Jan is chairing a meeting in the DM-Scranton conference room with Pam, Angela, Kelly, Phyllis, and Meredith. What do all those people have in common? Whatever you do, don't ask Dwight. Pam THs that she doesn't know what the deal is with the whole "Women In The Workplace" thing Jan is foisting on them, but she does know that Michael isn't invited. Naturally, Michael crashes the meeting with some of his bullshit that poorly hides the fact that he's really worried about the break room being turned into a "lactation room" like in Albany. Wait until Hannah gets here, Michael. Jan kicks Michael out. In a TH, Michael clearly is being driven crazy by being excluded, and naturally worries about the possibility that the women are all talking and complaining about him. Which explains why we just saw him making sure that they would. Jan tries to get her meeting back on track, and Pam quietly interrupts to tell her Michael's still lurking outside the open door. "Michael!" Jan snaps, sending him scampering.
The whole thing seems to be freaking out Jim and Dwight too, although to widely varying degrees. Jim's vague fears are put to rest by turning and getting a Pam eye-roll through the open door. Whereas Dwight frets about the women's menstruation cycles getting into sync.
Michael decides to fight fire with fire, and calls a meeting of the guys right outside the conference room. He has them all clap for no other reason than to make a lot of noise, which draws an irate Jan out of the conference room to tell them to go somewhere else. "We have nowhere else, Jan," Michael victims. But when Dwight suggests the warehouse, Jan jumps right on that idea and sends them on their way. As she snaps the blinds shut behind him, Michael realizes that the warehouse is, after all, the perfect place to make his point, whatever that point may eventually turn out to be. As he blathers on about the manliness of it all, he leads the guys out in single file. Except that Toby, at the end of the line, drops off and closes the door, looking at us with a conspiratorial finger to his lips. "Managing the warehouse is a very important part of my job," Michael THs, "and I haven't been there in months."
The office guys enter the warehouse with some trepidation. Except for Dwight, who quietly smirks at us, "Remember on Lost, when they met the Others?" Actually, no.
Back in Jan's woman-empowering meeting, she asks Pam to take notes. See how ironic that is? Jan should have made Michael do that. Except the conference room doesn't have a one-way sound isolation booth, so that probably wouldn't have worked.
Down in the warehouse, Michael is introducing us to Darryl and Roy as though we've never met them before. This actually provides a convenient cover for Kevin to come up behind Jim and quietly speculate that Roy will try to beat up Jim for liking Pam. "I got your back if he does," Kevin promises. He then immediately regrets it and adds, "But try to stay out of it." He says that, but I wouldn't want to find myself in a cage match with Brian Baumgartner. Dude's probably a human wrecking ball. Meanwhile, as the warehouse guys and the office guys meet into the middle of the warehouse floor like they're about to perform the "Beat It" video, Michael starts out this little summit by saying that he sees no difference between white-collar and blue-collar, because he's "collar-blind." That might explain why he never sees the rope with which he's constantly hanging himself.
Upstairs, Jan is trying to build the women's confidence by having them take turns saying what they're good at. Meredith stops in mid-AA intro to say she's good at supplier relations. Phyllis is good at computer stuff. "Really?" Angela says waspishly, sending Phyllis into one of her trademark self-esteem tailspins.
Pam does a TH in the break room. I'm sure it's a coincidence that the sign on the women's room door is clearly visible over her shoulder. She says she's not getting much out of the seminar, and slowly realizes that instead of the women, the person in the office she has the most in common with is...
"Jim! Halpert!" Roy growls at Jim. He's heard the rumors, and he's cool with it, since it's over. In fact, Roy appreciates the fact that Pam has someone to talk to at work, "So she's not all 'bap, bap bap bap' when she gets home." "Yeah, I like talking to her too," Jim passive-aggressives right over Roy's head. So it's all good. In the background, Kevin is spectacularly relieved.
