There wasn’t even a hint that The Office would end after its ninth season when the show was officially renewed in May 2012. Despite the sinking ratings in season eight and negative reviews, it was still NBC’s highest-rated comedy. Once they secured the return of Ed Helms by giving him several weeks off to film The Hangover Part III and worked out raises for the other leads, a full-season order happened very quickly. “Remaining open is the question who will run The Office next season,” Deadline reported. “I hear NBC is not close to naming a replacement for Paul Lieberstein, who will be leaving to focus on the spinoff [The Farm], which he co-created with Wilson.” That replacement turned out to be Greg Daniels, who felt secure enough with Michael Schur running Parks and Recreation that he was able to return full-time for the first time since the first half of season five.
Alysia Raycraft: Everything felt more cohesive after Greg returned. Mindy likened him to a dad at one point and it really felt like Dad was back.
Briton W. Erwin: Having Greg back made things feel more unified.
Greg Daniels: I hadn’t been full-time on the show for a few years, and I just have a very strong connection to everybody. I feel responsible for everybody, and I couldn’t imagine a scenario where I wouldn’t be directing what was happening at the end.
Mark Proksch: Greg had such a clear insight into the show and how the show should work and how the relationships should work, better than anyone else, I think, other than possibly Paul Lieberstein. Him coming back really gave that last season direction. Season eight felt like Clown Town Frolics, which is a weird term I use sometimes. But Greg’s whole idea was that it’s a love story between Jim and Pam and he returned the focus back to that. I also think that he realized that Andy wasn’t quite working out as boss and so he tried to spread that a little bit instead of focusing on Andy so much as they did in season eight. The writing felt more focused. I just felt season eight was a little . . . and who am I to say as just a recurring actor on the show, but I felt that the stories were a little wishy-washy at times and unfocused.
Greg Daniels: I wanted to have a tone of alternating comedy with seriousness, I guess. Then one of the things that we all as writers felt was that Andy Bernard was funnier as a bit of a dick. We took his character down a few notches. We went back to perhaps an earlier version of his character. Part of it was that he was going to be gone for like ten episodes in the middle of the season. So, it was clear that he couldn’t headline the show as he had in season eight because he was missing for the middle. Part of it was, “What do we do if he’s not going to be here for the middle of the season? We have to figure out something for Erin to do.” But we also liked the Andy that was capable of more foolishness.
And even though the cast was huge by this point, he decided to bring on Jake Lacy and Clark Duke as young office workers.
Clark Duke: When Jake and I joined the show, the idea was that it was gonna be like ER. The three leads—Rainn, John, and Jenna—were all going to leave after the season and they were going to reboot the show the following year with new cast members basically. That was my understanding of what was going to happen when I was hired.
Owen Ellickson: I heard that bandied about, but I never thought it was going to happen. There was the road where—which is the road that ended up being taken—where you start a show and you start with a bunch of actors and you basically end with those same actors and that’s the life of the show. The other version is you could theoretically imagine a sort of perpetual-motion machine, like a Law & Order or something, where, like in an actual office, people leave and new people come in.
Brent Forrester: Greg was initially thinking about a reboot of the show at the start of season nine. It was like, “Hey, you know what? Let’s keep this show going on way beyond season nine.” That’s where you see him casting Clark Duke and Jake Lacy. That was going to be the future of The Office. On-screen they’re quite deliberately referred to as, “Hey, look at new Jim and new Dwight.” Greg anticipated if there had been a season ten that Krasinski and Jenna Fischer would move on, and then he would just replace them and build a new cast. There was an effective process of that from beginning to end. They had the core cast and then new characters were added effectively from time to time, like Andy Bernard and Erin. That would have just continued and old characters would have left and it just would have kept evolving.
Greg Daniels: From the storytelling standpoint the theme of this year was set in the premiere and it was the kind of realization on the part of Dwight and Jim that they’d been there a long time. That’s sort of a prod for them to get their lives on to the next stage. By having these guys who everybody was seeing as the new Jim and the new Dwight—the point of that was just to kind of get them to think about how long they’ve been in the same job.
Clark Duke: There was supposed to be a Jim/Dwight thing with me and Jake. They kept playing with the meta-ness of it by saying that I looked like Dwight. I think it would’ve been a fun thing if they’d kept it going longer and figured out the nuances of the characters.
