photo: nbc
The Office
Body Language
Original Air Date: Apr 29, 2010
Shannon – Associate Editor
shannon@thetwocentscorp.com
This week, Michael misreads body cues from a potential sale/ girlfriend, Dwight and Kelly work together, and Michael’s lost his sales mojo.
In the cold open, Michael wants everyone in the office to learn Spanish because he’s going on vacation to Mexico. Michael is having problems with the gender portion of the language so Oscar helps him by having him label things with the international gender sign. Leave it to Michael, but his entire office is now labeled with post it notes of genitalia.
Jim and Pam get a new high profile client with a joint sales pitch and Pam wants to make really bad jokes. They are suuuper bad. The new client? It’s Donna, the manager from the night out at the pseudo Dave & Buster’s. They have a sales pitch with her in the conference room which Michael busts up. Of course. Michael shows her slides in order to turn her on and it seems like it works until he tries to kiss her as Jim and Pam watch. Then it’s uncomfortable because he misread her body language. She talking heads and says she’s not really that annoyed. Michael thinks that Donna could be his Pam and Pam agrees. Pam decides to back out of the sales pitch and let Jim and Michael take over.
Michael and Jim continue the pitch while Donna slowly removes articles of clothing. Donna thinks DM’s price is too high so she takes her jacket off, exposing…parts. Jim thinks she’s flirting to get a better price. Michael continues to misread her body language. Everyone but Pam thinks that Donna is very not into Michael, so he goes with Pam’s consensus and tries again. And fails again. Oh my word.
Sabre has a new minority executive training program and Gabe is pitching it to Daryl. Dwight doesn’t want Daryl to run the office eventually. Dwight works on Kelly and tells her she should apply for the minority training program. Dwight coaches her on the interview but Ryan cuts in. Kelly says when she’s an exec she’s going to make Ryan manager and they’re gonna clean house. Dwight tries to get Kelly disqualified from the program but it turns out that Daryl dropped out of the program to play softball. Kelly is now the only applicant. Dwight tries to recruit Stanley and Oscar but they don’t want to cross Kelly. Dwight finds the Japanese guy from the warehouse that used to be a surgeon in Japan and submits him for the program.
Pam admits to Michael that she was wrong. People pipe up and say that it’s easy to get fooled until Erin walks in with a barrette that Donna left behind. Michael thinks she needs to return it to her and everyone tries to talk him out of it but he runs out and Donna’s still in the parking lot in her car. They talk and kiss. Apparently, she is into him and he didn’t misread her.
Kelly is now the new recruit and she tells Dwight that she’ll never forget everything he’s done for her because she never forgets anything.
So, what happened to Michael’s ninja sales skills? Remember the night at Chili’s when he was working on Jan and he was so awkward but he made the sale at the end because deep down he’s a really good salesman? That was the one thing he had going for him and now it seems he’s lost even that. What happened there?
I kind of liked the bit with Kelly. Obviously, it’s not going anywhere (I think), but it was still amusing to see her dressed up in her ethnic gear. So let me know what you think about the episode. Leave a comment!
TheTwoCents 