Dwight was good in this one. The rest of it was just ok… not much went on with story development, aside from Jim having the time of his life.
I actually think Meredith looked better with the shaved head. It’ll probably look even better when it grows in an inch or so.
By the way, the whole premise of the plot was faulty. There’s no way to know if Pam brought in the lice from Cece, or if someone else brought it into the office and Pam took it home to Cece. Also, lice doesn’t leap from scalp to scalp, so it shouldn’t have spread that quickly unless they were all sharing hats or something.
Terrible. Every joke flat; I don’t think I laughed once. I was astonished that Dwight dropped the bomb in his car - it was so telegraphed that I was waiting for them to do something else with it. Nope.
That and why did matter who brought the lice regarding Meredith shaving her head. Unless I missed something, she didn’t shave her head because she brought the lice, but because she had lice…same outcome either way.
Kudos to Kate Flannery for really shaving her head there. At first I thought it was for sure a bald-cap, but you could see normal skin imperfections (moles, bumps, etc).
I thought the episode had some good laughs and I really enjoyed the storyline of Jim hanging out with Dr. J even if it wasn’t very funny.
AND, the CDC doesn’t recommend suffocant treatment like mayonnaise for lice outbreaks. Use a pyrethrin-based insecticide, then manual removal.
Huh, i thought the bald cap was so obvious it took me out of the episode. I even commented on it to my brother. Not fake looking but it made her cranium just look way out of proportion.
I thought it looked real enough that I was convinced that she really did it. I meant to see if I could find anything out about that today.
Okay, her Twitter page said it was a bald cap (and it took 3.5 hours to get into).
https://twitter.com/KateFlannery
The only reason I thought it might have been fake when I was watching it is that if she really did shave her head, pictures would have surface back when they filmed it.
Awful episode. Just awful.
The skin didn’t look fake but she was practically a conehead, it didn’t look realistic at all.
Well, fooled me!
I didn’t get the whole subplot with Jim and Dr. J. It seemed like just an excuse to have a guest star and didn’t go anywhere. Unless I missed something near the end there was no payoff to it: no big laughs, no plot or character development, nothing. They kept making the point that Jim was having an incredible day while Pam thought he must be really stressed out and that Jim thought Pam was doing fine when really she was having an awful time, but nothing came of this.
True, but I believe children in preschool and elementary school are the group most likely to pick up head lice (from contact with other kids), so it does seem more likely that the lice passed from Cece to Pam than from Pam to Cece. I don’t think they said this in the episode, but it’s possible that Pam knew there had been a recent outbreak of lice in Cece’s class.
Yeah, while The Office is a comedy and not a documentary or anything I did feel it was kind of irresponsible for the show to portray the mayo treatment as a safe and easy way to treat head lice. I was expecting that this would turn out to be just a dumb idea of Erin’s and they’d all have to get some lice shampoo. Even if mayo did kill adult lice (and the evidence seems to be against it), one treatment wouldn’t be enough. Lice eggs don’t need to breathe.
It’s a sitcom, not a role model.
Should we go over all the other things in sitcoms that you shouldn’t follow as real life advice?
Don’t cook meth to pay for your cancer treatment.
Don’t walk around in the hot California sun in full Star Trek regalia.
Don’t lock the doors, heat the handles and set off fire crackers in The Office to test your co-workers ability to exit during a fire drill.
If you and your best friend start a business that involves contracting your ‘psychic’ abilities out to the police department, in actuality you probably won’t get into all kinds of fun and wacky predicaments and end up dating the cute blonde detective.
Anyone else?
Very little on sitcoms is ever explicitly presented as practical advice the way Erin’s mayo remedy was. “Sitcom character does something strange, hilarity ensues” is pretty different from “sitcom character describes well-known but probably useless folk remedy as the best way to deal with a common problem, and this is shown to work perfectly.”
Given the amount of time this episode devoted to the mayo remedy and the lack of comedic payoff associated with it, I’m not sure what the point was of including it at all if the viewer was not meant to think that Erin was right and that she’d saved the day with her unexpectedly practical advice.
If you put mayonnaise on your head which an active outbreak, wait a while and wash it out and then go home, how does that say it was an effective treatment. They might all have eggs hatching for a new outbreak at a future time, not shown on the air.
If anyone watches that, tries mayonnaise as their only treatment, based solely a SITCOM I’m okay with them having another outbreak.
Breaking Bad is a sitcom? Wow, I’ve been viewing that show all wrong! 
Anyway, that was a bald cap? Wow, it looked about a thousand times better than whatever they’re doing to Monica Potter’s head on Parenthood.
Sorry about that one. I was trying to come up with life lessons you shouldn’t take away from TV and a few hours later I was thinking about that post and realized I used the word ‘sitcom’. I think I’m safe with the others though. I was wondering if anyone was going to call me out on it. I’ll bet if we put our heads together, we can find something to replace it with.
It probably wouldn’t be based solely on a sitcom though. This is a well-known folk remedy, and a quick Google turns up plenty of websites claiming that it works and that it’s better than lice shampoo because it’s safer and more natural – basically the same thing Erin said in the episode.
If there had been any real comedic payoff to the mayo treatment that would be one thing. But the episode spent a LOT of time on this and none of it was particularly funny, so it seemed almost like an infomercial for treating lice with mayonnaise. If the writers just wanted to show Erin stepping up to solve a problem, they could just as easily have had her overseeing lice shampooing/nit combing.