Owen Ellickson: Greg sort of gathered everybody toward the end of season eight and asked how we thought we could rejuvenate the show. I said, largely to silence, that I think we have to fire a bunch of actors. Not that I think they deserve to be fired, but if you actually wanted to make it feel like you were starting a new chapter, you can’t keep eighteen pieces in place. You’re never going to start a new chapter if it’s like, “Here’s pieces nineteen through twenty-three.” You have to give those people real slots. I think, totally understandably, partly for personal reasons, because everybody was friends with the actors, we were never going to quite pull that trigger. There may have been business concerns as well, but I think when Clark and Jake were told there was going to be a tenth season with them, I’m sure that Greg believed that in the moment. I think that was something he genuinely considered doing. But I’m not shocked it never went that way. I think you leave the dance with the date that brought you.
Just four episodes into the season, Daniels came onto the set and made a big announcement.
Kate Flannery: Bryan Cranston was on set that day directing the “Work Bus” episode [where everyone in the office is forced to work in a cramped, moving bus]. During lunch they told us this was going to be the last season and it was going to the press in an hour. They wanted to prep us for it going out. I just remember we were on this bus and inches from each other all day. I was like, “This is crazy.” It just felt so emotional, but it also felt sort of perfect that we were in such close proximity feeling this all together and processing this together.
The exact reasoning has never been fully articulated, but it seems to be a mixture of creative exhaustion, the knowledge that the leads were unlikely to agree to another season, and Bob Greenblatt’s desire to move NBC away from quirky, relatively low-rated shows like 30 Rock, Parks and Rec, Community, and The Office and once again produce massive hits like the network did in the 1990s.
Briton W. Erwin: When the ninth season rolled around, Greg went around and polled the cast and crew and said, “We can do a season ten if you want, but should we?” And I think pretty much everybody said, “Let’s find a way to go out in style, not just try and drag it out for another season just because.” I think everybody kinda liked the idea of a solid ten seasons and it’s not like any of us wanted to stop working together, but I think the majority of the people kinda felt like it was time and it wasn’t the same show anymore and it hadn’t really found the traction that it needed to.
Brian Wittle: I remember there being some discussion of a reboot with Jake and Clark, but the general consensus was that we should just end it, that it’s been nine years and if we try to start up with new guys, or even these new guys, it’s not gonna be the same if everybody leaves except them. They were funny, but I think we would’ve lost most of the audience.
Warren Lieberstein: Greg wanted to get out before the show ever took a slide. By then we were always battling to try and find small office stories. That was the bread and butter of the show, but after a while [with] those small stories you begin to kind of circle around kind of the same stuff. And you’re like, “Oh, we already did an episode that was kind of similar to that.” Then when you start to remove yourself from the office and more and more stories start to be set in other locations, you can start to get the sense that the timing is right to leave.
Teri Weinberg: In thinking about a possible season ten, it was, “Does Greg have it in him? Does this writing staff have it in them? Does the cast want to come back and do this?” And I think we all decided that we felt like it was a great opportunity to have an incredible season nine and have that be our last season. We went out on our own terms.
John Krasinski: We all had a big say in whether or not we ended it. And it was a big discussion with the actors and producers and the crew and we all had a feeling about it. To us, it was just about maintaining the very special experience we’ve had all along, which is “I think we’re a very special show, I think we’re a very unique show, and because of it, I feel we deserve to leave rather than be asked to leave.” Growing up I remember vividly the end of Cheers and the end of Friends, and I think it’s such a special moment, and weirdly TV is an incredibly sentimental medium that you have a lot of people not only watching, but weirdly experiencing this with you, so everyone deserves to have that goodbye moment rather than, “Is that show still on?” We just didn’t want that.
Oscar Nunez: Greg Daniels was like, “This is going to be the end.” We’re like, “No.” And then he’s like, “Should we keep going?” Everyone was like, “We don’t know, we’re just saying no, but we don’t know.” He’s like, “I think we’re done. I know I’m done.” We were like, “He’s right.” For Greg it was so much work for so many years. He was ready for a break.
Steve Burgess: It was Greg being Greg and Greg wanting to end things the right way and on our terms and not on the network’s terms.
Clark Duke: I thought NBC canceled it.
Bob Greenblatt: I made the decision with Greg Daniels to end it while it was still pretty strong because we didn’t [want to] watch it erode on the air.
Randy Cordray: We believed that Bob Greenblatt wanted to move away from The Office and develop his own slate of comedies and dramas. And The Office was getting a little long in the tooth as far as he was concerned. And I don’t think he planned on The Office going twelve seasons.
