Michael is all excited about throwing a baby shower for the child Jan is having with an anonymous sperm donor, even if he's less excited about Phyllis's performance as the new head of the Party Planning Committee. He's even planning to freeze out his office crushes, Holly and Ryan, to spare Jan's "bloated feelings." So when Jan shows up with the baby quite clearly already outside of her body, it's a bit of a letdown for him.
But that's only the beginning, as Jan spends the whole shower inflicting placenta stories and "Son of a Preacher Man" on the whole office at obnoxious length while Dwight crash-tests her $1200 stroller in the parking lot. Michael's left feeling cold when he holds the baby, and gets some much-needed advice from actual baby-daddy Darryl. When Jan leaves, completely not fooled by Michael's rudeness to Holly, she has the nerve to ask Michael not to date her. Michael, to his credit, asks Holly out about one minute later. To her somewhat more questionable credit, she agrees.
Meanwhile, Jim and Pam are having trouble connecting over the distance between them, but are more in sync than they realize. Seems kind of familiar, no?
It's a normal day at the Dunder Mifflin Scranton branch, with everyone quietly going about their business. How is this normal, you ask? Well, Dwight appears to be wearing an apron with a watermelon stuffed inside it. Ah, that's more like it. After he loudly notifies Michael of his ten-minute contraction interval and ripening cervix, Jim explains in a TH what's going on, with the help of a handy flip chart and a couple of simple genealogical diagrams: Jan is having a baby with an anonymous sperm donor, and Michael is having a watermelon with Dwight. To explain the relationship between the baby and Michael, Jim simply draws a large question mark and states, "Delusion."
Dwight breaks his water (actually a paper cup) into a trash can, and Michael rushes out of his office to begin the simulation. Which will of course be noisy, chaotic, and totally disruptive, just like everything else these two ever do. Dwight throws a car breakdown at Michael, ordering him to adapt, but relents when Michael offers to let Andy step up instead and Andy is only too willing to begin gasping and screaming. thing we know, Dwight is sprawled on Michael's desk with his pants off, warning Michael to mark the baby with a Sharpie the moment it crowns. Jim isn't even bothering to make a face at us. It's more of a hopeless, dead-eyed stare. No sooner does Michael have the watermelon in his hands than it lands on his carpet and cracks open. "Butter," Dwight explains. "Newborns are slippery."
Cut to Michael snacking on a slice of savory watermelon while Dwight puts on his pants directly behind him. "It's going to be the happiest day of my life," Michael says, until the zipping of Dwight's fly right in his ear spoils the mood.
Michael enters the conference room, where the Party Planning committee is putting together a baby shower for Jan's kid. Michael's disappointed that Phyllis couldn't organize any live storks, but they've gotten together bowls of M&Ms personalized with baby names. "Chevy," for a boy, was Michael's suggestion, which tells me Jan is clearly expecting a girl. And, according to what Michael wrote down in his instructions, she plans to name her "Astird." The ladies in the room wonder what's up with that, and of course the FCC-baiting falls as always to Meredith, who thoughtfully pronounces "Ass-turd." Michael's not impressed with Phyllis's performance as head of the Party Planning Committee, and orders her to step it up. He reminds her of the bridal shower he gave her, and asks for a shower to match it. A golden shower, in fact. Once again, Michael's choice of words is more precise than he realizes.
He then THs about how he's like the dog who nurses the tiger cub in some video. "It's bizarre, but it happens." I think we have a tagline for the Season Five DVDs.
Phyllis shakes down the reluctant accountants for contributions, then does a brief TH about how much she enjoys her new position as head of the Party Planning Committee, primarily because of the new dynamic it creates between herself and Angela. But before she can elaborate on the joy of having her foot on Angela's "grape-like head," Michael interrupts her through the window behind her: "Don't talk to them! Make the party!" Phyllis gets back to work with her balloon and hand pump.
