Recap of The Office: "Safety Training"

I really don't know what to make of last night's episode. It was weird. It started off in a promising way, with Andy returning from anger management and taking some not-so-good-natured ribbing. But then he promptly disappears. What up with that, huh? What up? I sense that the show's writers didn't do so well in Wrapping Things Up 101. Maybe they were hungover. I don't know. I really don't want to speculate. But whatever the situation, maybe you guys want to get a GED in that or something? Try one of those correspondence schools. Get your degree in gun repair and wrapping up subplots, right in the comfort of your own home! It is a miraculous age that we are living in.

I was talking about something. Oh, right. The Office. Yeah, weird episode! In the middle, Darrell gives Michael and all the other office people a hard time for undergoing safety training for such a sterile, safe working environment, as opposed to their hard, dangerous warehouse workplace. And that's great. The white-people-are-so-lame humor angle is not played out. At all. That's not a horse that has been beaten to death by socks full of nickels, and then the lumpy corpse was flogged with paddles and left to dessicate in the sun, and then the bones were crushed into powder by a bulldozer, and then Keith Richards snorted the powder, and then a piano fell on Keith Richards' head and killed him, and he was cremated, and his ashes were sent into space, and the spaceship got lost in space. It's not like that at all. That is a verrrrry fresh angle.

But in any event, it leads to an ending I actually thought was kind of brilliant. Michael gets so upset over the belittling that he wants to show the warehouse guys how dangerous the office can be, so he decides to stage a mock suicide (to demonstrate the dangers of seasonal affective disorder), with him jumping off a building (Dwight rented a moonbounce for him to land in). Only he truly is depressed over Darrell's insult, and the office workers know he will be horribly injured if he jumps, so they end up talking him down, with Darrell finally having to tell Michael how brave he thinks he is. Everything up to that sort of sucked, but the ending was so clever that it made up for it. So what they hey. I'll give the episode a thumbs up.

Hyperlinks:
- The Office [NBC]
- Previous recap of The Office [No One Appreciates Me]

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