Owen Ellickson: I think that Bob Greenblatt was never particularly sold on The Office. I don’t know him personally, but it certainly never felt like there was a consistent plug from the network, like, “We love you guys. We would like to find the next version of this show.” It might have gone by the board anyway, but that element was certainly not in its favor.
Teri Weinberg: Bob couldn’t have been more supportive when he first came to the network, and he’s one of my closest friends. I love him dearly. He said, “I’m not going to come in and tell you guys how to make this show. I respect it. I’m a huge fan of it, and I’ll support you, and I want you on the air as long as you want to be on the air.”
Ben Silverman: Now that I look back, I think that Greg wanted to end it. I think there was just a little bit of fatigue around it that I’m sure that everyone regrets having because it could have kept going.
Halsted Sullivan: If the ratings were better at that time, maybe there would have been another season or two. But you also have to remember that, for both the cast and crew, we were doing twenty-six episodes a season at that point. A lot of us were low on gas—not low on love for the show, but it was challenging to find new and interesting ways to tell stories that hadn’t been told before.
Kim Ferry: Most of the cast were still really interested in doing movies and maybe doing something completely different than the characters they’d been playing for nine years. I think they kind of got antsy.
Matt Sohn: It felt like the end. There was conversation of getting another season out of it, but everything leading up into it, it definitely felt like this was the last one. It seemed like that was the general chatter with the cast. There were cast members that were definitely ready to move on. There [were] other cast members that were happy to keep this going until they could just be done with the business.
Brian Wittle: I remember Greg saying, “At least we know it early on so that we can really savor this last season.”
They had twenty episodes to wrap up the entire series.
Halsted Sullivan: When we knew we were marching toward the end, we were therefore able to take some bigger swings.
Owen Ellickson: It was a much more satisfying season to work on because we knew we were building to a head. Season eight was sort of like, “Here’s some more stuff, but we don’t really know what the upshot of any of it is.” Season nine was totally different.
Brent Forrester: In some ways that was very energizing because it was like, “Hey, every single idea that you ever wanted to do on the show that you couldn’t, now’s your last chance.” There was an abundance of leftover ideas. From the very beginning, Greg knew that a couple of things [were] going to happen before the show ended. One was that we were going to break the fourth wall and show the camera crew. You’d think we were talking about the end of the earth the way we debated this. People were going to lay down their lives for or against this issue back when Mike Schur was on the show. I remember speaking to Mike and saying, “Why are you so against showing the camera crew?” Mike said, “Why am I against this? Because it’s like opening up the skin of the actor and pulling out its guts and showing that to the audience as entertainment.” That’s how passionate he was against this. Now that Mike Schur was gone Greg could finally show the boom operator.
Ken Kwapis: Greg decided we should start to get to know those people. But I do think that there’s always been important moments where you get a sense that if a character says something to the camera, they’re sort of having a conversation with the camera operator.
Justin Spitzer: In the back of our minds, that was always something that we would talk about. At some point, do we meet that person? I think Greg always had in the back of his mind that whenever the final season was, we would meet them, or we would jump forward in time to when they’re screening the documentary and all that.
Owen Ellickson: I was a real camera-crew-reveal skeptic. I never really even thought of it so much from a creative perspective, but from a fan perspective. I just felt like even though I’ve often enjoyed meta stuff in other forms of comedy, that wasn’t what I found interesting about the show. The presentation was part of what made the show fun, but I wasn’t actually curious about who these people were living in Scranton. That just was a question that I felt viscerally I did not want to ask, personally. So, I was against it, but it was just season nine and we knew that was something we had to do, so we moved forward on it.
Briton W. Erwin: Our dream was that at the end of it, since it was a British documentary crew, that it would turn out to be Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant and some of the other people from the BBC show being the documentary crew. A bunch of us were rooting for that to be the end. But I think in a lot of ways, Greg was right to go out on a more emotional note because I think at that point, people were so invested in these characters.
Despite that investment, Greg wanted to throw a major wedge between Jim and Pam. It begins early in the season when Jim starts up a sports agency with college friends that forces him to divide his time between Philadelphia and Scranton.
Justin Spitzer: Early on, once we got Jim and Pam together we said that we’re not gonna do the Friends thing of you split Ross and Rachel apart just to bring them back together. That season we thought, “Well, we’ve gone this long; maybe we do add a little bit of tension.” It’s so much fun to see characters get together and that would give us a cool place to end the season.
