If I know one thing about the world wide webernet it’s that cyber-surfers would rather talk about just about anything other than the attractiveness of famous women. So I can write this A.V Club post confident in the knowledge that it will not, under any circumstances, devolve into an extended argument about the hotness of Hilary Swank. I just know it in my bones. Besides, it’s not as if there’s anything to discuss. Of course Swank is hot. She might not be beautiful or cute and she may have the giant chompers of a Shetland pony but of course she’s sexy.
With that out of the way, we can now concentrate on the extremely serious business of relentlessly dissecting twenty-two minutes of extremely silly television comedy. But before we do we should probably acknowledge that Swank, like Kirsten Dunst and Uma Thurman, blurs the line between sexy and just plain weird-looking. Depending on the angle, she can either look extraordinarily hot or like a bit of a transsexual.
I missed last week’s episode of The Office since I was in Park City getting my Sundance on: mad props to Scott for filling in for me. I’ve got to say though that I found tonight’s episode a little disappointing. The Office has proven itself capable of greatness and gut-wrenching pathos often enough that it can’t really get away with being mildly amusing.
Tonight was about as inconsequential as The Office gets. With the exception of Michael’s moral quandary as to whether or to take advantage of the naivety of a comically friendly rival paper company (Prince Family Paper) it was all about gags, some inspired, some relatively arbitrary.
The show got off to a promising start with a classic Jim prank: attaching an insanely long piece of wire to Dwight’s computer, then watching with supreme satisfaction as Dwight followed the mystery wire all the way up a telephone pole. I would have respected the gag a lot more if the payoff was Dwight climbing a telephone pole in the background of Jim’s confessional. Alas, the show tipped its hand a little too strongly by having Jim swivel around and assert that he’d managed to make it up the telephone pole, so Dwight could undoubtedly follow suit.
It was amusing, but it also felt like the kind of gag the show has pulled off dozens, if not hundreds of times, before. The A plot for tonight’s episode had Michael and Dwight travel to a family-owned paper company to do some corporate espionage at the behest of David Wallace. Michael goes undercover as Michael Scarn, businessman but Dwight chooses to go as himself, a disgruntled employee at a second rate paper company called Dunder-Mifflin who chafes under the control of his incompetent boss.