The Office Review: Body Language
May 1, 2010 by Michael Pantozzi
Filed under Television
The Andy and Erin storyline takes a major backseat on this week’s episode, and I suppose this was appropriate since last week’s kind of took it to a plateau where it was starting to really dominate the show in a way.
This week finds Michael’s St. Patrick’s Day love interest from a few episodes back, Donna the bar manager, showing up to “buy some printers.” She shows up in a boob shirt, “with shoulder cut-outs,” as Pam adds at one point as a qualifier to the likelihood that Donna has in fact turned up out of her romantic interest in Michael.
Michael thus, throughout the bulk of the episode, makes repeated attempts to make out with Donna in the middle of highly inappropriate sales-oriented activities (at one point he slips split-second, subliminal frames of words such as “sex” into a PowerPoint sales pitch). These all fail, and whether or not she’s really interested in him thus becomes the matter of debate that drives the push and pull of the episode’s events.
Meanwhile Dwight tries to…well, what was he doing? It seems he was somehow in charge of alerting the minorities in the company to a new opportunity as a member of some kind of Sabre Minority Executive Board. And because Kelly, who he initially notified about the position, decides that she’s going to replace him in his current position with Ryan, he launches a campaign against her in favor of other minority employees (such as the Japanese warehouse employee/former surgeon, who also made his last appearance on the show in the St. Patrick’s Day episode; he’s just as hilarious in his ten seconds tops of screen time here as well). Tons of new, but not really all that clever racial comedy ensue. I attributed the vagary of this secondary storyline as a whole to the fact that it was probably just my inability to engage with it as much, because the contrast of strength in terms of the storytelling and the comedy was so grossly dwarfed by that of the primary.
Overall a wonky episode, comparatively, I thought. Oh well. Pobody’s nerfect.
Season 6, Episode 22: Body Language (originally aired April 29, 2010)
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Thursdays, 9/8C on NBC
Photograph courtesy of NBC Universal and Chris Haston.
