TV-Reviewed

The Office kept the season rolling with episode two of this fifth season when they put Michael in a very peculiar spot. With Jim and Pam having a baby, it’s nice to see that Jim is looking to advance in his career and decided to put in a plan for promotion with the company. If Jim didn’t get the job, he would leave and go somewhere else. Michael’s desperation to want to be part of everything was funny and his silly idea of spying on them was great because it actually worked. It’s just too bad he got there when the meeting was almost over.

The problem with Jim wanting a promotion was that there are not enough branches to give Jim his own branch, so they came up with a plan where there would be two managers for the Scranton branch. This put Michael in an awkward position because it would definitely change the dynamic of the office and technically Michael wouldn’t be the main man in charge and in an otherwise uncharacteristic move, Michael actually got David to reject Jim. I thought it was awesome and really showed just hot selfish Michael can be. However, Michael’s weakness about wanting to be liked came through when he was confronted by Jim.

Michael then calls back Wallace and ends up going along with the plan. To be honest, it felt like Michael was bullied in to the whole thing because of how was he going to tell Jim that he didn’t want him to get the promotion. This definitely will change the dynamic of the office now and I’m interested to see if Jim’s level-headed management will mix with Michael’s off-the-wall management style; this should definitely set up some interesting scenarios for the season.

Dwight and Toby playing detective and trying to figure out if Darryl was really hurt was funny as well. This was one of the few times where I was actually hoping that Dwight could prove that Darryl was committing fraud and sure enough he did. Well it looks like Darryl is probably still going to get his workers comp, but Dwight did a good job of solving the case. It was priceless to watch Toby yell out the window at Darryl only to find out that it was really his sister.

I liked this episode and having Jim as the co-manager is a really big risk because it’s really going to offset the dynamic of the group. I wonder if we’ll see Jim still playing tricks on Dwight. We can also guess that Dwight isn’t going to let this go, because he seems pretty pissed that Jim got the spot and he didn’t. I share Dwight’s confusion; I would have liked to have heard what makes Jim worthy of this spot over the rest of the sales team or accounting. Storyline-wise, having Dwight as co-manager would have been awful anyway, so it works best this way for now.  Now we get to see what Dunder-Mifflin will be like with two managers and I can bet you that it probably won’t end up too well, but we’ll at least get some hilarious moments out of it.

Rating: 8.5