KEY EPISODE 3

“The Injury”

The premise of “The Injury” couldn’t be simpler: Michael burns his foot one morning on a George Foreman grill and Dwight suffers a concussion when he races to his condo so quickly to help that he crashes his car into a pole. The rest of the episode is just everyone reacting to Michael’s absurd claims that he’s horribly injured and Dwight’s obliviousness to his actual severe injury, which causes such a major personality shift that he actually starts acting friendly toward Pam. It was just the third episode written by Mindy Kaling.

Mindy Kaling: “The Injury” is probably the favorite episode that I’ve written. I think the original idea was that Michael had fallen asleep in the sun and had sunblock all over him except for his foot, and it started out as a sunburned foot. And actually the name of the episode was “My Grilled Foot” for the longest time until we thought that might be too weird for people to tune in and watch that. I was amazed that we based a whole episode that was basically about disability around Michael’s crazy disability of having to eat bacon every morning when he wakes up.

Jen Celotta: Mindy Kaling is a genius and that episode was so well written. That speech about how he burned his foot was one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.

“I enjoy having breakfast in bed,” Michael explains to the camera. “I like waking up to the smell of bacon, sue me. And since I don’t have a butler, I have to do it myself. So, most nights before I go to bed, I will lay six strips of bacon out on my George Foreman grill. Then I go to sleep. When I wake up, I plug in the grill, I go back to sleep again. Then I wake up to the smell of crackling bacon. It is delicious, it’s good for me. It’s the perfect way to start the day. Today I got up, I stepped onto the grill and it clamped down on my foot . . . that’s it. I don’t see what’s so hard to believe about that.” A ridiculous monologue like this would be a hard sell for most actors, but Carell delivered it effortlessly.

Jenna Fischer: Steve Carell’s bit at the top of the episode, where Michael explains how he burned his foot, is the greatest interview of the entire series. I think his performance is brilliant. Seriously, brilliant.

Jen Celotta: There’s not a false note in that monologue because you believe that he’s true in everything he does. He has his own set of rules and he plays by them. Even when he’s doing ridiculous things, there’s such integrity to him, and Steve protected his character and he knew his character.

Mindy Kaling: That’s my favorite talking head he’s ever done. “Sue me. I like to wake up every morning to the smell of bacon.” Steve, I remember, when he read it, he’s such a genius, because there’s about seven crazy things, and he’s just like, “And yes, every morning I have to have seven strips of bacon, and no, I don’t like to go to my kitchen to do it. It has to be in my bedroom.” And he just railed through it, and at the next meeting it was, “Give me something else.” He’s such a genius he could take something so crazy and make it something I love thinking about.

Randall Einhorn: That was outrageous and incredibly funny, just amazing. It is such a far-fetched idea that he cooks bacon in his bedroom while sleeping, but he appealed to everybody’s love of the smell of bacon and made it very, very believable. It was a tremendous performance.

Dean Holland (Editor): As a viewer you were like, “Michael would one hundred percent do this.” They did a great job at building stuff up like that and allowing themselves to take chances and go broad without it seeming broad. He treated that injury as if he was in a serious car accident and was like, “You all are not taking this as seriously as I am and this is a serious thing.”

When Dwight crashes into a parking lot pole, he gets out of his car in a stupor and vomits all over the hood as everyone watches from an office window in horror.

Jen Celotta: The way you do vomit is you give an actor split pea soup and they spit it up. However, it was like six in the morning when we shot this. They put split pea soup in Rainn’s mouth again and again and again for takes, and so I am certain that one of the takes he actually threw up a little bit. I think that was the one we used.

Bryan Gordon (Director): Mindy Kaling wrote the episode, so that’s genius upon genius. And I think part of the appeal was that every actor likes to have an obstacle, and Michael and Dwight, their obstacles were they got injured. Michael’s dealing with his foot and Dwight is dealing with getting injured and that gave them so much to work with.

Mindy Kaling: It is full-on loopy. It starts with Dwight throwing up, there’s a Flowers for Algernon B story, Michael grills his foot. If it had just been weirdness for weirdness’s sake, it wouldn’t have really taken off. It was all about the framework—that’s a Greg thing: It can’t just be crazy—and the episode is really about injuries and people with disabilities. If you remember correctly, Michael decides that when people are mean to him, he’s going to pull, “Oh, you’re mean to people with disabilities.” That’s why it’s so funny to me, because what happened to him is so stupid.

Bryan Gordon: What I love most about the episode is the reactions to Michael and Dwight that all the characters give, even when they aren’t speaking. They go from, “I don’t give a shit about this guy,” to a little sympathy and then, “Is Dwight crazy? Is he out of his mind?” They get that all in there without speaking.

Mindy Kaling: It was a very broad episode. It’s basically like Flowers for Algernon, but Office-style, with vomiting and monologues about grilling your foot. And the episode before, [“Booze Cruise,”] which Greg had written, was this very like romantic one, allowing there to be a minute where they don’t say anything—the opposite in tone from mine. So it was nice that later in Office lore that became an episode that people remember fondly, because at the time, I remember no one was very happy with it.