“The Office” has been on so long, they’re still finding old pranks Jim had elaborately constructed for Dwight years ago that he hadn’t found yet. Such was the case in the cold open when Dwight happens upon a treasure map from the company founder and follows its various clues to a secret golden chalice.
Jim, off to his other job in Philadelphia, remembers the gag from several years ago but can’t remember whether there was a treasure at the end or not. While a group tears up the warehouse looking for it, the new warehouse supervisor quietly has a donut and sips from his … golden chalice!
This is all in the cold open, and most of the episode this week has to do with Jim’s absence in Philadelphia. He can’t go to his daughter’s recital (and since when is she old enough to be a dancing ladybug?) and Pam, professing knowledge how to capture the moment for him by shooting video with her phone (“I can point a rectangle”) she messes it up anyway by taking a call during the performance (she’s been hired to do a mural for the local Irish American cultural center).
There’s no love lost between Dwight and Jim, yet Dwight gets very annoyed when he finds that Darryl has plans on getting a job at Jim’s new company as well. First Dwight tries to trick remaining employees to sign a loyalty oath, then he holds an office seminar on company loyalty.
Nellie takes the opportunity to twist the whole loyalty question toward personal relationships. She had paired Erin and Pete to do a Dunder-Mifflin social media site (mostly made up of a fake Facebook page with fake friends), but seeing the chemistry between them, she fears she’ll be blamed for their inevitable hookup by her boss Andy.
So she does what she can to stop the budding relationship by bringing it out in the open at the meeting in hopes of preserving Andy’s relationship with Erin.
Nellie’s got her own relationship problem: an errant office kiss from Toby makes him think they’re a thing, so he’s doing all kinds of inappropriate neck rubs and such — very odd from the guy who has several volumes of sexual harassment policy on his desk.
Dwight tries another tack with Darryl, who says he wanted to leave because it would be more fun to work in a sports company. He tricks him into taking a truck out one afternoon so they can get fast food and throw it back at the drive-thru window guy (is this a thing? If not, I fear it will be now). It doesn’t work out, Darryl makes him go inside to clean the mess, but while doing so, Dwight himself is bombed by another prankster slinging a shake at him. When the moment is captured on YouTube, it is the one thing that makes stone-faced Darryl smile.
There’s still room in the episode for three more remarkable revelations. One is a not entirely convincing rift between Jim and Pam, fueled by his own frustration of struggling at his new job, their separation, his missing his daughter’s recital, etc. They have a big fight that ends up with Pam in tears. From the beginning the Jim-Pam relationship has been at the heart of “The Office” saga — a stab at unironic romance in the middle of the rest of the comedy. A kiss between them is just about the only thing left in the cut-down opening titles. Yet I don’t ever recall a moment of this kind of pathos, not even that year they were separated and Jim was in the Stamford office.
It’s such a dark moment that something that never happened in “The Office” in either the American or English version occurs — Pam reaches out to the cameraman and he answers, a camera turns on him (is it Chris Diamantopoulos, who played Moe in “The Three Stooges” movie?) as he comforts her and, even more shockingly, orders that they stop filming this particular invasion of privacy.
The whole office has been shooting reaction shots quietly to this crew as long as the show’s been going on. On one hand it’s no surprise to see them finally interacting. But to have them respond and be seen on camera themselves, well that’s really wild.
Not as wild as the cameo that was most out of character for the show, as one of Jim’s Philadelphia co-workers, with at least a couple speaking lines, turns out to be Ben Silverman, who has a producing credit on the show (he brought it over from England), and once ran the network.
To have him before the camera (and acting, badly) is just as shocking as seeing Jeff Zucker in “Fat Actress” several years after his own stint running NBC was over, or that forever unseen camera operator.