Conflict Resolution

S02E21

This is the one that hooked me.

At Reception, Kevin pitches his band to Pam for her wedding. In a TH, Jim insists that he doesn't mind constantly overhearing Pam talking about her wedding preparations. After all, she has to hear him talking about his social life (suuure she does), and they both have to listen to Dwight order deer urine. "So it evens out."

In the break room, Angela overhears Phyllis and Pam talking about Pam's save-the-date cards, and says she hasn't gotten hers yet. In an explanatory TH, Pam explains that she's not inviting everyone. "It's my wedding," she says, "and I don't want anyone there who has called me a hussy." Jeez, bridezilla much?

Michael accepts an unheard compliment from the producers on his Fantastic Sam's haircut and explains, "We're doing ID photos today. Gotta represent."

I should probably mention that the guy taking photos for the ID badges is being played by Scott Adsit. So please consider it mentioned. Phyllis prepares for her photo, and Dwight can't help noticing the amount of makeup she's wearing. "Is that a disguise or something?" he wonders. Dwight then THs that security badges are long overdue. He even tells us about the time he brought his potato gun into the office. "Can you imagine if I was deranged?" Well, I probably could, but I don't want to strain anything.

Michael's got Ryan in his office, trying to get him to swap neckties with him for the ID photo. "Let's...keep our clothes," Ryan says uncomfortably. Suddenly they're interrupted by the sound of Oscar freaking the fuck out all over Toby in the conference room door. Michael goes in to check it out, and Toby explains that he's just letting Oscar vent about something to do with Angela. Normally Toby uses the break room for stuff like this, but that's been commandeered by the ID photographer. Toby then pulls Michael aside and says that if he just listens, things like this have a way of working themselves out. "What do you know about conflict resolution?" Michael demands. "Your answer to everything is to get divorced." Michael calls Pam in to the conference room, and tells her to bring Angela along. He's taking over. Why work when he can humiliate Toby?

Michael starts this little Oscar vs. Angela session by opening a training manual and making everyone sit there impatiently while he starts describing the various conflict outcomes, beginning with number one, "lose-lose." Angela wants to skip right to number five, "win-win." Michael does her one better and offers "win-win-win," in which Michael also wins for having successfully mediated the conflict. In other words, Michael thinks he just got written permission to make this all about him. Which he normally has to muddle through without.

Michael comes out into the bullpen and asks who has filed a complaint. Almost everyone raises their hands. He follows up by asking if their complaints were resolved, or just listened to and forgotten. "Listened to and forgotten," everyone murmurs. So Michael has decided to resolve everything. He wants to start with Phyllis vs. Angela. "You already did me," Angela says. Jim lip-syncs Michael's "That's what she said." Michael pages through the file, pointing out that Angela has complained about everyone except Dwight, which makes her the only one. Before she and Dwight can get too uncomfortable, Michael asks Toby to define "redacted." The reason he asks is that there are a bunch of complaints against Dwight that were redacted six months ago. Dwight loudly wonders why anyone would do that. Spotting Angela's uncomfortable reaction, Pam comes to her rescue for some reason, stepping up and changing the subject to complaints against herself. There's only one in there, but it's withdrawn, so Michael wants to move on. But Pam can't let go of the idea that someone might have ever thought she's anything less than perfect, so she makes Michael read it: "Does she have to plan her wedding on office time? Shouldn't she do that at home?" With six months? Even I know that isn't enough time to plan a wedding, and I barely got to mine on time. Pam turns and gives Angela a look of betrayal. Angela just looks back at her like, "What?"

Pam THs that she's kept Angela's secret all this time, gave her a save-the-date card, and now this. "What the hell!" she fumes.

Michael gets to a complaint from Kelly. "'Ryan never returns my calls.' Join the club." Ryan tries to blame his voice mail. Kelly says she wants her complaint withdrawn. Toby agrees, "Fine, I'll take your name off, so no one will know." This last is directed pointedly at Michael, but it goes right over his head. Jim makes a heroic attempt to derail all this nonsense: he raises his hand and says that Dwight tried to kiss him, and he hadn't told anyone because he isn't sure how he felt about it. Dwight demands it be redacted, but Jim says he isn't making a formal complaint. "I just thought we should talk about it." Awesome. Dwight asks Toby something about the file in New York. "Sure," Toby lies. As Michael moves on to Stanley, Pam stands up and hisses at Angela, "Thanks for ratting me out." Angela denies it, but Pam doubts her, since the only one Angela hasn't complained about is "Bobblehead Joe." Meanwhile, Stanley denies filing the complaint that the men's room is whites-only, which it of course isn't. "Then why is there a picture of a white man on the door?" Creed demands. Moving along.

