Well, after nearly four and a half seasons of The Office, we finally got a wedding. It wasn’t the one we expected, and it was certainly one of the stranger television weddings you’ll ever come across, but we got one. It involved a German Mennonite minister, Andy Bernard stepping in excrement while in the kitchen, and two main characters bonding in matrimony, even if only one of them knew it.
Yes, Dwight and Angela are now married. (He actually refers to her as “Mrs. Schrute.”) While showing Andy and Angela around Schrute Farms, Dwight gives them a dry run for the actual wedding with him playing Andy and Angela playing herself. The Mennonite — who, “despite growing up miles from here,” only speaks German because of a “closed society” — turns out to actually be marrying the two. So, afterward, when Angela confesses to Dwight that she loves him rather than Andy, Dwight gleefully points out that they’re already married, though she had no idea. It’s unknown if this upsets her more than when Dwight mercy-killed her cat, but it’s likely to have similar results. The scene was handled well, but the whole device seems tired and gimmicky. Is the show so divorced from real life that two characters can have an accidental wedding?
In any case, it did help disguise the fact that this was one of the more laugh-free episodes of The Office in a while. The subplot with the copier team versus the chair team seemed recycled (they’ve used a similar story line at least four times by now, right?), the Jim-Pam passive-aggressive pushback had no real stakes, and Burlington Coat Factory jokes, and angry PETA protesters pouring paint on fur coats, were old a decade ago. (Seriously, are we to believe that there are really people splashing paint on people wearing fur in Scranton? Really?)
Fortunately, there was the simple pleasure of Mose Schrute hitting Andy in the head with a ball. When you combine Mose with the dull thud of physical comedy, you really can’t go wrong.
