Jim's persistent absences have caused David Wallace to decide that the company needs to hire a junior salesman to fill the gap. And he's put Dwight in charge of the search. Clark wants the gig and insists he deserves it, but Dwight has brought in all his weird friends, a couple of cousins and even his former babysitter to interview for the job. As the interviews progress, however, even Dwight has to admit that he has made a huge mistake with this collection of weirdoes and losers.
As for the potential future coworkers of the weirdoes and losers, nobody is more worried about them than Jim. After all, whoever Dwight hires is going to end up sitting to Pam, which is one more source of stress that their already-strained relationship doesn't need. He asks David Wallace for a vote in his replacement (and also, embarrassingly, for some venture capital for his company), and gets not only the brush-off but a pay cut. Fortunately, Dwight realizes he's going to have to alienate all his friends by not hiring a single unqualified one of them, and he begs Jim to deliver the bad news, which Jim does, but everyone still blames Dwight and ostracizes him en masse. Pam's new desk-clump-mate will be Clark, who she's fine with. And Jim's pleased with how he engineered the important matter of who gets to go to work and look at Pam all day, like he did, and ended up falling in love with her.
Which reminds me -- Brian's still on the documentary crew and he's still enjoying holding a big long fuzzy cylinder over Pam's head a little more than maybe Jim would like him to.
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Pouring out a 40 for 30 Rock, which I rarely got to see because I don't have much time to watch TV for free any more. But if Tina Fey had asked me to for once get a sub for American Idol, I would have.
One of the documentary cameras is sitting on the bullpen floor behind Meredith's, but it's rolling. So we get a bug's eye view of Pam coming up to Brian, having heard he got in trouble after last week, but he plays it off and asks if things are cool with her and Jim. Pam's called away for a phone call, as if anybody wants to talk to her, and Meredith shows up to address Brian as "Boom Guy" and ask him, "when you gonna boom me?" Brian says they're cracking down on talking to the subjects and basically flees. [Note: So, nothing about how a documentary crew filming in this setting, with their subjects wearing microphones, would need a boom to begin with? Or how it's strange a boom guy would keep the same job for nine years? Or how this documentary crew was okay with not interfering during so many other more actually dangerous times in the office, like when Dwight started a fire and nearly killed Stanley? 'Kay. -- Rachel.]
Full credits this week, and Ed Helms is still in them for some reason. I guess someone figured we needed to be reminded what he looks like.
Clark finds Dwight in the break room, wondering what's up with him bringing in new people to interview for a sales job. Dwight tweaks him a bit holding up a hand and saying you have to be "this cool" to be in sales, then THs that Wallace is letting him hire a Junior Sales Associate to fill in for Jim. "Finally, I'll have someone at my desk clump who gets me," Dwight says. Back in the break room, Clark says he deserves this job, after the suit warehouse thing and going above and beyond with Jan for the White Pages account. "And under," he adds. Dwight promises him an interview, but smugly THs that his friends Rolf and Trevor are up for the job too, so Clark has no chance. Clark is bitter about the twelve grueling weeks he's sunk into this company that have led only to competing for a promotion. "I thought this was an office, not the Thunderdome."
Back in the bullpen, Dwight teases Jim and Pam for how the balance of power will be changing at their desk-clump, and Jim THs about how the last thing their relationship needs right now is "doubling the Dwight in her life."
By M. Giant
Clark waits nervously in the conference room with Rolf (not seen since he destroyed Jim and Pam's kitchen), who says that Clark's interviewing for the sales job, but he, Rolf, is getting it. Clark points out to Rolf that his twelve-week tenure is equal to a full season of Homeland, which proves a lot can happen in that amount of time. Dwight THs from Andy's office about how awesome Rolf is, over shots of the latter shouting at a rabbit.
In the wake of Athlead's loss of a major investor, the partners are now pressuring Jim to shake down David Wallace for the replacement cash. In fact, he's on the phone with one of them with Dwight and Rolf roll up. "I hope you like Norwegian black metal, because I don't do earbuds," Rolf threatens Pam. As he and Dwight head into Andy's office, Jim tries to downplay it, but looks nervous when Pam downplays it even further.
In the interview, Rolf does that thing where he turns the interview around, making like Dwight's the one being interviewed. Power dynamic reversal, blah blah blah. To Dwight's tiny amount of credit it doesn't work, but he's still got high hopes for Trevor, the hit man he and Angela hired a while ago to kneecap Oscar: "You say 'jump,' he says, 'on who?'" In the interview, Trevor is completely flummoxed by basic questions, as though he's trying to interview as poorly as possible.
