Season 8 - Episode 11
NBC (US)
It's been a pretty dreadful season for The Office. The loss of Steve Carell (although he does appear to make an uncredited, non speaking cameo in this episode) has hurt the show, and the introduction of James Spader's Robert California character has been an abject failure in my eyes. But then they come along with an episode like this. Over half of the episode is absolutely fantastic, encompassing everything that's great about this series. Unfortunately it was dampened slightly by a pretty dire B-Plot, but the A-Plot here is by far the best thing they've done since "Goodbye Michael".
And the premise is so simple. After a bit of setup, where it turns out Andy needs to sell $843 dollars worth of paper to meet the office's sales target for the quarter, the whole office heads to Philadelphia for a trivia contest that Oscar was headed to. With a prize of $1000. And from there, it's just brilliant. It turns out the quiz is in a gay bar, and there's a limit of four people in a team. Splitting the Office into the A-Team, the B-Team and the "Just For Fun" Team, Andy sets his sights on the prize. But while his team of Daryl, Jim and Ryan falters, The "Just For Fun" team of Kelly, Kevin, Meredith and Erin manage to win the whole thing. It's a truly delightful A-Plot and The Office at its very best.
It's really a shame about the B-Plot where Dwight travels to Florida to enquire about a manager's job. Gabe is there, as he spends half the week in Florida (Tuesdays and Thursdays, flying every single day, which was not funny and just made Gabe look needlessly stupid). Robert California tries to fob Dwight off, and Dwight ends up at his house. It was a waste of two good characters in Dwight and Gabe (although Dwight has been dangerously close to self-parody this season) and nothing with California on screen was funny.
This was a four and a half star episode with a one star B-Plot. The very strong main story carried enough weight for me to still rate this well, and I hope that is the style we get to the end of the season.
*** 1/2
I'm just the opposite of you; I have been really enjoying James Spader as Robert California since the Doomsday episode. Plus I liked the B plot in Trivia (along with the A plot); perhaps it is because I read that Dwight will be going to Florida for a six episode arc, and I understood it to be a setup plot.
ReplyDeleteRobert had three quotable lines in Trivia and all were delivered perfectly...I don't understand why you dislike this character. I find him interesting, and I have been enjoying watching Spader act...can't say the same for Ed Helms. No, he's not Michael Scott funny nor is supposed to be...this isn't a character that was brought in to replace Scott; If he had been he would have been made RM.