Yeah Oscar did mention at the beginning that their long term problem was dumping all those properties that were losing money, but their short term problem was that they were out of money.
How much info would the shareholders have about what’s going on anyway? For intance would they know before the meeting that Scranton is the only brank still in the black? Or even who Michael is or about his antics?
Wasn’t it from Say Anything?
Right, and then he said something about it being so easy to fix, but then he had to be convinced to get in line to make his point.
In some earlier episode Michael was shown to know Mr. Dunder well enough to be able to ask him to come to a meeting in the Scranton office. How can he have that kind of connection but not have met the current CEO?
IIRC, Dunder had sold his shares and was no longer part of the company.
He was still a member of the board (but he sends a proxy).
I was a little surprised that Michael had never met the CEO. I wasn’t even sure if there was a CEO. It seemed like Wallace was really running the show.
I think Wallace is CFO.
I was thinking When Harry Met Sally. Sally’s talking about Joe and says that she doesn’t miss him, but she misses the idea of him.
He is. But just from all we’ve seen of Dunder-Mifflin Corporate, it seemed like Wallace was pretty much the head guy.
Wallace is far more hands-on regarding the day-to-day operations of the branches than is typical of a CFO. I suspect the writers just picked an important sounding non-CEO title for the character, without really knowing what the position actually entails.
Regarding Oscar, I lost a lot of respect for him in this episode - or as much as one can for a fictional character. 
There are ways of telling a room full of idiots what they should do without making them feel like idiots. A little diplomacy on Oscar’s part and he could have helped both the company and his career. I agree with **Lunar Saltlick ** that Oscar is the “brightest, sanest guy in the office” - too bad he dropped the ball this time.
I find it way too hard to believe that the CFO (and the rest of the board) would have no vision or plan to present to the shareholders at the annual shareholders meeting. This is something he (and they) would have been working on for weeks prior to this meeting, even if it was nothing but pure BS. There is no way people at that level would come out before the shareholders scratching their heads like that.
Agreed–I actually thought this was one of the worst episodes this season (and not just for that reason). The show is growing increasingly unbelieveable and the humor is being sacrificed as a result.
Blargh.
But your big asumption is that there actually is something that CAN be done. The impression I got from Oscar was that DM had been run by Dummies Morons and Idiots for so long that there was no turning it around - so the only plan for him was keepng his paycheck as long as possible.
As for the suit screaming session, it was obviously a take on the recent HCR town hall meetings, and it showed that when you’ve got people like that, what you have to say is pretty irrelevant because they aren’t actually there to learn anything.
-Joe
As for the screaming session with the suits, it was obviosly supposed to be a take on August’s town hall me
I also got the impression that Oscar had a very clear idea of what was going wrong at Dunder-Mifflin, but viewed it as an intractable problem. He complains to his coworkers a lot (like anyone else might), and his criticisms tend to be good ones, but it’s a far cry from being able to identify a problem and solving it. And ultimately, he’s just a minor accountant, not a member of Corporate or even a manager - it’s not his damn job to try to fix the systemic problems underlying Dunder-Mifflin’s sinking stock price.
The whole episode, I got the feeling that both Michael and Andy seemed to think that just because Oscar was a smart, math-minded guy, that he must have some magic plan to save the company (you know, the way it would happen in a shitty sitcom). Hence Andy pushing Oscar to speak up at the shareholder meeting, and Michael calling him into the room with the corporate guys. The problem is that Oscar isn’t a business genius. Hell, he probably doesn’t even know much about paper. He’s a freakin’ accountant. He never wanted to, nor expected to, put on the spot and asked to create a plan to save a near-certainly doomed corporation from scratch.
If you’re going to give Michael the enormous benefit of the doubt and claim that his making the shareholders cheer for a nonexistent plan is somehow good business skills rather than reflexive showboating, then you can’t really turn around and criticize Oscar, of all people, for not being able to do something that the combined braintrust running the company (including Michael) could not.
I think Michael was trying to help, and he did it the only way he knew how.
To him, it was inconceivable that the big boys wouldn’t have a plan. And when it turns out they didn’t have a plan, he tried to lead them into developing one.
-Joe
I sort of hope that they don’t come up with a plan and the company goes under, and hence, the show. The setups on this show, and the behavior of some of the characters, has become so unrealistic and cartoony that it’s just not as funny any longer. It used to be a believeable slice of life in an office in Scranton, PA where the personalities of the workers would result in funny, uncomfortable situations, and their fearless leader was sort of a buffoon. Now, every character is too blown out of proportion that it’s impossible to believe them as personalities; they’ve become “characters” as outlandish as anything else on TV.
I think it’s time for D-M to shut its doors and the show to end.
There’s no way the show is going to end. NBC isn’t going to get rid of one of its highest-rated TV shows for some time…
I always thought the show was pretty much consistent with being inconsistent. Though I wouldn’t mind if the show ended now, while I still enjoy it. The second season was good, but even then people would complain about the “unrealistic” moments.
Aside from that, this season’s shaping up well IMO, aside from the wedding. The mafia episode wasn’t funny, but it still seemed to me to be pretty true to The Office universe.
Maybe back when they were doing well, like with Seinfeld, but yeah.
“No, I pretty much miss the whole Helen.”
I have no idea how they would get there from here, but I couldn’t help thinking about some kind of plot line that ends up with the Michael Scott Paper Company back in business.
I agree that there have been a spate of pretty bad Office episodes, and I agree with the idea that the characters are starting to go over the top too much. I think that moving Jim up was a bad idea. In both versions of The Office, Jim’s character more than any others, in my opinion, seemed to be the link between us and them, and presumably the link between the sane observers and the insanity of the environment of the office. Not only was he, in the past, typically the voice of reason, they often included shots of Jim looking at the camera, as if to make the explicit connection between him and us.
I think they lost a lot when they tried to move him up and make him appear more incompetent. This episode addressed that a bit, with him being proactive regarding Ryan, but there still seems to be something missing.