Sabre already has a test store to open to the public in Florida. I know, it seems fast to me too. Dwight figures this is his big chance to prove himself and score the vice president's post from Nellie. His big plan involves a lot of Chuck tie ins, appealing to his stereotype of bloggers (which turns out to be pretty accurate), building fake buzz by having Erin pose as a hipster, making Kathy flirt with the stereotypical bloggers, and, most disastrously, letting Ryan give the big presentation. These succeed to varying degrees, but Ryan panics and skips town, forcing Jim to step into his tiny little shoes. The presentation is a Ryan Howard classic, all flash and no substance, but the customers seem impressed, even if Nellie doesn't.
Meanwhile, in Scranton, Andy explains that his new shiner is the result of his protecting Pam from a gang of two-wheeled ruffians in the parking lot, leaving out the fact that the biker who hit him was a fifth-grader on a Schwinn. In order to keep the employees from calling the cops, which would unravel his whole cover story, Andy asks Toby to teach everyone self-defense. It's going fine, at least by Dunder-Mifflin standards, until the mother of Andy's assailant drags her into the office to apologize. Everyone mocks Andy for getting beat up by a girl, which somehow leads to Kelly hijacking the self-defense training by attacking Toby. When Andy steps in, he gets another black eye, but avoids further mocking by pointing out that he got these injuries standing up for others. So he ends up preserving his dignity after all, at least up until he downs all the wine and painkillers.
And Dwight gets made vice president after all. God help us.
A Sabre test store has already been set up somewhere in Florida, with fancy displays and design and a cardboard Chuck standup and Dwight in a royal-blue retail uniform shirt. Needless to say, he's pretty excited about this chance to prove himself and lock in the vice presidency with Nellie. Ryan's more worried that he's going to fall off the chair Dwight's supposed to be holding for him while he ties a banner. Erin is "incognito" as someone camping out in line, wearing glasses and a hat and pretending to be a hipster to try to build buzz. Luckily, she tells us it's really her; otherwise we might have been confused. "There's already people camped out behind me!" she says excitedly, pointing out the homeless guys sleeping to her tent.
Short credits again, and the team does a hero-shot walk into the store, all (except Erin) wearing triangular Pyramid tablet cases strapped to their chests, like Baby Bjorns for nerds, over their uniform shirts. In the back room (whose décor includes that same "Teamwork" Successories poster that's hung in Scranton for eight years), Nellie gives an inspirational pep talk, which includes lapsing into the harsh cockney accent she had until age 32 and sharing the sad tale of not getting called back after auditioning to be the black Spice Girl. Dwight takes the floor and explains that it's press day, which means bloggers. Luckily he's got a dossier on them, which he hands out while giving the vital info: "Bloggers are gross! Bloggers are obese! Bloggers have halitosis! You're gonna love 'em." I'm going to not take this personally. Ryan stiffly vows that his presentation will make people shit their pants, while Kathy will be the hot girl who talks to bloggers. "Kill me. It was my idea," she asides, which she doesn't really have the hang of yet. Packer's job is to be the sexual predator who goes after teen girls. "I don't see where that gets us, but I'm a team player," Packer says with surprising uncertainty. But he THs that he's just waiting for Dwight to screw up so he can swoop in like a sexual predator. Nellie concludes that she wants to get goose pimples. Dwight: "Speaking of pimples, release the bloggers!"
In Scranton, Pam and Andy walk in at the same time, Andy sporting a black eye so fresh it's still red. There's some extraneous jokes packed in until Kelly (played by the person who wrote this episode, so I have higher hopes than usual lately) blares, "Since the interesting thing happened 'til now, so much time has passed. It's like my life is buffering!" Andy tells everyone the story about how when he and Pam arrived at work, Pam was waylaid by a biker gang, Andy intervened, and after a fight in which some blows were exchanged, the gang left. As he's telling this, the scene of what really happened as captured by a camera in Andy's office window unfolds: a bunch of fifth-grade girls on bicycles rode up and threw pine cones at Pam, and when Andy came over to stop it, one of them socked him in the eye without even getting off her bike. Then they all rode off while Andy stood there crying. But after relating his version of events, which Pam doesn't dispute, Andy gets a round of applause, which he accepts as modestly as Andy can ever manage.
Dwight opens the doors to the store, and he and Erin try to act like the dozen or so people wandering in constitute a stampede. Once everyone's in, Kathy chats up a gross, obese blogger who looks like he has halitosis. The interesting thing about this moment is that we learn that she was being subtle with Jim last week. Erin talks to another blogger and mispronounces the words Zooey, Deschanel, and Coachella.
Up in Scranton, the other employees are trying to convince Andy to call the police, but he's resisting, and Pam's backing him up, acting all street and chanting their ZIP code like it's a gang name. We get a little moment that reminds us what we used to like about Darryl, as he corrects that you need to use the nine-digit ZIP to give it real cred. Andy decides that a better way to make the employees feel safe is to have Toby teach self-defense. Toby's happy to be asked. "I'll go put on my cup!"
Jim's on his phone to Pam, which, since he's not using the Sabre phone at his belt, makes him a sweet target for a failblogger to photograph. In the back room, Nellie and Dwight chew him out and order him to "Surrender the tri-pack. You know what you have to do." Jim shakes his head in horror, but the thing we see is him outside, twirling the Grand Opening sign.
Dwight spots a small group of geezers wandering in and enlists Erin to chase them out. No olds allowed!
