure. (Though I still dearly miss Roy.) He has the potential to be a really strong character, I think, as all his Michael interactions are brilliant. It’d be neat to see him interact more with the other characters.
• Michael and Dwight dancing on the roof to build up Michael’s courage was fantastic. One of Rainn Wilson’s many talents is making guitar noises using nothing more than his own mouth.
• Kelly and Ryan are turning into real scene stealers. The bet on how long it would take Kelly to explain Netflix (and, also, how many times she would use the word ‘awesome.’) was the best scene this week.
• The cold open was a close second, as Jim’s “Andy, Dwight says he knows nothing about bear attacks” was a great line, and the follow-up was equally memorable.

Things that were not so good

• Somewhere between Michael being on the roof and a bouncy castle magically getting inflated in the Dunder-Mifflin parking lot I felt like this episode got a little too off-the-rails wacky for me. Even little things, like Michael’s voice apparently projecting all the way down to the parking lot, sort of bother me. It’s all only because this is the sort of show that has prided itself on maintaining realistic grounding (the camera being forced to shut off during the hospital sequence in the Grilled Foot episode is the best example I can think of) that this bothers me, sure, but it still bothers me.
• Partially because of the above point, I really wish they had flipped the two main plots, and had the betting plot take centre stage with the suicide thing going on in the background. It’s not that I don’t think Michael is a great character because I really do, but it’s just that it’s easy to overexpose him at this point, and the betting had way more potential than they realized.

Worth Watching if…

This was definitely way more stand-alone than the last couple of episodes. Somebody totally new to the show could come into this episode and really enjoy it, I think, and it’s nice that they can still do these sorts of episodes as a means to avoid the sort of disease that I think befell Arrested Development, where the funniest and best jokes required intimate knowledge of almost every episode that preceded it. This wasn’t my favourite episode of all times by any means, but as a quick filler episode before we head into May Sweeps, it did what it needed to do.

In Five Words

I Went Click Click Click

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