Best Of The Office: "Branch Wars"

A note before I begin: NBC kind of sucks. Don't freak out, now - I love them for their programming. But they immediately pull any clips from The Office from YouTube, and they just recently shut down their own YouTube page. Which leaves me absolutely no resource to give you Office clips until NBC's fancy new Hulu site launches. Or until they give me access to their beta site. So this recap is going to be picture-filled. Sorry. Moving on.

"Branch Wars" did some smart things, and some stupid things. Now I will list two of each.

Smart Things:

1. Centering the episode around Stanley. Leslie David Baker gets underappreciated a lot on The Office, and this is really unfortunate. In this week's episode, we saw him all the time, as the plot centered around Karen (the new regional manager at Dunder Mifflin's Utica Branch), trying to recruit Stanley to work for her. Of course, Michael can't handle this, because "you can't take away the hilarious black man from the office." Stanley's reaction to this? See the picture on the right. This is typically his reaction to everything.

2) Bringing Karen back the right way. When I saw in promos that Karen was returning, I thought, "Oh, no. This can't be good for Jim and Pam." But you know what? I was really glad to see Rashida Jones again. I was also glad the writers decided to make things not okay with Karen and Jim. Karen definitely has the right to be bitter after the way Jim treated her, and she's getting her revenge by showing off her great new job, and hot new secretary (oh snap, Pam!).

Stupid Things:

1) Those mustaches. How slapstick can The Office get? I really think this is an example of taking things too far. Like Michael driving into the lake because the GPS told him to, or Michael starting the Fun Run. This week? Michael and Dwight trick Jim into driving to Utica to pull the ultimate prank on Karen. Jim is obviously not cool with this, and neither was I. I really did not see the humor in it, except when Dwight tried to pee in an aluminum can, and said "I think I cut my penis on the lid." Gah! Thinking about Dwight's penis is something nobody should ever do. Except Angela, obviously.

2) Not showing us The Finer Things Club sooner! I know I'm kind of cheating with this one, but this is pure genius. The fact that once a month, Pam, Oscar (in "the gayest thing about (him)"), and Toby (who clearly is just in it for quality Pam time) discuss art and literature over finger sandwiches is just too good to be true. Add in the fact that Andy desperately wants to get in because it's "exclusive" just adds to it. Oh, The Office is just like lower school. And that's what I love about it.