Jim arrives at the office, and Dwight gives him a "demerit" for being late. Dwight lectures Jim about not being above the law. Dwight explains the whole hierarchy of demerits, citations, violations, verbal warnings, and written warnings, culminating in a disciplinary review for Dwight's immediate superior. "Which would be me," Jim points out, and demands a copy on his desk by the end of the day, lest Dwight receive a full desaggelation. What's that? "Oh, you don't want to know," Jim threatens darkly. Dwight looks terrified.
Phyllis comes into the office, looking even more upset and sad than usual. "I think I just got flashed," says Phyllis. Everyone gathers around, as Dwight dashes out to the parking lot to chase the perp. "Okay, I'll call the real police," Jim offers. Andy comes in offering to help. "I'll check the web," he says when no one answers. Jim says that the police have already gotten three calls, which means that, right now, Scranton's version of Elliot Stabler is already taking it personally. Phyllis tells her story: there was a guy with a map asking for directions, and when Phyllis went over to help, he had "it" out on the map. "You're a married woman!" Angela admonishes Phyllis, like this is somehow her fault. Creed wonders what the big deal is about "hanging brain." "If that's flashing, then lock me up," he THs. Capital idea!
A bit later, people are still talking about the incident when Michael comes in and senses the weird energy. He seems genuinely concerned when he hears what happened, and it's good that Bob Vance is taking Phyllis out for a walk, because Michael starts rudely snickering about Phyllis being the victim: "Did he even see Pam? Or Karen from behind?" He cracks up, and everybody -- even Andy -- just looks at Michael in disgust. Which he doesn't help matters by turning around, unzipping his fly, and poking his finger out through it and waving it around like a quintuple-sized version of his actual. Michael's like this when Toby comes in, and obnoxiously simulates...well, whatever the opposite of a Cialis moment would be. He basically accuses Toby of being the flasher, and when Toby says that he was at a parent-teacher conference, Michael says, "Prove it. Let's see your penis!" Long pause. "You know, as that was coming out of my mouth, I knew that it was wrong." That's what she said.
Michael THs that it's his job to keep people safe, because otherwise women can't have fun. As an example, he tells us his and Jan's safe word: "foliage." "Although last time, she pretended she didn't hear me," Michael adds.
Speaking of which, Jan is on Michael's speakerphone, asking him to drive over and saying she'll give him $200 for gas. No? How about $300? She'll even leave it on the dresser for him. Michael is evasive, but Jan just wants to know the plan so that her assistant can get more vodka. "Hunter, are you on?" "Got it, Jan," we hear Hunter say. Oh, man. I think I just became a Pam/Hunter shipper, just so we can watch them sit and compare stories.
Dwight uses his broom-stake to flush the hedges bordering the parking lot. "Better a thousand men are locked up than a guilty man go free," he speechifies.
And later, Dwight comes into Michael's office, having compiled a folder of penis photographs for Phyllis to look over, Michael not only thinks that's a bad idea, he asks, "Dwight, are those your pants? That's a Polaroid." Dwight wisely crumples up the photo in question.
Out in the bullpen, Dwight announces the formation of an emergency anti-flashing task force. "Won't that interfere with your other task forces?" Jim wonders. Dwight assures Jim that this task force will have top priority. He explains that he's asking the office park to install security cameras and floodlights, which is actually a good idea. "Now, I know what you're thinking," says Dwight. "Won't that shed more light on the penises? But that's a risk we have to take." Dwight also asks Pam to work with Phyllis to draw a composite sketch of the suspect, although he accidentally pronounces her name "Phallus." "Sorry, I've got penises on the brain," Dwight apologizes.
Pam THs that she almost wishes someone had flashed her when she was with Roy: "That would have been the ass-kicking of the year. Especially if it had been Jim. He would not have wanted me to see Jim's...whoa, I am saying a lot of things."
