TV Verdict

Break out your calculators, folks. It’s time for an Office pop quiz: What do you get if you add 8 lost deposits, $9 pants, 2 engagement rings, a $645 coat, and 0 times seeing Angela naked? If you said $4300, you’re correct. If you said “a partridge in a pear tree” see me after class, smart guy.

Why $4300? Because that’s the budget surplus Oscar reports to Michael at the beginning of the oddly titled episode “The Surplus.” Send the money back to corporate, and the branch has that amount deducted from next year’s budget; spend it before the end of the day, however, and everybody wins. Well, maybe not everybody. It all depends which side you’re on. Which brings us to… tonight’s Battle Royale!

In this corner, the Payroll Pugilist, the Excel Eviscerator, the one they call “Accountant Dracula”: Oscar Martinez! And in the opposite corner, just back from The City that Never Sleeps, the Raging Receptionist, the Queen of Collation, “Bellicose Beasley” herself: Pam!

He wants the surplus spent on a new copier. She wants new chairs. Who will win? Who will lose? And how many lives will be lost in the bloody battle?

The answers to the above questions are, in order: Pam, Oscar, and nobody. But just because no one died in the Surplus Skirmish of ‘08 doesn’t mean loyalties weren’t tested. Just ask Jim, whose love for Pam is apparently matched only by his hatred of the office’s aging copier. Not that she’s going to back down. Last week, we got to see a new side of Pam in the “who made the microwave mess” conflict. This week, she’s willing to do whatever it takes to get the chair she was promised on her first day at work. That she ends up getting it proves she learned more in New York than how to save hi-res CMYK EPS vector files out of Adobe Illustrator CS3. She learned how to stand up for herself and fight for what she wants, whether that be appliance cleanliness or lumbar support. Pam is back, America, and she is feisty! It’s a welcome new dynamic, not only in the office but in her relationship with Jim. It’s a different kind of spark than they had before they started dating, but a spark’s a spark, and who doesn’t love a gal with moxie? You go girl! (That’s still a cool thing to say, right?)

But what of the great decider, the man at the center of the conflict—the one who had to sort through all the wining, dining, flirting, and ass-complimenting? Somehow, Michael did what Michael always does: force someone else to make the decision. He tried to get Hank the security guard to do it (I’m loving seeing more of him this season, by the way), and he tried to get David Wallace to do it—a buck-passing attempt that backfired when Michael learned that if he returned the money to corporate, he’d get 15% of the surplus as a bonus. What to do? Be the bad guy he desperately wanted to avoid being, or miss out on the opportunity to stride into Burlington Coat Factory like a “king”? That’s a tough choice. Of course, the best thing about being the boss is that you don’t have to choose. Turns out it’s possible to both give your employees what they want (“Urkel-nomically correct” chairs) and spend $645 on a new fur coat… on credit… without the money to pay for it… then have someone throw red paint on you as you’re leaving the store. Oh, well. Maybe Toby’s prediction that everyone in the office will die from Radon is going to come true and it won’t matter. Season-ending cliffhanger, perhaps?

Probably not. It’s looking like the season finale is going to be dressed in white and squatting on a stump over a trench. Someone’s getting married at the end of this year, and it’s not going to be Angela and Dwight. Mostly, of course, because they’re already married, thanks to a surprise fake-fake-out ceremony at Schrute Farms, performed by a German-speaking Mennonite minister, and witnessed by the ever-clueless Andy Bernard. B-plot or no, this Andy-Angela-Dwight triangle is coming to a head, and I have no idea what’s going to happen. Dwight screwed his chances by duping his icy love—and just as she was realizing the mistake she made by choosing Andy—but will her religion permit her to get a divorce? Whatever happens, I’m sure Andy won’t know anything about it. He’s too busy stepping in cow pies to notice.

I’m digging the straddling of old and new Office dynamics these past few weeks. Let’s hope this run of great episodes lasts well past the holidays. I started the season worried about what was going to happen. Now, I’m more than happy to just let the writers “swallow their ideas… digest them, and see what comes out the other end.” I’m hoping for an all-butter cat.