The Office - The Seminar recap/review

This week’s episode should get a good review just for having a surprise Ricky Gervais cameo. He and Michael met at an elevator and had a zany conversation about good comedy. We wish the show wasn’t just teasing us and that Ricky would stay a little longer, but we will take what we can get. That said, that moment could have been written better. It wasn’t as funny as we wanted it to be. The point of it was to make us all go, “Oh look! The guy from the British version of The Office! He’s the British Michael!”

Andy held a small business seminar in the conference room to increase his sales. He recruited some of the people from the office to help (Stanley, Phyllis, and Dwight), but they bailed when they saw that the attendees were mostly duds. Jim bailed when he saw a childhood friend in the conference room. His mother had tried to limit their interactions because Jim was in a higher reading group at school than his little friend. In elementary school, Jim told his friend that his mom said they couldn’t hang out because he was dumber than Jim. Embarrassed at his past rudeness, Jim wanted to avoid the adult version of this boy. He spent most of the day in the parking lot and ended up running into the man anyway. The man mocked Jim for working at a paper company and joked about Jim being a genius. It was awkward, but we liked it.

Erin spent most of the day trying to beat Gabe at Scrabble on their phones. Whoever wins these games gets to pick the movie the couple watches. Gabe had won all past games, obviously, and kept making her watch horror movies. Erin wanted to watch Wall-E. Oscar and Pam tried to help her win this time, but she lost anyway. Erin is so dumb. But this time, she was actually kind of cute. After she lost, Gabe decided to compromise by getting a horror movie that featured a robot. Sort of like Wall-E. Then Andy stopped by and handed her Shrek 2 to borrow. Hopefully he gets her back soon. Or she dies. And he dies. One day, maybe, we will learn to love Andy and Erin, but right now, they are our least favorite characters.

Andy got Kevin, Creed, and Kelly to step in. Kevin trying to fire up the people at the conference was a laugh-out-loud montage of hilarity. And we love Kelly branding herself the “Business Bitch.” Michael pretended to be Greek all day (with an accent that sounded more Italian) and he spent a lot of time trying to get Holly to join him. Holly caved and became Greek too, and both she and Michael served as “plants” in the conference to start people buying Andy’s sales package. Stanley, Phyllis, and Dwight wanted back in on the deal when they found out that Andy’s conference was going well, but Darryl told Andy that they were users and to refuse them. Andy ended up making three sales.

Not enough Dwight for our liking, but this was still a decent episode. It isn't as good as the ones written by Mindy Kaling recently, but it continued The Office's streak of watchability. We think that the loss of Mindy Kaling and Kelly could actually be more devastating for us than the loss of Michael Scott ... We hope that Mindy's statement about possibly leaving the show turns out to be an empty musing.

Grade: B