The Office!
Wow! What a season finale. If you haven't seen it, go download it at itunes. I thought they would leave a lot of things unresolved -- they did in some sense I guess, but really, they gave us what we wanted. Read no further if you don't want to know what happened.
So what happens now? One idea: Jim and Pam go together to work at Dunder Mifflin corporate, or rather Jim goes to work there, and Pam does that graphic design internship they had offered her previously. How would things be resolved in Scranton? I have no idea, but I'd have to imagine Roy will want to crush Jim's skull at some point. How will Michael weigh in on this story of true love? It might be too deep of thing for him to wrap his sociopathic mind around. I just don't see how they could work into the plot everyone all staying in the Scranton office, so they will have to come up with some other way for the documentary makers to film everyone.
How good of a job did the writers do in leading us to think that Jan and Jim would hook up, both of them dejected after having opened themselves up in the name of love? Brilliant writing. But no, that final scene, the final scene that I never really expected, that I thought at best might be only implied, was what they left us with, Jim finally doing what we all wanted him to do. (And where did that happen anyway, was that in the office?) The big question for me: Pam talking to her mom, telling her about what Jim did, responding to something asked by her mom, says, "I think I am." What, Pam, what do you think you are?!? I love with Jim?
Will Michael find love with the realtor in Season 3? Will the season be all about how love, marriage, and fatherhood finally make him a man?
Anyway, it's amazing I have written all this about a TV show, this from a guy whose TV watching is really only the Sopranos and the Office, and Mets games of course. Here are some other people's thoughts:
Just to prove people are really talking a lot about this, here is a Technorati blog search engine search for
Jim and Pam.
TV Squad has an episode recap and also opines that the Office is "the best comedy on TV today."
The
LA Times has an interesting take: The Office is actually a replacement for The West Wing, in that it attracts the same kind of audience, though the "presidency" represented is not the West Wing liberal fantasy, but our current administration. Michael Scott is Dubya:
"Conflict Resolution" was the name of last week's episode, in which Michael resolves a simmering dispute between two employees by suggesting a cage match. "Cage matches? Yeah, they work, how could they not work?" he says to the camera. It's "The Office's" version of the Bush/Rumsfeld certainty about democracy in the Middle East: Freedom? How could freedom not work?
And
another article from The Sun Herald on the Office finding its place in the TV universe (after initially emerging as an Americanized clone of the British original)
So for those of you who have not seen all the episodes: see them this summer, and be ready for an awesome Season 3.
For those of you who have seen them all, any thoughts?