Michael unlocks the conference room door and emerges into a bullpen that's nearly abandoned. Completely abandoned, if you don't count the three people who are sitting there pissed off, glaring at nothing. Going through an inhabited but hostilely silent kitchen on his way to the break room for his ID photo, Michael compares the day's experiences to his understanding of shiatsu massage: painful and vomit-inducing while it's happening, but great when you're finished. As Michael sits for his photo, he sees through the glass wall to where Toby is nodding at him knowingly. Michael has the grace to look ashamed as the camera flashes.

Back in the conference room, Jim and Dwight are talking about Stamford. Jim jokingly suggests they both go, but Dwight says he has a girlfriend. "Sure you do," Jim mocks meanly. Michael returns, saying they'll get to the rest of the complaints later. Dwight doesn't want to be put off, but Michael manages it anyway.

If you're watching this on DVD, get ready to pause. As the photographer is on his way out, Michael stops him and asks for a group photo. The photographer will only do it if Michael pays him twenty bucks. Michael does it, and then gets everyone to gather in front of reception. He can't make them smile, though -- not in their current collective sour mood. So he ends up paying another twenty, and another, and another, trying to get a decent shot. While the group is posing, Pam decides this is the time to confront Angela, and Jim realizes that the only way to stop that is to confess that he was the one who complained about Pam's wedding planning on the clock. He tries to downplay it, saying he was just venting and he didn't know Toby was going to write it down, and then he took it back anyway. "Okay," Pam says stiffly, from the place where her heart used to be. "Oh, dear," Phyllis murmurs, apparently involuntarily. Shipper.

As the camera keeps flashing Andrew Jacksons right out of Michael's pocket, Michael VOs about the difficulty of getting a picture of fifteen people. Got your finger on the pause button? "But I'm sort of an expert at Photoshop, so it turned out fine in the end." Pause right now, on the shot that is the final product of Michael's "expertise." Michael looks fine, but everyone else has faces that are at the wrong angles, the wrong sizes, under the wrong lighting, and possibly cut from photos that were taken from the wrong photo shoot on the wrong day in the wrong universe. It's a Dali-esque nightmare, and it is glorious. Michael continues his content-free blathering about conflict and cage matches, as we see that Jim is at Corporate in New York, meeting with Jan. "Sometimes you have to open the cage," Michael concludes, "and that is something that Toby will never understand." Nice save, Michael.

We see all four of them -- Angela, Oscar, Michael, and Pam -- standing before the scary-ass poster that Toby got Angela for Christmas. Michael asks them to take turns describing their feelings about the poster. Angela talks about how much she likes it. "Come on, seriously. That?" says Michael as the impartial mediator. Oscar goes off again about how much he hates the poster, and Michael stops him when he gets to "Hard-core porno." He wants to brainstorm creative alternatives that are win-win. "Win," Pam adds. So she is paying attention. Michael decrees that in order to let Angela see it but not Oscar, they will make the poster into a t-shirt that Oscar wears. Win-win-win!

Creed sits for his ID photo. After the snap, Creed turns to the side in a practiced motion. He is nothing if not a pro.

Pam delivers an STD to Angela, who's glad to receive one, for about five seconds. "It's not my taste," she tells us.

Toby seems surprised to hear that Michael resolved the conflict, and pulls a full manila folder out of his desk to throw away one of the sheets inside. Seeing the stack of paper in there, Michael wants a gander at it. Toby refuses. "Now you and I have a conflict," Michael says. And it ends with Michael physically wrenching the folder from Toby's possession. "Had to use win-lose on that. It was not pretty," Michael admits to us. He asks Toby if that's everything. For some reason, Toby sighs, pulls a big storage box out from under his desk, and tells Michael, "It's all Dwight's."

Toby THs that he's got a standing appointment with Dwight every Friday at 4:00 so he can file grievances against Jim, which Toby then sends to a special file in New York. "That box is the special file in New York," Toby confesses to us. Another reason it sucks to be Toby: never getting to sneak out early for the weekend, because you just know Dwight takes a whole hour. Michael takes the folder and the Dwight box out past the break room door, where we see Oscar posing for his ID photo with the baby musicians poster draped over his front like a giant bib. He's going to get shot if he leaves the building looking like that, and not by another camera.

Michael and Pam are in the conference room, going through some seriously petty complaints between other people in the office. "You will notice that not one of these complaints is against me," Michael smugs.

Toby corrects that impression, showing us the fat accordion file that represents complaints against Michael for that year's first quarter alone. But it's not as bad as it could be; it's not like the folder is full of CD-ROMs.

Pam THs that she's kept Angela's secret all this time, gave her a save-the-date card, and now this. "What the hell!" she fumes.

Toby barely sits down for his photo, saying, "Just take it." The picture shows him already getting up to leave.