Clark asks Jim if he can look over Jim's price sheets to prep for the interview, but as he sits in Pam's vacant chair to do so, he gets distracted by Jim's questions aimed at determining Clark's suitability as a desk-clump-mate for Pam. Which includes checking his breath. All of this ends up meeting Jim's approval. Dwight sees this through the window of Andy's office, but says he can't hire Clark. "Sure, he looks like a Schrute, but he thinks like a Halpert. And he acts like a Beesly." But in Clark's interview, Dwight presents him with a hypothetical no-win scenario, which Clark aces simply by using the words Kobayashi Maru. Sorry, but it's been three decades and you either get that reference by now or you don't. In fact, Clark stands up and says the interview's over, because he Kobayashi Maru'd the whole process. Besides, Clark points out, the other candidates were losers. Dwight angrily assures Clark that he's got plenty of other friends. Aaaand, cut to a flock of weirdoes milling around in the conference room. "This is not natural," Stanley remarks. True, but the last time anything natural or organic happened on this show, Pam was still at Reception.
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The other employees are still talking about how weird the hopefuls look and how bad they smell after the ads. Meredith, in a Velma Kelly wig for tonight's first episode, makes Kevin promise to tell her if she ever smells that bad. "Meredith, I tell you all the time," Kevin says. She takes that pretty good-naturedly.
The candidate is Dwight's cousin Mose. "He's got a natural fear of paper, which would motivate him to get as much of it out of this office as possible!" Dwight THs optimistically. In the interview, Dwight questions Mose about the claim on his resume that he's been a sales rep at Dow for fifteen years. "You know we live together, right? And I've never seen you go to work ever." Caught, Mose gets up and flees the interview.
From the window above, Clark watches him go, apparently on foot all the way back to the beet farm. He turns back to what is now an American Idol-style holding room to ask the others how they heard about the position. Nate, the half-deaf warehouse worker (wearing a tie with his DM work shirt, which is not a successful fashion statement) explains that he heard about it from his mom because Dwight called her house not realizing Nate had moved out over a quarrel, "because I can't stay out of her stuff." Mose's taller, even weirder brother (played by Matt Jones, notably from Breaking Bad) overheard Dwight talking about it to Mose in the shower. "It's a cow shower, so there's like a ton of people in there," he explains, like Clark is an idiot for not understanding that. Dwight's babysitter-slash-ex-girlfriend from "Dinner Party" is also there, as is one of his friends from "X-Men School" (played by Eric Wareheim from Tim And Eric.) Yes, you heard that right. Dwight clarifies in a TH that he and some other kids were in fact victims of a con man who modeled himself after Charles Xavier from the X-Mencomics, though some kids never figured it out. Indeed, Dwight's former schoolmate explains his abilities: "Night hearing; dogs understand where I point; and our training included picking carrots, scrubbing tubs, sewing imitation Levi's, and a lot of telemarketing." Not parallel sentence structure, though, I see. [Note: There's also Ryan's former club-hopping short friend Troy from "Night Out."]
Out in the bullpen, Angela wants someone to say something. Stanley says he did, when they were thinking of hiring Jim. "Now look at what he's doing to us." Nellie quickly jumps on the blame Jim-bandwagon, and even Oscar agrees that they can't blame Dwight, being a weirdo, for bringing in weirdoes. Pam points out that she's the one who's going to have to sit to whoever it is, and is actually rooting for Nate. She gets up to go work on her mural, leaving Jim looking thoughtful and pensive.
After the ads, Jim is on the phone to David Wallace, asking if he can have some input. Dwight horns in on the call, putting it on speaker, and when Wallace says Jim wants in, Dwight gets pretty owly about it, seeing Jim's barely around anymore anyway. And in fact, Wallace throws in that they're going to start paying Jim only for the days he actually works. Jim has the nerve to be thrown by this. Worse, Wallace brings up the call he and Jim have scheduled for later, so Jim has to try to ask Wallace for investment funds with Dwight standing right there. And worst of all, he's about ten words into his pitch when Wallace cuts him off. Fortunately, Dwight is still there to mock him. Jim doesn't even bother to answer his call.
