Season 4, Episode 9- Chairmodel

WARNING! WARNING! Major plot line SPOILERS discussed below! Continue AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Ok, are you sufficiently warned?

Alright, let’s continue.

This week’s episode finally put us back into the actual office, and was a return to form of sorts. It was also a “game changer” of an episode, and the rest of the season will springboard from this episode.

After last week’s dinner party, Michael and Jan are broken up – at least for now – and Michael is back out on the prowl. After becoming enamored with a model in an office furniture catalog, he demands that everyone in the office give him the number of a woman to be set-up with, or they’ll be fired.

Pam, eager to get him to move past this and pick a new chair, so she can get his old one, gives him the name of her landlord.

Meanwhile, Kevin and Andy are dealing with a parking issue that it plaguing the other office workers. Office park neighbors W.B. Jones are renovating their offices, and their construction guys are taking up parking spaces, forcing half of the Dunder-Mifflin employees to park in a satellite parking lot. If you ask Kevin and Andy, this is the single biggest issue facing the world today, and there is no possible way things can continue until this situation is corrected.

It’s a perfect look at what actually working in an office is like, because people really do flip out over stuff like this.

Michael calls up Pam’s landlord, and they meet at a coffee shop. When Michael sees her, and she’s not a super model, he goes into full “Michael Scott” mode, and makes you want to punch him in the face for treating that woman like dirt. They have an awkward conversation that ends with him calling her an old lady, and that’s about it.

It’s really, however, what this meeting sets up that is important. After Michael returns to the office, Jim jokingly goes up to Pam and mentions that she’s probably just been kicked out of her apartment. She jokingly responds that its ok, she’ll just move, then suggests that she should move in with her boyfriend since he’s a slob too. Jim immediately jumps on that with a “yes”, and Pam hesitates, responding that she won’t move in with someone unless she’s engaged.

Now, i honestly couldn’t tell if she was fishing for a proposal, making an excuse for not doing it, or making a general statement of something she believes. Like, that’s just her rule in general, and she has to stick by it for her to stick with her own moral code.

Jim doesn’t skip a beat, telling her that he’s going to propose…he’s just not going to tell her when…but when he does, he says “it’s going to kick your ass, Beasley.” She smiles and jokes with him like she isn’t sure if she can believe him or not.

Then as Jim walks away, there is a look on Pam’s face that is just unreadable. She looks nervous, and I can’t tell where this is going in the long run…the writer’s are either going to screw this whole thing up and break them apart over this, or just keep us hanging with a “did she say yes or no” season finale cliffhanger.

One thing we do know, is that Jim is serious. In his interview segment following the scene, he pulled out a ring and told us he bought it “a week after they started dating”.

Kevin and Andy’s story wraps up when they gather the five bosses of the office park, and demand their parking spaces back…they get them…and Kevin is very proud that he “finally got to win one”…and as silly as it is, I was proud of him too. Go Kevin!

Dwight promises to find the woman in the catalog upon his return…and quickly does some investigative work discovering she’s dead. Got high and wrecked her car. Tragic. Of course, Michael and Dwight have to go to her grave, which is apparently within driving distance of Dunder Mifflin.

There is one more Pam and Jim moment in the episode worth note, where – as they are walking back to their cars – Jim drops to one knee, looks up at a poker-faced Pam and says “Hey Pam will you… wait for me one second while I tie my shoe?” Pam’s reaction is, again, hard to read, because she seems disappointed, but they both laugh it off, and keep walking.

Where will this go? Feel free to speculate below…but if I’m going to keep watching the show, it better go to a happy place for once. I hate it when shows tease the “will they, won’t they stuff” for years, get the couple together for a few episodes, then break them up again…and I seriously hope the writer’s of the this show are more clever than that.