(Season 5, Episode 12 – “Prince Family Paper”)
What a fantastic blend of the emotional heart of this show with the unique humor that makes it so special. There’s nothing like The Office for taking something completely mundane and making it entertaining. Tonight, while the major story featured Michael and Dwight’s infiltration of a rival smaller paper company, the rest of the cast participated in that age-old debate. Is a chick hot … or not? Tonight’s candidate: Hilary Swank. I actually remember getting into this exact same debate about her shortly after her gender-bending performance in Boys Don’t Cry back in 1999.
And here we are ten years later still having the debate? And yet, Hilary Swank is one of those actresses where you can see why there would be some uncertainty. But the show did a great job of breaking it all down. Isn’t it interesting how it was Jim who tried to curb the entire debate early into it to get everybody to go back to work. Not that it worked, but Jim is certainly stepping up in the world of office responsibility. No longer the prankster playboy. Maybe he’s finally taking his potential career seriously.
Then you’ve got Michael, who’s clearly doing something right as evidenced by David Wallace’s praise last week. So this week, Wallace tasked Michael with finding out what he could about that aforementioned rival paper company. And giving credit where it’s due, Michael and Dwight came up with a pretty solid plan for finding out the dark secrets of Prince Family Paper. The problem is that while they’re coming from a very corporate environment at Dunder-Mifflin, they were completely unprepared for the family business environment of Prince.
One of the reasons that, despite everything he does, Michael remains a sympathetic character is the amount of heart he has. The guy’s an idiot in almost every social aspect possible, but he’s a good salesman and he genuinely cares. Sometimes too much. Of course there’s a moral quandary in the whole scenario laid out here. Dwight had it right in that business is business and handing over the list of top clients to David Wallace is the right thing to do for the sake of business.
But Michael lives in the world of emotions and heart. As viewers, I imagine we were as conflicted as the office was about Hilary Swank’s hotness when it came down to what Michael should do about the list. Many would take the way of emotion and humanity, like Michael, and say that they couldn’t destroy this overly nice family (great job on the duct taping of the bumper by the way). But as many others would see the business validity of using the information to go after Prince’s client base. It is business after all, and who can say definitively which is the right answer.
And I like that the show didn’t try to. Ultimately, Michael went with the business decision because, as Dwight pointed out, his heart hasn’t always led him down the smartest paths. It looks like the star of Michael Scott is indeed rising and maybe we’ll see him take on the regional manager role, at least temporarily. Jim seems more and more ready and willing to take on the day-to-day responsibilities around the office. I wonder if the show would work with this kind of a change in the management structure.
While last week’s revelations made for a good episode, I was very glad to see the return of humor heavily in this episode. We got impassioned speeches and presentations about the hot-or-not-ness of Hilary Swank from everyone in the office, and we got Michael and Dwight’s ridiculously effective subterfuge in the Prince Family Paper office. Everything was spot-on perfect Office. Looks like we’re ready for our Super Bowl close-up.
Clacked by Jason Hughes 
on Jan 23, 2009 @ 15:43 EST5EDT