Down in the warehouse, Pam is back at work on the mural and Hide is back at work heckling her from below. "They're giving out jobs upstairs, why don't you go up and get one?" she snaps before returning to work.
Stanley enters the men's room to find Troy drying his suit pants under the hand dryer. "Whoops," he explains. In the break room, Mose's brother steps out from the vending machine he's been lurking behind to touch Darryl's head, apparently never having felt a black man's hair before. In the kitchen, Jim, Nellie, and Darryl are taking Dwight to task for wanting to hire freaks, but Dwight stubbornly compares his friends to another supposed freak: Spider-Man. Darryl agrees, "Your friends are like Spider-Man, if he'd got bitten by a spider and then got really into masturbating."
The latest candidate is a psycho named "Wolf," apparently one of Dwight's paintball buddies. He angrily refuses to sell Dwight a single sheet of paper even in a softball role-playing exercise. Then Hide runs down his overqualifications from back in Japan until Dwight tells him, "This isn't gonna work out."
Now that the interviews are over. Dwight tells us how great all his candidates are, but soon he's literally rolling on the floor in indecision. His old babysitter offers to change him ("I do that myself now," he says sadly) and asks if he's going to make a decision before her car gets towed. Which it already has. Trevor, Wolf and Dwight's other cousin come in saying Dwight shouldn't feel bad, no matter which one of them he picks. "Or none of you?" Dwight trial-balloons nervously. They all agree that would be humiliating.
Dwight quietly tries to get Jim's attention, but Jim extravagantly ignores him, talking aloud about how much he enjoys staring off in one direction. "If I'm not lookin' south, I'm not livin', that's what I always say." And here I always thought his desk faced west. What a shitty sense of direction I have. Anyway, trying to stay out of sight of the losers in the conference room, Dwight belly-crawls up behind him and drags Jim's chair, with Jim still in it, into Andy's office and closes the door.
Cut to Dwight deciding to give Jim a vote on who the junior salesperson will be after all. "You know I wouldn't hire any of these all-stars," Jim points out. Dwight acts disappointed, but then admits that he has higher standards for his coworkers than for his friends. "I just couldn't picture any of them in the old gold and grey." Yep, Dwight designed uniforms, and he shows off a few sketches for the camera in a TH.
So after that, Jim and Dwight are in the conference room addressing the rogue's gallery and Jim is the one who breaks the news that they're going with none of them. Dwight emotes fake outrage while Jim obligingly says it's entirely his call. Nate asks for the return of his resume because there's a chili resume on the back. And Rolf makes a veiled threat about suspicious packages and leads his fellow rejects out of the room. With the day basically shot, they decide to all go to paintball together, blowing off Dwight. And Creed follows them out. "I think that went well," Jim says to Dwight, who looks wounded at having just burned bridges with all of his friends. Such as they are.
Pam returns to the bullpen to see Jim training in Clark at his desk. "Trust me, this is the least of all the evils," Jim quietly assures her, adding that it took him all day to pull it off. Pam's not unappreciative, but says, "I mean, I kinda liked my old desk mate." So it could be worse between them, but then of course Jim has to run off for a board meeting.
As soon as he's gone, Dwight gets an email, subject line, 'Hey Jerk," and opens it to find a photo of all his friends in paintball gear, happily flipping off the camera over the caption "Glad you're not here." Who spelled it for them? Dwight philosophically THs, "They say that everyone outgrows their friends at some point in their lives. Well, I just outgrew them all in the span of three hours."
Clark gets up, asking Pam if she wants anything from the kitchen. She doesn't, but when Dwight asks him for a coffee refill, Clark holds up a hand and says he's gotta be "this cool" for coffee. Pam takes pity on Dwight, as she does, and asks if he wants to haze the new guy. "Absolutely I do," he Halperts. Pam gives him a roll of Saran Wrap from Jim's desk drawer for the time Clark goes to the bathroom, but Dwight misunderstands and ends up pulling it tight over Clark's face. Fortunately we cut away before Clark suffocates.
From the parking lot, Jim insists that Pam's desk-clump-mate in his absence does matter. "The people around you are basically who you end up spending your life with. I mean, because of where my desk was I spent all those years looking at Pam. And I fell in love. So that stuff matters. It definitely does." While he's saying this, we see Clark clowning around with Pam, who laughs, and then pan over to Brian, holding the boom over Pam and watching her adoringly. And Jim just keeps getting dumber.
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.