Season premiere: The Office
Posted by Dan
September 25th, 2006 at 04:58pm
In The Office
I'm surprised no one written about it until now, but let's chat about the season premiere of The Office, shall we?
In bullet form? Certainly. Some thoughts…
- First off, Jim and Pam. We all knew it wouldn't work out, right? That's for the series finale. But how would it not work out? That was the question. For the most part, I think they got it right. The reaction of both of them admitting that they had wanted to kiss for a long time was exactly what they should have said. Pam wussing out was predictable and in character. But the abruptness of Jim leaving seemed unnatural — like he wasn't even game for a little bit of a fight.
- The idea of having Jim start out at a new office full of wacky people is an ambitious, but exciting prospect. Ed Helms is a promising addition to the cast. And I don't know who the woman is, but I loved it when she mocked Jim's patented shrug to the camera.
- Was it me or was this one of the roughest episodes to get through in terms of the Oscar storyline. Just in terms of cringes per minute. And the intensity of those cringes. I guess I just got excessive cringe-age for obvious reasons.
- In this episode a lot of the characters teetered on the verge of being horrible (Angela, Dwight, Kevin). They've always been flawed and wildly eccentric, which is why they're funny, but even Kevin was acting like a jackass with his 5th grade giggling.
- Oscar's hot. That's all.
I think one of the reasons Jim had the courage to kiss Pam that night was because he had just gotten this much better job offer, and was starting to feel like maybe he could break the cycle and get out of his horrible job and the horrible crush, like maybe he was better than all that. But in a way, that makes him think he won’t need Pam. He thinks he’s going places, now, or at least not just sitting at the same desk enduring the same Dwight annoyingness and Michael cluelessness day after day. Jim gave up on Pam pretty easily because he was feeling good about himself (and hey, at least he gave it a shot before he left their “forever”), but she’s the person he turns to when things couldn’t possibly be any worse — and now he thinks things aren’t that bad. He can’t really decide to be serious about her until he gets completely disillustioned and demoralized by this new job, which of course is no better or more fulfilling than the last (”I can’t say whether Dunder Mifflin paper is less flammable, sir, but, I can assure you that it’s certainly not more flammable…”). He’s got to realize that, actually, there isn’t anything better out there, and that for all the tedium of his old job, at least there he had Pam. And of course Pam’s got to realize that she CAN try to break the cycle, and then they’ll meet halfway. Or something like that.
The woman who sits behind Jim in his new Stamford office is Rashida Jones, daughter of Quincy. And am I the only one who thinks the Stamford office will be downsized and some of the staff (Ed Helms, John Krasinski) will move (back) to Scranton? No? Anyone?