Toby's in the conference room, starting with the basics: "Strike, Scream, Run." Creed tries it out, smacking Meredith upside the head, yelping and exiting at high speed. Toby goes on to say that it's all about the groin, but Andy's suddenly very curious about how to deal with someone smaller, who has no groin. "Why are you fixated on this hypothetical transgendered attacker?" Oscar wonders. Andy keeps "subtly" trying to learn about how to fight off a tween girl, and fortunately for him Toby gets even louder groans by pitching his latest Chad Flenderman novel. Then Toby has them all stand up and practice palm-strikes to the chin. Everyone directs the practice strikes upward, with the notable exception of Andy.
Dwight introduces Kathy to "Fatty Gruesome. He is a freelancer for Wired Magazine." "Patty Grossman, I'm a woman," the freelancer corrects. But she still writes for Wired, so that's all Dwight cares about. Also, she might just dig Kathy too.
Ryan has just finished trying out his presentation on Jim and Dwight, the former of whom gently observes that Ryan's a little nervous. In fact, it looks like the pants-shitting Ryan promised early will be done by Ryan himself. "I wish Kelly were here," Ryan whines. "She always knows exactly what to say." Dwight giggles and flatters like he thinks Kelly would, and Ryan happily slips into the role-playing, belittling Dwight-Kelly like he does with the real thing. Then Jim has to play the part of Ryan's mom, which seems to go fine as long as he keeps calling Ryan "sweetie." But when he uses the word "fix," Ryan freaks out and demands a yellow or green sports drink from a store. Dwight dispatches Jim to fetch it.
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Toby's on the Playing Dead unit when a woman comes in with her daughter, looking for "a fancy gentleman with a squeaky voice." Andy tries to play it off, but the girl recognizes him: "That's the guy I hit." Everyone is disgusted with Andy, except Kevin, who says, "Poor Andy! First you got beat up by a gang, and now she kicks your ass?" The girl also points out the "chubby one" she threw a pine cone at, to which Pam protests that she just had a baby. "Yesterday?" the girl asks. Her mom orders her to apologize, and she sullenly says, "Sorry I kicked your ass in front of your 'thin' girlfriend." Pam: "How about we wait until year after you have your kid?" Nice. Andy accepts the apology, and the visitors take their leave. Kelly immediately asks Toby to give a seminar on "how to protect ourselves against tiny little girls." Toby says there's no shame in what happened to Andy, but Kelly disagrees. And looking closely at Andy's face, Darryl marvels, "I think I see the imprint of a Ring Pop."
Stanley, rather than looking for Erin when Dwight tells him to, instead announces that he's on break, unzips his tri-pack, and pulls a big slice of pizza out of it. Dwight tells some bloggers to stay for Ryan's presentation, promising big things. But in the back room, Ryan's losing his shit, asking his uncle on the phone for a Ritalin prescription and then yelling at Nellie when she tries to talk to him. "Your little man is unraveling," Nellie snaps at Dwight. "Now go and fix it." Ryan's needed fixing for six years, she thinks Dwight's going to do it in one day?
Erin's walking down the sidewalk with one of the old ladies she chased out, explaining, "We don't want our brand associated with death." The old woman turns out to be none other than Georgia Engels, who used to play Georgette Baxter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Betty White has some long coattails, y'all. They end up commiserating over their respective man troubles. You know about Erin with Andy, of course. As for Georgette, her husband is dead.
Dwight and Jim are waiting for Ryan to come out of the bathroom when Jim gets a text from Ryan -- he's going home to see his mom. Nellie comes in demanding to know where Ryan is, and Dwight claims he sent him home. "As brilliant and creative as he is, he is nothing compared to this guy!" Jim, who Dwight is pointing at: "Ahhhh..." While Nellie freaks out, Dwight drags Jim into the room and begs him to do the presentation. Jim agrees, but only with great reluctance. "Go get into Ryan's costume and check out his notes," Dwight instructs. Costume?
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Jim unzips a garment bag and takes out a tiny little shoe. Oh, and apparently there's eyeliner, too. Cut to the darkened store, where Jim awkwardly leaps out into the spotlight, dressed in a too-small white guru-suit and starts reading the cue cards Erin is holding, which of course make no sense. At least not until it gets to the part where Ryan was going to bare his soul, at which point we hear Jim confess to crying the entire time he was at Disney World at age ten while we see Ryan getting on a bus. Then Jim runs down a few of the Pyramid's lackluster features before the big finish, which is where he releases the Pyramid so it appears to be levitating, just before he pirouettes clumsily out of the spotlight. On the floating pyramid, Ryan's image appears, saying, "Sabre. It's time to come home." The lights come up, and nobody is more surprised than Jim at the resulting applause. But Nellie doesn't look happy as she gestures to Dwight with a beckoning finger.
Toby's trying to get the class through the "Begging for Mercy" unit, but he's losing control of the room to the point where when Angela suggests that Kelly (who admits to having also been a twelve-year-old bully) attack Toby, she's up for it. Toby is still trying to maintain control while Kelly slaps him up, and when Andy gets up to intervene, Kelly catches her boss in the eye with a stray elbow. Everyone laughs, including Pam, and Andy angrily points out that he got hit by girls because he stood up for others -- first Pam, then Toby. Everyone looks shamed as he tells them to ask themselves, "Where were you when the girls came?" In his office, he says it was a tough day. "But I feel good. I put the office in their place. Took a bunch of painkillers, drank half a bottle of wine, took my pants off, I feel good!" And zoom out...yep, pants are off, all right.
In the back room, Dwight is making his excuses until Nellie interrupts: "Dwight, you're the vice president." Dwight throws himself one of his trademark karate-themed celebrations.
In the tag, Jim's attempts to spin the Grand Opening sign are thoroughly shown up by a guy up the street doing a whole ninja routine with his "Liquidation Sale" sign. Jim's attempts to keep up only result in his smacking himself in the head. Just give up and bring it on down to Omeletteville, Jim.
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, follow him on Twitter , or just e-mail him at m.giant[at]gmail.com.
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