Darryl suggests to Michael that they switch places, but Michael would rather get his office guys to work unloading the trucks. Which they do, led by Dwight. Suddenly, Michael spots an old friend -- the blow-up doll -- hanging from a storage rack. He takes it down to...get reacquainted, I guess. But she's changed. In fact, she's now got a life-sized photo of Michael's face pasted on the front of her head. Michael's a bit thrown, but then takes a moment to pose for the cameras with his latex doppelganger. The two-Michael-heads illusion is a lot more convincing here than it is with his Halloween costume.
Jan's meeting is not going so great. During a break, she THs that the idea of these sessions is "to see if there are any standouts; women who could be a good addition to our corporate life." And then she offers a spectacular demonstration of the act of Stopping Right There.
While schlepping boxes, Dwight tries to get the guys talking about guy stuff and opens the floor for suggestions on a topic. Ponies? asks Jim. Ryan suggests rainbows. Jim tries flowers. Somehow it's funnier to have the two of them tag-teaming Dwight like this without even looking at each other. Just like last week, Ryan steps seamlessly into Pam's role. Is that too much of a stretch? That's a rhetorical question. Please don't send me any slashfic.
Michael is at the controls of the forklift, using it to move one single box of paper. He ignores an increasingly panicked Darryl's entreaties to get off it, until Michael clips a big freestanding storage shelf and knocks it over, as well as the one to it. "We'll get someone to clean that up," Michael promises as he sheepishly dismounts, to the guys who have to clean it up. "We have to get this thing serviced," he adds, because it's the forklift's fault that he's an idiot.
Back from ads, Michael's got the guys sitting around in a circle. He's shed his tie and jacket, and has undone no less than four shirt buttons. I'm glad to see that Steve Carell's "man o'lantern" patches from the 40-Year-Old Virgin shoot have grown back. He talks about how much the two groups of guys actually have in common, including liking some of the same girls as he points at Jim and Roy. The warehouse's one female asks if he wants her to go. Michael, who has clearly not noticed her until now (she's not especially...girly), says she doesn't have to, but she goes anyway. Good call. I wonder how many of the guys still there would be willing to trade places with her.
In Jan's meeting, they're apparently talking about their dreams and goals, which have a distressingly (to Jan, at least) domestic bent. When Pam's turn comes, she talks about wanting a house with a terrace upstairs where she can plant flowers, and she loves to draw. She'd like to get into graphic design someday. Jan seizes on this and says the company is offering a design training program in New York. Really? That doesn't sound like the Dunder Mifflin we know. Pam starts making excuses, until Jan interrupts with, "There's always a million reasons not to do something." Pam swallows and accepts the brochure Jan offers her. Although at this point, she's only 10% interested in the thing and 90% scared of saying no to Jan. Which, to be fair, is 9% more courage than I would have at this point in Jan's character arc.
Michael is trying to lead a gripe session, which, since most of the griping is about him, doesn't go the way he expects it to. One of the warehouse guys calls him "Hasselhoff." Michael is actually kind of likable as he recognizes the ribbing and takes it in good stride. He's even more likable when he starts buttoning up his shirt.
Speaking of which, Jan says it's time to talk about clothes. "Dress for the job you want, not the job you have." Angela THs that apparently, "Jan aspires to be a whore." Ouch!
Roy complains about girls wanting to go out for dinner, and also on dates. The other guys relate. Dwight adds that they want a ride to church the morning too. Nobody relates to that. Michael is trying to commiserate with the warehouse guys, but Darryl is suddenly making the point that in the warehouse, they get much lower pay than the guys in the office. Roy throws in a complaint about the benefits. And suddenly the warehouse guys are talking union. Michael tries to defuse this, but when Darryl directly asks Michael if he's with them on this, he can't refuse. Darryl shakes his hand and leads a chant of Michael's name, while Michael thinks about all the times he's imagined moments like this and how this one is really wrong.
After the ads, Michael comes upstairs and interrupts Jan's meeting again, this time to tell her about the union talk that's blossoming downstairs. He THs about knowing how to talk to women, which he demonstrates by telling Jan not to get hysterical and addressing her like she's a skittish horse. Jan says that everyone will lose their job if a union happens, and he needs to fix this. Michael doesn't wanna -- he's afraid to wreck one of the few times when people actually like him. He wants Jan to take care of it instead. When she refuses, Michael makes it a hundred times worse by quietly trying to appeal to their "history." With gritted teeth, she orders him to shut it and get back downstairs.
