The Office: Season 4, Episode 6
A tv post by matt, posted on November 1, 2007 at 10:17 pm
Business trips have ruined me again! Spoilers for “Branch Wars” below.
Things that happened
In an episode that seemingly was inspired by an episode of Stella crossed with a bunch of terrible non-sequitur videos from collegehumor.com, we catch up with Karen Filippelli, now branch manager at Utica. She’s still holding a bit of a grudge against Jim, and thus Scranton as a whole, so she’s decided she’s going to steal Stanley away. Michael thinks this is tantamount to a criminal act (robbing the office of its wacky black guy!) so he, Dwight, and a reluctant Jim don warehouse uniforms and fake mustaches and drive to Utica to play a prank and, thus, get revenge. It all goes terrible awry when Michael and Dwight get trapped behind an industrial copier.
Meanwhile, back at Scranton, Pam, Oscar and Toby have formed a club dedicated to the finer things in life. They sit around the lunch room wearing berets and discuss art and books while eating fancy food. Jim is a little miffed that he’s not allowed to join, as is Andy, who takes a run at it anyway.
Ultimately, it all comes together when, after Jim runs into Karen during the terribly ill-advised prank, Pam lets Jim join the club. Mostly out of pity. And then Jim doesn’t even bother to read Angela’s Ashes anyway.
Things that were good
- More cracks on the Jim/Pam relationship. I realize that I still might be reading too much into this, but I’m officially predicting that they’re doomed to failure.
- Michael’s last request to Jim: that he host the Dundies. It made me really want to watch that episode again. It was so good!
Things that were bad
- Everything else! This was a bad episode.
Worth Watching If…
I don’t even know what to say about this one. It feels like something a wacky improv troupe would come up with. There was no consistency, no real character moments, and only a handful of lines that actually worked. It was a different kind of bad than the first few episodes of this season. Those episodes felt like everyone was trying too hard. This episode felt like they weren’t trying at all. What a waste.
In Five Words
Sleeping On The Job Again
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Jack wrote:
Yikes! I don’t think I’d even be this negative about this episode!
Then again, I had Guitar Hero III this week so I didn’t feverishly anticipate my Thursday Office as much as I usually do. Thus, my expectations were pretty low.
But after having seen this episode a mere once, I think it was okay. It seemed very incomplete, and it will probably serve as a bridge into some better sweeps episodes. Or it will introduce the characters to star in the Office spin-off series which will probably be a complete disaster.
Related to that, I think the entire point of the episode was to show the general Jim-Pam rift. Not that their relationship is going to fail, but they definitely have different goals: Jim wants to slack off and make jokes and Pam wants to eat finger sandwiches in the break room and pretend to be as cultured as a receptionist in Scranton can be.
Strange as it seems, I think the during-the-end-credits denouement really contained the meat of the episode. Jim just made some jokes and didn’t have any honest contributions to the conversation. This clearly points to the fact that Jim has been horrifically depressed for like ever and that his only coping mechanism to deal with his crappy, boring, going-nowhere life/job is to crack wise. I don’t know if the show will take a turn for the hard-hitting, but if it does, I expect this to be its main focus because it seems like they’re out of all other ideas. Because honestly, have you read the descriptions of upcoming episodes on Wikipedia? It’s really going nowhere.
Posted on 01-Nov-07 at 10:37 pm | Permalink
Jack wrote:
Where be my Office recaps? A week late for the last episode, and several hours late for the next!
Posted on 16-Nov-07 at 1:47 am | Permalink
Ian wrote:
Need to watch this one again.
Posted on 17-Feb-08 at 7:51 pm | Permalink