Oscar said it best during last night’s “Mafia” episode, describing the unavoidable bedlam in the office when the nucleus pair of characters, Jim and Pam, are away on their honeymoon. It was overwhelming entropy at its finest, headed by the overactive, ungoverned imaginations of Michael, Dwight and Andy.
Mike Starr (Dumb and Dumber) guest stars in the episode as a sleazy business insurance salesman, Mr. Grotti, who drops in unexpectedly to sell Michael an unnecessary, not to mention unaffordable, policy. His elementary tactics disgust Michael, and the meeting leads the irrational gears in the boss’ head to crank out a precisely uneducated guess as to Grotti’s true identity and intentions. What other possibility could there be? An Italian accent. A Gotti-sounding last name. A nice suit. He must be a mobster using insurance as his cover.
With the paltry help of Dwight and Andy as partners in crime-deterring, the trio decide to lunch with Grotti in hopes to stand up to his perceived mafia threats, capiche? The “plan” didn’t go haywire when Andy’s mechanic costume (intended to make his crowbar in-hand appear natural) backfired into a botched lady-in-distress scenario. With this incompetent bunch of players, the plan was doomed from the start, spiraling into more contrived developments that were worth, give or take, a few shares of polite chuckles.
The episode finishes fairly anti-climactic. Though Michael tells his co-workers otherwise in a grandiose retelling of the incident, Mr. Grotti was not a mobster, as much as we wanted him to be in the end. The good news is that we have another Office vocabulary submission thanks to Dwight, who coined the term “Muckduck,” a nonexistent, nonthreatening reinvention of the word, “Murder.” At least we can salvage this.