The Office - "The Farm" - Review

“The Farm” is a very odd episode of television. Initially intended as a backdoor pilot for a series of the same name as the episode, NBC scrapped the show after shooting the pilot. The Office in turn had to rework the rest of the season to smooth over the change in direction. And so “The Farm” is a salvage mission; it’s an episode that tries to integrate the footage of “The Farm” and make it work as just another episode of The Office.

It’s not a terrible episode; this season has had far worse ones. However, it’s an episode that feels halfbaked. The material about Dwight on the farm never is given enough footing to truly take off. Thus it’s a lot of ideas that actually aren’t that bad but never amount to much.

When Dwight’s aunt dies, he attends her funeral, where he’s reunited with never before seen siblings. Setting aside how weird it is that we’ve never even heard in passing about his brother or sister, I’d be willing to accept their existence if it weren’t for the fact that I doubt we’ll ever see them again. Much of this episode is very “pilot-y”. It’s setting up ideas that would potentially have paid of down the line in the spin-off. But since there’s no longer a spin-off, the siblings are just types, and they don’t seem to have at least a cursory similarity to Dwight. His brother is a tad off, but he’s a hipster loser. His sister is a single mom who lives in the city and loathes rural life. There’s the suggestion of history between them (the brothers playfully fight the moment they see eachother), but we know nothing of these other characters beyond the fact they’re related to Dwight. But what does this do to service Dwight’s story arc? (wait, for that matter: what is Dwight’s story arc this season?)

There’s a B-plot that’s tacked on about Todd Packer pretending to be a part of AA and trying to apologize for his past mistakes. I’ve never been a fan of Todd Packer. It’s a character that if the series had used him any more than they did, he would have become frustrating and annoying. The storyline is incredibly unnecessary but it was interesting to watch Packer be kind of backhandedly nice for a change. And the reactions were all appropriately in character. However, the storyline is made problematic when it turns out Packer laced the cupcakes he gave to the office with drugs. At which point an unnecessary but not grating storyline took the series back into the realm of surrealness it’s ineffectually been dancing around with in recent seasons. 

The Packer story is treated like an afterthought, and the Dwight storyline is a series of amorphous but never fully formed ideas. Part of the problem is derived from trying to make the best of the fact there’s no longer a spin-of and the show does an amiable effort. I’m a sap and so I probably would have checked out the first few episodes no matter how little I care about The Office at this point.  But even the best salvaging efforts sometimes can’t completely save the wreckage. 

Grade: B- for effort, C+ as an episode of The Office.