The Office: Product Recall

This episode of The Office, "Product Recall," had a hit-and-miss mix of laugh-out-loud moments and scenes that didn't work quite as well. The main concept -- Dunder-Mifflin has to apologize for an obscene image of a cartoon that appeared as a watermark on their paper -- is hilarious by itself, but the execution left a little to be desired.

Primarily I was left wondering throughout the episode why Michael is dealing with this public relations nightmare on his own -- it seems something that corporate, specifically Jan, would be heavily involved in as soon as it happened. There's no way Jan would trust Michael to deal with something like this on his own, so the only conclusion to draw is that she doesn't know about the situation. That seems pretty farfetched, however, considering every single one of the Scranton branch's customers were pissed off, and complaints like that must have gone to the home office as well. It's a poor lapse in keeping things realistic on a show that normally does an excellent job of making completely ridiculous situations believable.

The best comedy to come out of the watermark disaster involved the consistently funny Creed. Often relegated to the background, Creed was in the spotlight more this episode than he's been in the entire series to date, and I loved it. Just the concept that the completely unmotivated, kleptomaniac Creed is the employee in charge of quality control (in the one year he blew off his weekly quality checks) is classic. His scenes were some of the best this episode -- telling the interviewers he was supposed to catch the problem, explaining that "the only difference between me and a homeless man is this job," and collecting money for a farewell for the framed and fired Debbie Brown only to keep all the money for himself.

I didn't get any Jim & Pam interaction this episode, but I got some great moments from Jim, including the bookending scenes featuring Jim dressed as Dwight, and Dwight acting like Jim. Jim's Dwight impression was hilarious ("Question. What kind of bear is best?" "Bears eat beets.") and it was great to see one of the opening gags come up again at the end of the episode, with Dwight's ridiculously lame impression of Jim ("Blah, blah, a little comment. Yeah.").

Jim's interactions with Andy were great this episode as well, even though if Andy's situation seemed extremely contrived (his girlfriend, whom he had no idea was a minor, just happens to be attending the exact same high school Andy and Jim need to personally visit). From his initial tolerance of Andy's singing and "beer me" comments to their car ride back to the office with Jim starting "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," it's the nicest I've seen Jim be to Andy in quite a while.

Michael's presentation of the novelty check to Mrs. Allen was awkwardly amusing, but even when the bit worked I couldn't help but wonder how Michael was getting away with this insanity, without interference from Jan, or even just Toby. A better Michael moment this half-hour was the making of his latest apology video, with the ridiculous computer printout of a US flag in the background and the completely unapologetic content of Michael's diatribe ("It will take a SWAT team to remove me from this office"; "They are trying to make me an escape goat."; and "If I am fired, I swear to God that every single piece of copier paper in this town is going to have the F-word on it.").