Steve Burgess: I remember Greg having a meeting with pretty much everybody in the cast about where they felt their character would be going and how their character would be ending the series. Greg actually took a lot of that into consideration as he planned out the final season.
John Krasinski: My whole pitch to Greg was that we’ve done so much with Jim and Pam, and now, after marriage and kids, there was a bit of a lull there, I think, for them about what they wanted to do. . . . For me it was, “Can you have this perfect relationship go through a split and keep it the same?” which of course you can’t. And I said to Greg, “It would be really interesting to see how that split will affect two people that you know so well.”
Greg Daniels: I was just very attracted to the idea of doing something that would matter, and where people would feel very involved, and I think there were a number of moments [that] year where you become really involved in what’s happening. And in order to get that feeling of involvement there, you need some ups and some downs.
Brent Forrester: Greg really wanted to do something extremely risky and high-stakes, which was the documentary airs and we see what effect it has had on these characters. And there was going to be a reunion episode where you see that Jim and Pam have split up by this time, and they will have their reunion in the reunion episode.
Warren Lieberstein: I recall this slightly differently, though if Brent says it’s true then I would believe it because he had a large part to do with that final season and Halsted and I were just working three days a week at that point. What I recall is that there might have been a faction of people who liked the idea of splitting up Jim and Pam, but it wasn’t universally loved and Greg had the final say.
They built toward a possible Jim/Pam split through the early part of the season where they are increasingly at odds with each other over his new company, especially when she learns he lied to her about it at first and then put $10,000 of their emergency savings in it. In the twelfth episode, “Customer Loyalty,” they get into a nasty argument over the phone when Pam admits that she failed to record their daughter’s dance recital. When it ends, Pam breaks down in tears and a voice off camera says, “Are you okay?” She shakes her head and says, “What am I doing wrong, Brian?” We then pan to a boom mic operator standing a few feet away from her desk. A camera operator is next to him. After nine years, we finally see the faces of the people making the documentary. The boom mic operator moves toward Pam to comfort her and orders the cameras off. It’s clear they have affection for each other. The boom mic guy is named Brian Wittle.
Brian Wittle: Brian is me, that’s who it’s supposed to be. Greg came to me and he said, “So we’ve been talking about you in the writing room. We’re gonna introduce a character and we think it should be you. You’re gonna audition and maybe you could play yourself.” I was like, “Well, I haven’t really done a lot of acting, but I’ll try.” I did an audition with Jenna and then they auditioned a bunch of other people, too. Greg sent me a very nice e-mail saying they had given it to someone else, which I expected to happen. [The part went to Chris Diamantopoulos.] We did a talking head where he introduces himself as Brian Wittle and I boomed it. It was really weird.
Owen Ellickson: It sucks to have a character named after you, then read for it and not get it. It always felt like it must have been a very existentially confusing moment for the real Brian Wittle.
Warren Lieberstein: There was always this notion that the person behind the camera might develop this certain affection toward the person they’re shooting because it was so intimate. If you’ve ever been wired up for sound you know it’s very intimate, the whole thing. So it made sense to us that a relationship would be drawn between filmer and subject.
Greg Daniels: [This] was something that came up in season five, I think. It was a pitch. I think Mindy was the first or one of the first champions of it. The idea was to introduce some romantic triangle with Jim when they were such soul mates that you had to say, “How could she possibly be interested in somebody else?” You think to yourself, “Well, I wouldn’t believe it if I just was introduced to the character.” You had to see it happening from scratch. What if that character had been secretly there the entire time and predated the relationship with Jim and had been a shoulder that she cried on for years? It just seemed very intriguing. But we also were like, “If we break the fourth wall in season five, it feels like that might be the last season for the show.” So we kept putting that off. Ultimately, I didn’t think it was about actually going there. They never did anything. It was just to introduce worry in the audience, which I think happened. I mean there are people who in season eight were like, “They’re so boring. They just hang out together and there’s no angst. We used to love the angst with their relationship.”
Kelly Cantley: The rules we made up for our documentary, we always stuck to them. Then we were like, “Okay, so now some random guy walks in and starts talking to her. How is the doc going to shoot that?” My idea was that if you change the frame, like they weren’t really paying attention, you could maybe believe it was found footage that we got by accident.
