During Robert California’s The Hangover, he ended up closing the Binghamton branch without a transition plan leaving many clients up for grabs and the remaining Dunder Mifflin branches hungrily picking over the scraps. The episode begins with Robert coming into the office after a memory-erasing bender fueled by “Australian reds” and “Colombian whites” (Creed knows what I’m talking about!). No matter how “low” he goes, his uniqueness, especially when compared to the tiredness of most of the other characters, gives him an immediate edge. While I think the purpose of the episode was to show Robert as some sort of pig by really going overboard with his negative qualities, he’s just too entertaining, offbeat, and different to hate. Ignoring my questions about the overall concept of The Office, tonight’s episode worked for the most part thanks to the ever reliable Robert California and the usually reliable Jim and Dwight: Partners. At least Turf War makes it seem as though the show is ready to acknowledge these problems. And the Scranton branch, itself a mere pawn in the world of high stakes business, has spent most of this season floundering, rudderless, and difficult to root for. Or is Sabre just messed up from top to bottom? If so, at least Dunder Mifflin’s incompetence seemed realistic. Was Jo the better boss? After all, Robert talked her out of her job, and she approved the Sabre Store as well as its dangerous products. The multitude of examples of this blindness/ignorance add up to one of this year’s biggest issues: the show never decided who was in the “right” and who was in the “wrong.” Is Robert a quirky business genius or a huckster? According to a comment made tonight it seems like the latter, but for most of the year, the show seemed to go the opposite route. These are just some of the actual business issues that Turf War brings up tonight in a way that highlights just how little attention the show has paid to these matters throughout the season. Could Dunder Mifflin ever be a worthwhile investment? When Sabre purchased Dunder Mifflin, it wanted to use its salespeople to push its other wares such as exploding printers. It’s an idea the show brought up regularly in its early seasons, and paper was used as a metaphor for the characters themselves- bland and practically obsolete. The use and need of paper has died down tremendously over the past decade or so, and paper businesses suffer simply by being paper businesses. This scenario also fails to take into account that part of the reason why Dunder Mifflin always seems to be dying is that it is a regional paper company that has to compete with national chains. I’ve criticized Andy throughout the season for his “leadership” abilities, but to his credit, he finally showed that he could be a salesman tonight.
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Maybe he was a bit better than that, as he somewhat understood how to deal with Michael and Jan, but he certainly wasn’t exceptional. He was competent, I’ll give him that, but I always saw him as representative of the shortsighted executive unable to adjust to modern times. Who would be the good management? I never got the sense that David Wallace was great at his job.
A major problem comes down to this concept of management. Ignoring my favoritism for Robert and my admitted dislike for Andy, this entire set up seems iffy, even if it was predictable from the first episode this season that Andy would eventually out-business Robert (good guys must win!). Robert understandably says no, so Andy pitches David Wallace on buying Dunder Mifflin by claiming that it could be very profitable with good management. I’ll go more in depth below, but the gist is that Andy wins The Big Client and tries to use that to convince Robert to give him his job back. Even if it’s one episode before the season finale, better late than never. But apparently it is, and I guess it’s good that at least something is happening this season.
I didn’t expect it to be the genesis of a game-changing story arc. I saw David Wallace’s reveal that the government bought him out for $20 million more like Charlie Sheen’s horrible cameo in Oliver Stone’s horrible Wall Street II: Money Never Sleeps, a throwaway joke. To be fair, this season hasn’t exactly been competent at handling, remembering, or setting up ongoing plotlines. I feel foolish for not foreseeing tonight’s big development last week. The possible savior of Dunder Mifflin NBC still needs a hero
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