In the conference room, Phyllis admits that she didn't get a good look at the guy, so this isn't going to accomplish much. Pam doesn't mind; she just doesn't want to be on the phones. Karen comes in with a memo from Dwight, basically putting the women of the office under what amounts to some form of fundamentalist law. When Dwight enters to announce that he's removing all the bananas from the kitchen, Karen complains to him about the memo. "'Sleeves down to the wrist, buttoned-up collars and muted colors'?" Pam reads. "No one dresses like that." Yeah, Pam hardly ever buttons up her collar. Michael comes out and takes the women's side, even going out of his way to encourage Pam to show more cleavage, because he is just that enlightened. Karen asks for more respect, which Michael can't spell, not that that stops him from quoting Aretha. He calls a women's appreciation meeting in the conference room in five minutes.
Cut to the meeting, in which Michael talks about the seriousness of flashing. "When Meredith flashed me at the Christmas party, I nearly vomited." Meredith non-denies that she doesn't remember that. "What a surprise," Angela snits. "No catfights, please," Michael says, woman-appreciatively. He goes on about the right and wrong contexts for seeing a penis, and then says he wants to talk about women's issues. He talks about the media portraying women as "skinny tall goddesses." Which, he says, is not the case. "Even the hot ones aren't really that skinny," he says, pointing to Pam, who's too busy deciding whether to object to being called "hot" or "not that skinny" by her boss to actually say anything. He complains about how much society sucks for imposing these expectations on women. Because Andy is not just a suck-up but also knows his Dove ads, he chimes in to say that the women of the office should be the fashion models. Kevin heartily agrees, drooling, "Then the fashion models could come here and work with me." Karen uses the word "misogynistic," which Michael doesn't really understand. Phyllis reminds Michael of the time he asked if she was a lesbian after she got her hair cut short, and Angela says he always asks them if they're on their periods whenever they get mad. "I have to know whether you're serious or not," Michael protests. Dwight says he wishes he could menstruate. People just want to get back to work, but Michael decides that what they're going to do is relocate this discussion to a less male-dominated environment. Namely the Steamtown Mall. Everyone rolls his or her eyes except Kelly, who beams happily.
Michael leads out the "Ladies of Dunder Mifflin," deciding to have a calendar printed and asking Pam, "Put that in my 'good idea' folder." That must be one skinny folder. Before Pam leaves, Dwight asks her for the suspect sketch she came up with. Pam hands it over. And moments later, scores of flyers labeled "THIS MAN IS A PERVERT are coming off the copier, over Dwight's name, phone number, and....face. Although he has a moustache in the sketch. "I plan on plastering this pervert's face everywhere," Dwight boasts, holding one of the posters up to his own face. This show does enjoy its little Zaphod Beeblebrox moments, doesn't it?
The women plus Michael ride in Meredith's van, Angela yelling at her to slow down. Meredith downs a bag of chips and tosses the bag out the window. When Pam protests the littering, Meredith sullenly replies, "My car, my rules." You can see why her kid is such a sweetheart.
Back at the office, Kevin invites Jim to join him for an expedition into the women's bathroom. Jim passes, but Kevin goes ahead. "Oh my GOD!" he exclaims from inside, like he just opened the Ark of the Covenant.
In his flasher-hunting project, Dwight has drafted Andy, who appreciates the opportunity. "Of course you do, moonface," Dwight says contemptuously. "That's because you're a preppy freak, you're the office pariah, and nobody likes you." Andy's anger at Dwight's rudeness gets a lot easier to manage when he gets a load of the posters Dwight wants him to help hang up.
At the mall's parking ramp, Meredith has had everyone get out of the van so that she can park in a narrow spot. But she still can't quite pull it off, scraping her paint on the bumper of the car in the adjacent slot. Somewhere, Michael's sense of occasion wakes up from its long nap and reminds him to say the exact opposite of what he's thinking right now: "Many women are competent drivers."