In the warehouse, Ryan suggests an assembly line to make things more efficient, and Stanley firmly corrects him that they're running out the clock. "Just like upstairs." I think we just learned more about Stanley than Michael has assumed about him in the entire series run.
Jan is going over commonly-used sports metaphors, because guys use them in the office and chicks don't get them. While Pam tunes out by drawing her house with the terrace, Kelly innocently asks what "second base" means, in the context of Michael having said he got to second base with Jan. Jan gets flustered and acts like she doesn't know what Kelly's talking about. Kelly secretly tips the secondary camera a wink.
Meanwhile, Pam excuses herself when she sees Jim outside the room, checking his voice mail. "We watched a video about our changing bodies," she deadpans so effectively that Jim almost believes her for a minute. She tells Jim about the design thing, which Jim thinks is a great idea.
So how is Michael doing with the union-busting in the warehouse? Well, we see him throwing several cubic yards of Styrofoam packing peanuts into the industrial fan so he can pretend it's snowing. "You ever do this?" he asks Darryl. It's apparent from Darryl's face that he's thinking about a famous movie scene that also has snow and whirling blades, and that scene is from Fargo.
The women have finally turned on Jan, quizzing about her divorce and, in Kelly's case, why she "did that thing with Michael." Jan calls a break.
She goes down to the warehouse and asks Michael if he's "taken care of it" yet. He lies, badly that he has. So without even coming all the way down the steps to the warehouse floor, Jan takes control of the room and announces in no uncertain terms that unionizing is a really bad idea. It killed the Pittsfield branch, and if they even think about it here, they'll be screwed. If they have any more questions, they can ask Michael, who is now hiding. Jan leaves, invigorated. Because why deal with the fallout from the worst move of your romantic life (so far) when you can go crush an insurrection single-handedly instead?
Upstairs, Roy is clearly being an asshole to Pam about the design thing. We can't hear what he's saying, but it's obvious that he's shot the idea down as he hands the brochure back to her. Would he be so unsupportive if he himself hadn't just gotten kicked in his aspirational nuts? Doesn't matter. Meanwhile, Pam THs about dreams just being something to get you through the day. Like that house with the terrace and the flowers, which she read about in a book when she was twelve.
Jim comes and finds Pam in the break room, able to tell from her body language that she's not going anywhere. "Why not?" he asks, almost as disappointed as she is. "You gotta take a chance on something, sometime, Pam. I mean, do you want to be a receptionist here, always?" Pam gets pretty owly with him. And then she THs about how impractical it all is anyway. "They don't even make houses like that in Scranton. So, I mean, I'm never gonna..." And then her face crumples and she melts into tears. Stupid Roy.
Michael is back at the wheel of the forklift, doing to the warehouse what the Who used to do to hotel rooms. As crashes echo through the space, the woman erases the "936" on the lost-time accident board and replaces it with a big old goose egg. 936 days? Michael said it had only been months since his last visit.
Michael accepts delivery of a stack of pizzas, hoping it'll smooth things over, because everyone likes pizza. "Do black people like pizza?" he reconsiders. As everyone sits around eating it in silence, Michael says that Jan can be a bitch sometimes. When everyone agrees, he shushes them, saying they have a relationship. The office guys leave the trashed warehouse, as Darryl warns from below that "this isn't over!"
Everyone returns to their normal places in the office (and Jan crosses the parking lot) as Michael THs about how you need a gender mix in the workplace, because sexual tension fuels productivity or something. Speaking of which, Jim watches Pam answer the phone. Like she always has. Like she always will.
And to lighten things up after that downer ending, the tag brings us back in time to the warehouse visit. Dwight makes a Styrofoam-peanut angel in the pile on the floor as Darryl stares blankly into the camera, the only thing currently preventing him from committing murder.