Jim's on the phone with Pam, who's trying to quickly tell him some kind of art class story. He's having trouble following it, what with distractions like Dwight listening intently in front of him and Creed wrapping his feet behind him. Plus the story itself is a bit confusing, full of people Jim doesn't know and phrases like "Stacey Koua comes in." after Jim completely misses the point, Pam's out of time and has to ring off. "Who's Stacey Kouakomzen?" Dwight asks Jim curiously.
So that's Jim and Pam's version of not connecting. Here's Andy and Angela's: he brings in a baby photo of himself, for her to tape up onto an easel along with baby pictures of the rest of the staff so people can guess who was whom. Andy blows it big-time, mistaking Phyllis's baby photo for Angela's. I mean, not that a normal person would mind so much, but Angela gets offended and calls him a pervert. I sense another warehouse rendezvous with Dwight in the offing.
Michael comes into the annex to warn Holly that since Jan will no doubt be in an insecure mood about her big, pregnant self and because Holly is "one of the more attractive people in the office," he's going to be acting a little "cold" to Holly out of respect for Jan's feelings. And Ryan as well, in fact to the point where Ryan doesn't even get to be in this episode.
Stanley bitches about having pregnant women in his workspace, and runs down the litany of ways in which they're not any more special than he is. After all, he's got the swollen ankles, sore nipples, etc. "You think I don't need to know the fastest way to the hospital?"
Fortunately, he's not about to have to deal with one, because when Jan arrives, she really doesn't look all that pregnant any more. And she's wheeling a stroller. AND there's a baby in it. "Who do we have here?" Jim asks her, as neutrally as he can manage. Jan breezily answers, "My baby." And now is the moment where Dwight and Michael walk into the bullpen, take in the scene, and look completely gobsmacked, although for different reasons. Michael's reasons are self-explanatory, so we can just skip to Dwight as he THs, "Jan already had the baby, and Michael wasn't there to mark it. So the baby could be anyone's! Except Michael's."
Later, in Michael's office, Michael meets Astrid. When he wonders why Jan never called him, she explains that her birth expert didn't think Michael should be there. He lets it go, and asks to hold the baby. Jan gives him the go-ahead, as long as Michael leaves her in the car seat. And thus Michael is allowed to hold his ex-girlfriend's baby's car seat for the first time. He pats the impact-resistant plastic affectionately.
Montage of Michael doing a thing he claims he does: he picks up and holds a baby every day. I don't know where he finds all these women who are willing to let a strange man hold their kids all the time, but most of the moms are smiling. Maybe it's a Scranton thing. Michael launches on one of his philosophical tangents: "If a baby were president, there would be no taxes, there would be no war. There would be no government...and things could get terrible. It would probably be better as a screenplay idea than a serious suggestion." Way to reel it back in there, Michael.
Michael is still holding Astrid's car seat when he emerges from his office with Jan to introduce the baby to everyone, saying she'll know them for the rest of her life. Except maybe Creed, obviously. Jan just lets him go on, until he begins to raise the seat over his head, Lion King-style. As everyone heads into the conference room for the shower, Holly quietly asks Michael if he's okay. Feeling Jan's eyes on them, Michael overshoots "cold." He also overshoots "terse" and "rude" and lands all the way into "how he used to treat Toby all the time." Holly's like, Whoa, he wasn't kidding.
Kevin tries to avoid doing baby games, until Michael makes him. But since the "who wants to guess when the baby will be born?" game is clearly a non-starter, it's time for the presents, which consists of a single stroller that everyone kicked in on. Of course Jan already has one, a much nicer model that Oscar appraises at about $1,200. Yikes. Dwight scoffs, and as he boards the elevator with it, he tells us that $1,200 is more than the cost of his entire bomb shelter. "For $1,200, this thing had better be indestructible," he threatens. And with that, he clips the stroller's seatbelt around the buttered, cracked, watermelon he delivered that very morning. See you around, watermelon.
