Less camera time for:
Steve Carrell (his one liners, like “I’m not superstitious.
Just stitious” are better suited for an 1980′s
sitcom)
Ed Helms (nipple chaffing gag? that was the stupidest thing
I’ve seen on The Office)
Angela (yeah, we get it. you like cats. that’s getting old now)

More camera time for:
Toby
Jim and Pam (of course)
Creed

Myles: Definitely agree as far as the pacing goes. We got to the end of the first half hour and Erin immediately asked if the show was over. I understand the need for there to be some sort of break for syndication reasons, but this was way too overt. Especially compared to the hour-long My Name is Earl that came on beforehand, where the natural break was far more subtle. (And the episode was way funnier, too.)

Jack: I’m not sure I agree that they’ve exhausted all the possibilities for office-based episodes. I think they’re just trying too hard to one-up themselves. The fun run could have been a really strong plot, and almost entirely office-based: Michael, Andy and Dwight all campaigning to get the most sponsorships, for example. And, like you said, there’s a ton of possibilities with Michael and Ryan now. I hope they mine that.

Ryan: Yeah. I really get sick of people claiming that Jim and Pam getting together will ‘kill’ the show. That’s sort of outdated television thinking that doesn’t apply to a show like this that has been, mostly, about defying TV convention. But the show needs some sort of romantic tension to fill in for the old Jim/Pam stuff. And I don’t think Dwight/Angela strife is the thing to do it.

In the spirit of the episode, I will now say many unnecessary things:

A large black man feeding a squirrel a peanut is an untapped comedic reservoir. If the amount of past references made in this episode are any indication, I imagine we’ll hear mentions of Darryl feeding a squirrel well into season seven.

If nothing else, I’m proud that this show reached a fourth season. It is, however, disheartening that it pretty much exhausted the possibilities for entirely office-based episodes in season two, and season three basically made the audience get used to an increasing level of zaniness so that the expected nonstop zaniness of season four will be tolerated.

Let’s get some more BJ in there. I never thought I’d say this, but I think dual office Scranton-New York stuff would work, if only to give Ryan and the CFO some hijinks.

Spot on about how AD is really the only show that could pull off this much plot in an episode. And this much zaniness.

My biggest issue was that really this could have been a half hour story if they had cut out the entire middle section and skipped directly to the Fun Run: as it was, the first half was both overlong and disconnected. It was even paced like two episodes, even with the connections, which struck me as odd.