Episode 10 - Murder
14 February 2010
Review
Synopsis: The Wall Street Journal reports that Dunder Mifflin will soon declare bankruptcy. The whole office fears for their jobs. Michael decides that a murder mystery game will distract everyone from their problems. Jim thinks everyone should be working. Andy asks out Erin in character and she says yes. He then worries that she didn’t think he meant it and they end up cancelling what they had both thought was a real date.
The Good: Dunder Mifflin going broke is the most logical of plot developments. The show’s overall narrative has followed the decline of a specialist paper company in the modern market. Certainly this latest in a long series of company problems will drive the main plot along and might lead to the end of the The Office itself. It would make sense for the “documentary” to stop once the branch closed.
As ever Michael shows off his gift as a manager, which is to make the work place more fun than it might otherwise have been. It was a nice touch to have the scene where he was clearly vomiting upon hearing the news that he might lose his beloved job. His philosophy on how to ignore a problem fits his childish personality and it comes from both a selfish and selfless place inside him. He knows no good will come from worrying about losing his job, so why not have some fun. “Today is the hardest I have worked in a long long time” he says to Jim’s bemusement. But it was hard work for Michael, he believed so strongly that he was doing the right thing and he fought for it.
In general the murder mystery played out in a way which fit the characters. Andy’s skills with accents, Dwight taking it all too seriously (see Comic Highlight), Michael having to bribe Angela and Stanley into staying and so on. The Andy and Erin romance continues to stumble along and this was a clever way of delaying their inevitable relationship.
The Bad: This felt like a retread. It felt like one too many a time that Michael had resorted to a big childish game to avoid a serious issue. When he yelled at Jim to show how seriously he believed in the game, it didn’t have the emotional impact that was intended. Perhaps it was creative overuse of this idea. Or perhaps it is just that the company going bankrupt is too serious an idea for Michael’s distraction tactics to seem appropriate.
Some of the jokes didn’t land either. The writers often make Dwight look unnecessarily stupid. For a man who takes certain disciplines very seriously, he then has completely bizarre attitudes to other fields. Here both his karate and detective demonstrations made him out to be more stupid than was plausible. Oscar playing along with the Southern accents seemed really forced too. Why would he bother? As for Creed running away, implying that maybe he has had something to do with an actual murder is a joke too far. It just seemed predictable and implausible. The writing needs to keep his scheming on a more believable plane of reality or it seems too silly.
Comic Highlight: Several lines were fun but not particularly funny. Dwight may have had the best moment when, following Michael’s instructions exactly, he decided to get deep into his character: “Wait a minute, wait a minute! I’m the butler; you were listening in on that? Rich people! You think you can do anything you like to the servant class... I will poison your food!”
That’s what I said: A serious storyline collides with a very silly one. In a way what makes this fail is that we have had so many Michael madness ideas already this season. Almost every episode has revolved around him and his latest quirk of behaviour. This just felt a bit contrived as a result, as if any development in the world of The Office must lead to Michael hijacking everything. The show needs to spread the dramatic burden around and take a break from this formula for a few episodes.
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