Jan is singing to the baby: "Son of a Preacher Man," which might not be entirely appropriate. Less appropriate is how very into it she's getting. Yeah, her singing is clearly not about the baby. Jim steps in, thinks better of it, and steps right back out.
He calls Pam, who is at a Laundromat and thus unable to hear anything he's saying. Still, she's more in tune than Dwight, who is currently hurling Jan's $1,200 stroller around in the parking lot, complete with narration. Back in the party, Jan is telling everyone about her tub birth. "Must have been like the tide at Omaha Beach," Creed grimaces. Jan starts going into the kind of detail that's pretty much guaranteed to clear the room, a job Michael finishes by almost bursting into tears at not having gotten to be there. Jan hands Astrid off to Michael so she can go take a nap, effectively dealing with both of the babies in the room. Michael holds the child, without the protection of her car seat, and just looks down at her blankly. Whatever he was expecting from this moment, it's clearly not happening. In a completely unnecessary voice-over, he says that he just felt "shortchanged." After less than a minute, he simply hands the kid off to Phyllis and scoots out of the room. Gosh, and to think Jan didn't want him to be part of this.
Michael heads down to the warehouse -- and some old furniture conveniently arranged in a conversational grouping -- to ask Darryl for advice, "From one baby daddy to another." Michael asks Darryl if he felt a connection when he first held his baby. Darryl says he did, since it was his baby. He also advises Michael to stop calling himself a baby daddy, and is generally unsympathetic to Michael's plight. Think tough love, but without the love. "Want to hold me?" he mocks. "See how you feel?" "Could I?" Michael asks. Darryl quickly and wisely retracts the offer.
Even when cat-napping on the narrow sofa to reception, under the giant pink gift bag that covered the stroller, Jan still indulges in one of her trademark sleep-sprawls. She awakens to find Holly standing over her. Holly tires to charm Jan with some Holly humor, but gets nowhere and goes off to find her baby, whom Holly says is with Angela. When Jan finds Angela and Andy in the break room, posing Astrid all covered with veggies in a cornucopia, Jan is not best pleased. Anne Geddes is so over. Actually, given Angela's taste in baby posters, Jan's lucky there weren't any tiny jazz instruments lying around.
Jan then goes and finds Michael to ask for his help with something. Since Holly is standing there, Michael says some more mean things about her for Jan's benefit. Specifically, "She smells like old tomatoes and dirt." A regular Cyrano, this one.
Dwight has now tied the stroller to the back of his Trans Am and is dragging it around the parking lot at high speeds.
I sense a deleted scene, because Jan emerges from Michael's office without us ever finding out what she needed help with. Since she's leaving, she asks after her stroller. Dwight, who has teleported back to his desk just in time, says he already put it in her trunk. I hope he at least cleaned out the watermelon shrapnel.
Down in the parking lot, Jan thanks Michael for the shower and asks him a favor: "Don't date Holly." Michael stutters, fumbles, claims "I hate her," and finally agrees. Then, after Jan drives off, he goes inside and finds Holly. "You still gonna be mean to me?" she asks warily. His response is to put his arms around her for a very long time. After a while, she reciprocates, and even smiles over his shoulders. When he finally releases her, he asks, "You wanna go out?" "Yes," she says calmly. Michael THs, "I didn't feel much when I held Astrid, but I got a good feeling with Holly." Well, there you go then.
In the tag, Pam and Jim are dialing each other's cell phones at the same time, and thus get each other's voice mails. They're both a little sad to have missed each other, even though we get to hear their simultaneous messages that sound like they're actually talking to each other in real time, about Laundromats and being safe and missing each other. Aww. And, beep.
M. Giant is a Minneapolis-based writer with a wife, a son, and a number of cats that seems to have settled at around two. Learn waaaay too much about him at Velcrometer, or just e-mail him at m.giant[at]gmail.com.
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