Halsted Sullivan: We knew at some point we were going to see the crew. And then, in trying to show Jim and Pam as real people, and a real couple with real stresses, we were like, “What happens when the cameras are put down and Jim and Pam are fighting a little bit? And this crew, who know these people really well, especially when you’re cutting together their lives, what happens when they overstep?” This all came from a discussion about the story and process. It was like, “If we’re gonna pull back the curtain, why not pull it back and create a new dynamic to explore?”
Over the next few episodes, the rift between Jim and Pam widens as it becomes quite clear that Brian has become infatuated with her after spending nearly a decade chronicling her every move.
Halsted Sullivan: We wanted to treat them as a real couple with real stresses. Are they gonna have a picture-perfect romance that maybe no other couple in America has or are they going to be a real, relatable couple that go through the same things that lots of people go through? We didn’t want them to be sidelined into this perfect idyllic thing with Jim just pranking Dwight and Pam just being office managing. It was like, “No, this is our last season. Let’s go back to the heart of the show and see what happens when that heart is put under stress.”
Owen Ellickson: There was talk of Pam and Brian maybe hooking up a little bit. I have to say, as a writer, I never believed we were going to do that.
Briton W. Erwin: The whole Pam-and-the-sound-guy thing, that whole distraction . . . I don’t think it was really necessary or really helped the show.
Claire Scanlon: Everything got better in season nine because Greg came back and James Spader wasn’t there and they were really working toward an endgame so everyone’s acting was on point. It just got better. The only thing I think that was off was the guy who was the sound guy. And that’s such a bummer. I was so excited for the documentary crew to be incorporated into the storytelling and I just think that was bad casting. He was aggressive and mean and weird. I was like, “Why is this guy here?” He just didn’t fit in. It didn’t pay off the way I had hoped it would and I was a big proponent for that. Coming from documentary, I was like, “This is gonna be great. We’re gonna get an idea of his point of view.” And that was a mistake. We got out of it very quickly.
Owen Ellickson: The fans just didn’t like that Brian guy. I think it’s just this creepy lecherous guy who’s been staring at her for nine years and was making his move now that she was vulnerable. I think it just didn’t sit well with people. I felt like if [they] had cast kind of a schlubby guy, maybe it could have been okay. It would have been like, this guy likes Pam, but it’s not really about Pam liking the guy back. It being this kind of fit handsome guy in a tight black T-shirt felt like we were trying to say there had been this kind of mutual sexy undercurrent between them all these years. The fans just did not want to be asked to think about [that].
Brian vanished after appearing just four more times.
Brent Forrester: We had to pull the ripcord on it because it was so painful to the fans of the show. John Krasinski said to me, “Brent, this final season is for the ultra fans of the show. They’re the only ones really still left watching, right? This is for them. Jim and Pam splitting up is too painful for them to sustain all the way to the reunion. We have to get them back together immediately.” I was like, “Wow, we can’t allow this beautiful couple to be really like on the verge of divorce. It’s too awful for them.” It was obviously the direction that the show was going. Then they’re just like, “No. Pull the plug on that. No. Nobody actually wants that.”
Owen Ellickson: The episode that really spun people on a dime is one that I wrote [“Vandalism”] where Brian the boom guy heroically saves Pam from an attack from a warehouse guy. People just absolutely did not like that. They were bothered that there might be some triangle that Pam and Jim would be involved in and even more insulted that we thought they might believe that. That’s how it felt to me. Greg absolutely turned on a dime after that and we pivoted away, I think pretty skillfully given how quickly we had to do that. It involved decently sized edits to the next two episodes, if I recall.
Another difficulty that season was the addition of Catherine Tate into the cast. The British comedian had a quick cameo at the end of season seven as one of the many candidates for Michael Scott’s position and then joined the cast midway through season eight as vice president of Sabre’s special projects. In her native England, Tate is a superstar best known for her work on Doctor Who and the sketch program The Catherine Tate Show, but in America she was a complete unknown to most viewers. Her character of Nellie Bertram was introduced as a conniving schemer with basically no redeeming qualities. It didn’t give her a lot of places to go comedically.
Brent Forrester: Poor Catherine Tate, she really got swallowed up by the size of the cast. I remember certainly feeling like, “Oh my God. We have Catherine Tate in this ensemble!” and we’re coming up with stories that we wanted to do for her, but ultimately in the last couple of seasons there are so many characters. There’s a period where it’s like, “Come on, we’ve got to give Oscar a story. We’ve got to give Kevin a story.” Even if you are Catherine Tate, you’ve got to wait your turn. My feeling was always like, “Boy, we never really got to use this incredible English superstar in our cast.”
