The Office: It’s Baby Time at Last
March 5, 2010 by Michael Pantozzi
Filed under Feature, feature overlay, Television
About forty minutes into this one-hour special, Pam Halpert gave birth to a baby girl. Immediately, flashbacks to the initial flirtation between Pam and her husband Jim that I witnessed five years ago (and the flirtation between Tim and Dawn on this show’s British predecessor/originator, which never made it anywhere near as far as its American counterpart) even earlier than that, coursed through my brain.
So this is where it so often goes, huh? To this cataclysmic event that Bill Murray’s character in Lost in Translation describes as something after which “your life as you know it…is gone.”
How then, did The Office (a show whose overall quantity of truly grave and serious content could fit onto the tip of a jello-mold-encased staple) handle such a thing?
The answer is: by doing what it does best. For no matter what the show’s subject matter is, it filters it through its tried and true system of stories carried along by the behavior of its characters; behavior that, though always outlandish and over the top, somehow comes across as doubtlessly truthful. It’s like a machine that always does the same thing every time, but somehow turns out products that are so enjoyable and digestible in their variations, that you often forget the machine is even there in the first place.
This episode in particular, though somewhat plagued by a slight technical clumsiness (“Part 1” and “Part 2” of this “whole” episode, with the exception of the main Jim and Pam thread, were so disconnected from one another that one who is expecting to follow a complete story from beginning to end might be a bit jarred), had something truly distinct about it. For no matter how many breastfeeding jokes, no matter how many cuts to Dwight’s taking over Jim and Pam’s house took place (or to Kevin’s courting of Erin out-awkwarding Andy’s courting of Erin), the tone of the show could not quite escape the magnitude of what was going on.
Catch it if you missed it. It’s pretty important.
Season 6, Episodes 17 and 18: The Delivery Parts 1 and 2 (originally aired March 4, 2010)
For more on The Office, click here.
Thursdays, 9/8C on NBC
Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal and Justin Lubin.
How else could you explain those T-shirts abercrombie women both introduced into and pulled from stores last week?
The most offensive shirt featured two smiling, slant-eyed gents with pointy bamboo rice-paddy hats, presumably the proprietors of the Wong Brothers Laundry Service.
Their motto: “Two Wongs Can Make it White.”