Dwight sticks a pushpin into Scranton on a state map in the conference room and tells Andy, "This is what we know." More true than he realizes.
Jim stands corrected, because the women's bathroom is awesome. Candles, couches, magazines, fresh fruit, a little Zen waterfall. Toby and Ryan have also joined them for this little visit to bathroom luxury. The subject of Jim's six-month anniversary with Karen comes up, and Ryan -- surprised (or just projecting) -- says he figured Jim and Karen were just hooking up. Jim corrects him. Ryan admits something about an email he sent to Karen, which Jim already knew about. "I wouldn't want to be in an office relationship anyway," Ryan face-saves, as Kevin snickers from behind his Elle.
At the Steamtown Mall food court, Michael brings the ladies drinks and offers to dish. Nobody dishes. So he has to come up with his own topic, namely, "What is a pap smear?" Well, that did the trick: Pam quickly comes up with another subject, asking Kelly how things are with Ryan. Kelly gives a dismayingly ambivalent answer that contains both the words "awesome" and "awful" and not a great deal else. Michael asks the ladies about role-playing, and they're not as skeeved out by the question as you might expect. "Jan has this schoolgirl fantasy," he admits. Karen says that's common, but Michael says, "It's just...I feel uncomfortable wearing the dress." And with that, Angela's off to do some clothes-shopping at the doll store. "Sometimes the clothes at Gap Kids are just too flashy," she THs.
Back at the food court, Pam is saying that Michael shouldn't do anything that makes him uncomfortable. Michael says that he's just different from Jan; he likes cuddling and spooning, whereas she likes taping their sex, using it to critique Michael's form, and showing it to her therapist. I would wonder how Michael is able to perform at all in such circumstances, but after seeing earlier what he can do with his finger, I have a theory. It's too gross to share, though, so I'll just leave it alone. Pam tells Michael to get out of the relationship. He downplays it as a woman thing. "Normal women don't do stuff like that," Pam insists. "This is bad." Michael looks around at all the concerned faces surrounding him, and suddenly he's crying. "You guys, what am I gonna do about Jan?"
Michael spent the commercials making a list of Jan's pros and cons. The pros you already know about. The cons? "Wears too much makeup. Breasts not anything to write home about. Insecure about body." How can both of those last two be true? Michael continues, "I'm unhappy when I'm with her. Flat-chested." Everyone seizes on that second-to-last one. "I'm happy sometimes," Michael says, "like when we're scrapbooking." Karen projects that sometimes you have to push through the rough patches. But Pam -- who has broken up with Roy not once but twice -- thinks that Michael and Jan are just wrong for each other. Michael is torn. Phyllis tells him to answer without thinking: what does he want to do? Michael immediately answers that he wants to break up with Jan. He's amazed that he said it, and that it's true. "My mom taught me that," Phyllis says proudly.
Afterward, the group passes the Victoria's Secret, and Michael wants to buy everyone some underwear. He means it as a gesture of gratitude, so I feel kind of bad busting on him for picking a place with poor-quality bras. Oh, and for OFFERING TO BUY HIS FEMALE EMPLOYEES UNDERWEAR. He says that most women are cavemen, but he's different: "A woman looks best when she is just absolutely naked." Who knew Michael was so evolved?
Back at the office, the guys are still hanging in the women's bathroom; Jim is even napping. Suddenly, Creed comes in, scandalized by their presence. "You're in here," Kevin points out. "I pay for that privilege," Creed says, ducking into a stall. Hangout time's over. Afterward, with his headphones on, Creed yelling-heads that the one weird thing about him is that he craps in the women's room: "I've been caught several times, and I have paid dearly."