Jeff Blitz: The writers loved her, but they never quite figured out exactly what her role should be.
Roxxi Dott: I loved her to pieces, but she was fucking miserable.
Owen Ellickson: She’s brilliant. We were excited to get her, but I remember at one point in season nine, Greg saying, “I want the two of you to go off and start working on a G story for this episode.” It just got fractured beyond a point I’d ever even heard of on any other sitcom . . . There wasn’t enough oxygen to get a new character over. There had been a time when you really could sort of time and introduce a character, and really make them feel like they were woven into the core of the show, and they had their own unique comedy, but I think Ellie was the last one through the door. I think that it just got so crowded, which is a credit to the show that all these characters were fun, but I think Catherine was never quite given a clear path to becoming a real part of the fabric.
Rusty Mahmood: First of all, I didn’t know who Catherine was. She’s a huge, huge British comedy icon. She’s the Steve Carell of Britain. I don’t think the writers gave her what she’s capable of. And she struggled with what was written for her. When I looked her up, I learned what she did in England and I looked at her with new eyes. I thought to myself, “Wow, she’s coming in here and being treated like a recurring day player, like she’s Pam’s old boyfriend Roy or something.” It would be like if Steve Carell went to England and nobody knew who he was. She was just so underutilized.
Mark Proksch: I was really psyched to work with her because she’s the female Steve Coogan. She’s so versatile and can do so much stuff. And she’s just so funny to talk to in real life. She’s just really funny, but I feel like they didn’t quite know how to use her. They didn’t know where and how to make that character a standout like they did with the other characters that they created. I felt like she was just an add-on in a show where so many of the characters are so well defined, and that’s not her fault at all.
Kate Flannery: I really liked Catherine, but I felt like she didn’t get to be that funny on the show, which was kind of a bummer because she’s really funny. But I mean—and I understood what they were doing with her—but I felt like, I wonder if it would have been a missed opportunity for her to be the boss.
Steve Burgess: It was challenging for her, and for the writers, and I’m not sure they ever got the Nellie character the way they wanted it and the way Catherine wanted it.
Claire Scanlon: She thought they burned her character, like took her to crazy town too soon. And not everyone can work off-the-cuff like they want. It was just kind of like they threw her to the wolves and were like, “Okay, go play now.” She was like, “Well, let’s give me some more help here. Who’s my character? What am I doing?”
Myles McNutt: I love Catherine Tate. I thought her character was super interesting during the interview phase in season seven. But the Nellie character was so aggressive and offensive that there was no balance to it. You met her during the Florida arc in season eight where she’s just this absurd character they have to react to and engage with, and then they bring her to Scranton. They set her up as being this offensive woman who hates everybody, who nobody likes. How do you expect us to accept her as being part of this office? I remember watching that episode where they try to soften her and suggest all these sympathetic things about her. And I’m like, the deal was done. You can’t do that retroactively if you’ve introduced somebody that aggressively.
Owen Ellickson: I’m all for villains, but you have to know that if you’ve presented somebody as a villain, especially on a show that has a lot of people that people like, they’re not going to get that excited about turning themselves around on a villain.
Other plotlines of the season included Angela, now married with a new baby, discovering that her husband was having an affair with Oscar; Erin and Jake Lacy’s character forming a relationship; Andy taking a long sailing trip (giving Ed Helms time to film The Hangover Part III); Nellie taking over as manager; and the staff reacting to the upcoming debut of the documentary. The second-to-last episode, “A.A.R.M.,” feels almost like a series finale. It features Angela revealing to Dwight that he’s the father of her baby and the two of them deciding to wed, Jim asking the documentary crew to create a montage of his best moments with Pam and showing it to her, and new regional manager Dwight (he was promoted in the previous episode when Andy quit) getting pranked by Jim into competing in a contest to become the assistant to his own assistant. Pam begins to have second thoughts about forcing Jim to remain in Scranton instead of pursuing his dreams at the sports agency when she realizes that he truly loves her and Dunder Mifflin isn’t allowing him to grow beyond silly pranks. At the end, everyone goes to Poor Richard’s to watch the premiere of the documentary.
Brent Forrester: I wrote that one. It’s really plot heavy. Greg hired me to be the number two in season nine and what you see there is my work ethic and energy and drive in the penultimate episode. Then Greg takes over for the finale, and it becomes this meditative, almost melancholy meditation on people that he loved in the show. Much more than a plot episode, it’s a mood episode. It was brilliant.