In the break room, Pam bitches to Jim about Angela, and he tries to talk her down. He asks her what Roy thinks. Pam says she tries not to bother him with this stuff. "You mean like your thoughts and feelings?" Jim asks, pretty boldly for him. "Yeah," Pam says cluelessly.

In the conference room, Michael gets tired of Angela and Phyllis sniping at each other over Angela's self-assigned parking space and declares it resolved. "I don't like you," Phyllis whispers at Angela. I think that may be the one positive thing Michael accomplishes today.

Ryan vs. Creed. Ryan has complained about Creed's "old man smell." Creed cops to it, explaining about the mung beans he grows on a damp paper towel in his desk drawer. "Very nutritious but they smell like death."

Michael resolves the problem of Kevin making sexually suggestive remarks to Angela that make her uncomfortable: "You will make sexually suggestive remarks to Kevin that make him uncomfortable." "I accept your decision," Kevin says instantly. Another win-win-win!

While Dwight waits to get his photo taken, Jim jokingly suggests getting theirs taken together, and they can walk in together every morning. "Smile," says the photographer. "No," says Dwight, and then THs that he never smiles if he can help it, since showing your teeth is a sign of submission in the primate world. "When someone smiles at me, all I see is a chimpanzee begging for its life." Which explains a great deal about his taste in girlfriends.

Jim hands Dwight his new security pass, fresh out of the laminating machine. Dwight is displeased. This is humongous," he says, holding up his little card floating in the middle of an 8 ½ by 11 sea of laminate sheeting. "I am not a security threat," Dwight adds. "And my middle name is Kurt. Not Fart." Jim smirks at the camera as Dwight goes straight to Toby with this fresh addition for Jim's file. "Talk to Michael, I gave him the box," Toby says distractedly. "What box?" Dwight demands. Busted!

Dwight bursts into Stanley vs. Phyllis and freaks out all over everyone, declaring either he or Jim has to be out by the end of the day, and Michael has to choose. Dwight runs back out clutching his complaint files, all girly elbows and shoulders flying in all directions.

After the ads, Dwight is in Michael's office, insisting that he's not bluffing. Michael tries to break the tension by laughing at Dwight's ID with him, but it doesn't work. Dwight storms out, and the camera zooms in on the giant "Dwight Fart Schrute" ID sitting on Michael's keyboard.

Back at his desk, Dwight is on the intranet, going through internal postings for Jim and whispering at him, "Transfer...transfer...". Like Jim would ever take that sales job in Stamford. Michael comes out of his office and announces how they're going to resolve this: cage match!

Michael THs to us, like we're the idiots, that of course cage matches work. "If they didn't work, everybody would still be in the cage." He is never more infuriating than when he's making sense.

Michael starts going through the giant stack of Dwight's complaints against Jim. You'll pardon me if transcribe each one, because this is my favorite sequence in The Office history, if not sitcom history.

Someone replaced all my pens and pencils with crayons. I suspect Jim Halpert.

Everyone has called me Dwayne all day. I think Jim Halpert paid them to.

Jim nods, and laughingly THs, "Five bucks each, and it was totally worth it."

This morning I found a bloody glove in my desk drawer, and Jim Halpert tried to convince me he committed murder. I think he may be the real murderer.

Jim Halpert said there was an abandoned infant in the women's room. When I went to save the child, I saw Meredith on the can.

Michael cringes in sympathy, as does Jim. He might have gone a little too far there.

This morning I knocked myself in the head with the phone. Michael looks at Dwight with obvious puzzlement as to how Jim could have had anything to do with that, but Jim explains that he gradually put more and more nickels in Dwight's handset and then just took them all out. Would have liked to see that one.

Every time I typed my name, it said "diapers." "Just a simple macro," Jim THs. I don't know, reassigning Dwight's keyboard values probably would have been simpler. Not that I've ever done that to anyone. "You know, these actually don't sound that funny, one after another," Jim confesses, a bit shamefacedly. He has never been more wrong.

By the end of the day, my desk was about two feet closer to the copier. Jim admits that he moved it an inch every time Dwight went to the bathroom. "And that's how I spent my entire day that day." Why so sad, Jim? Dwight's the one who has to pee two dozen times a day. Clearly his urologist did not deserve that tip.

Angela enters the kitchen to get something out of the fridge. Phyllis, who is just ahead of her, slams the refrigerator door, nearly taking off Angela's fingers. You guys, I'm worried about what this means for the party planning committee.

Speaking of Toby, we now see him carrying the Dwight vs. Jim box into the warehouse, where it joins a Raiders of the Lost Ark-sized depository of identical boxes. Wouldn't you love to spend a year flipping through those? Maybe they'll be included on a future Criterion DVD or something.