Michael sits near Angela in Victoria's Secret, going down a long, upsettingly specific list of items she can get, on him, while she sits there fuming silently and possibly even having a crisis of faith. Meanwhile, Karen shows Phyllis a lime-green bra and panties set, and Phyllis approves. "Jim's gonna love it," she says with a disturbing amount of confidence. Yes, Pam saw that. She says that, being between boyfriends, she doesn't really need any saucy unmentionables. However, she does need new hand towels, so she shows us the hot-pink bathrobe she plans to cut up in order to make some. Remember how she gave her Dunder Mifflin bathrobe to Toby? I bet Toby would let her cut that one up. While he's wearing it.
On the drive back, Angela is yelling at Meredith again to slow down. Michael's cell phone rings. It's Jan. While Kelly bops along to Michael's "My Humps" ringtone, Karen advises Michael to answer it. Pam tells him not to. Again, Michael ends up listening to Pam. Or, more accurately, he just freezes until the phone stops ringing, which is really not the same thing as making a decision. Suddenly, a tire blows, and Meredith wrestles the van to the side of the road.
Jim enters the kitchen and, seeing the Dwight poster on the fridge, taps it and tells us, "That is pretty cool." I'm trying not to be irritated by Jim's condescending pride in Pam for figuring out a way to mess with Dwight all by herself, but it's not really working.
The away team is stranded on the side of the road. Kelly seems to expect Michael to "change the wheel," but since he knows less about changing tires than he does about jumpstarting a car, Pam takes over. Afterward, she proudly tells us about it, and adds, "This bathrobe's already coming in handy." She wipes her forehead, leaving a smudge, and runs to the van when Meredith honks the horn. Good for her, but you don't get to be that excited about your first tire change until you get to where you're going without its falling off.
Dwight and Andy close the gate to the parking lot, and put up some razor wire. Andy offers to share his candy bar with Dwight, but Dwight takes the whole thing. Andy gets his revenge by offering to hang up more posters around the neighborhood. Through a mouthful of Andy's chocolate, Dwight admits, "I may have underestimated you. You're not a total ass." Perhaps time, Dwight will estimate him.
Upon returning to the office, Michael decides to call Jan and break up with her. He asks Pam, Karen, and even Phyllis to join him. When he gets Jan's voicemail, Pam tells him, "Don't leave a mess--" Too late. So Jan will be getting a voicemail from Michael that goes as follows: "I'm just calling to say I think we need a little break. Permanently. And I know everybody says, this, but I want to remain friends, or at least business associates who get along. Just so you know, it's not me, it's you." And Jan walks into Michael's office. "Okay, buddy, someone just walked in," Michael says, and hangs up. The other women file out, and Jan closes the door so that she can apologize to Michael in person. Michael thanks her, and just like that, they're good. All better! Until Jan's cell phone vibrates, notifying her that she's got voicemail. She picks it up right away, saying, "You want to grab some dinner?" As Michael listens to what he just said muffled through Jan's head, he mutters, "Maybe some Italian? Chinese?" Jan's face falls, and she leaves without another word. Michael is so lucky the episode is almost over, or that would have been really ugly.
Michael THs that women are un-understandable. He tells us about the fountain at the mall, into which he tossed a coin and wished for Jan to get over him, and for a plasma TV for Phyllis. "I wished for Pam to gain courage" (as we see Pam rush to the elevator just in time to get on -- oops, with Jim and Karen). "And a heart for Angela and a brain for Kelly." He then asks himself how he can claim to appreciate women so much when he just dumped one: "You mean, how can I be so illogical and flighty and unpredictable and emotional? Well, maybe I learned something from women after all." Dude, don't blame an entire gender because you're you.
Jim calls Dwight and tells him over their respective desk phones that he knows where the flasher is: "I saw him two minutes ago. In the women's bathroom, above the sink." Dwight gets up and dashes straight there. "Anti-flashing task force!" he roars, bursting in. Luckily, he's alone in there. He looks above the sink, but there's nothing there but the mirror. Which he looks into, removing his glasses and holding his face so that the moustache drawn on the glass lines up with his upper lip. "Pam!" he bellows. Yes, Dwight just got the picture.