I guess I’m a glass half-full guy…anything more than a half hour is a bonus. Plus I’m not inclined to see corporate greed hanging around every corner. 
The ep was a few steps backward from last week but a giant leap forward re the earlier eps this season.
Is this Jim and Pam thing a spoiler or just speculation?
Ugh, I totally agree. I was really bummed to learn that next week’s is going to be a 6-months-future episode. The most interesting thing about this season has been Jim and Pam’s problems and it’s seemed so clear to me that Pam was in the wrong. Next week it’ll probably turn out that she allowed him to go, he made a ton of money and everything is all happy.
I disagree with Jim, that one woman would make it all worth it. Having a job that is absurd and unfulfilling when you had the opportunity of a lifetime but the one woman who didn’t want you to go because of her low self-esteem makes the crappy job worth it? Then why did he bother with Athlead at all?
I wonder what happened to Val. They made a big deal about getting them back together, but never resolved it. At least not in front of the cameras.
Jim still has some ownership in the company so he’ll do well if it sells. He hasn’t totally quit or they wouldn’t be continuing to try to get him to go on the sales trip.
Given that the final episode is six months in the future, the doc has aired in its entirety and I imagine that Jim has gone on his three month trip with his best bud Darryl. They’ll either allow him to work remotely from Scranton or Pam will have learned to love Philly.
I just caught up with this episode online, and it was the normal length for an hour long show minus commercials – 44 minutes. I don’t know how the actual number of commercial breaks worked out in the broadcast, but the amount of time devoted to commercials was the same as for any hour long show.
I thought this episode was pretty good, although the American Idol knockoff stuff with Andy seemed like a total waste of time. But maybe there will be a payoff in the finale where, six months later, he’s married to the woman he met in line or something.
As for the Jim and Pam storyline, while it’s possible they’ll reveal in the finale that Pam insisted Jim go on the road trip with Darryl, my takeaway from this episode was that Jim sincerely did not want to leave Pam and the kids for that long and that he was being honest in telling Pam he really didn’t want to go.
I agree but I think that she’ll convince him to go anyway.
Jim didn’t want to lose Pam. He gladly gave up on the trip because it was costing him Pam, but if it wasn’t for her he would be a lot happier with Athlead than being second fiddle to Dwight for who knows how many more years. If Pam had been supportive from the start there is no way in hell Jim would ever consider staying at Dundler-Miffin.
The idea that this was "costing him Pam " doesn’t speak well of Pam.
I took from it that Jim is sincerely happy in Scranton at Dunder-Mifflin for the first time in his life, and that he’s going to be just fine there from here on out. He doesn’t need Athlead to feel happy or fulfilled or whatever. He genuinely is getting along well with Dwight and realized that all that little goofy stuff they do in the office every day is what he really wants out of life, and that all of that, and being with Pam and his children, is way more meaningful than the sports marketing stuff he thought he had always dreamed of doing.
But maybe I’m wrong.
This was my take as well. He seemed genuinely happy for the first time since he was falling in love with Pam.
The infantilization of Kevin has gone beyond ridiculous. It’s a good thing the show only has one more episode, 'cause if it went on any longer he’d lose the power of speech and would need to start wearing a diaper.
Yes! This. There’s virtually no cons in the Jim/Athlead column. It’s not even a risky venture at this point. This season has shown us the worst of Pam. She hasn’t been so wrong and off-putting since Roy.
I agree but I did enjoy the little meta-nod to this with Oscar talking about how long ago the documentary started being filmed… so long ago that he was still sleeping with women, as was Kevin.
I don’t agree. He’s still selling paper for Dunder Mifflin and playing pranks on Dwight, just as he has for the past decade. He may be happy, but he’s not moving forward. I think Pam recognized this.
Someone on the board said years ago that they hope it comes out that Kevin had a brain tumor, which explains why he’s been degrading over the years, and he then gets mad at his coworkers for not saying anything.
Wait… you guys keep referring to Kevin and others as “characters”… YOU MEAN THESE WEREN’T REAL PEOPLE IN AN OFFICE??? I feel cheated and lied to! All these years 
If Pam did not exist then being at Athlead would probably be preferable to being at Dunder-Mifflin, but it seemed to me that the whole point of the Jim/Pam plot in this episode – one pretty explicitly spelled out by Jim in his conversation with Dwight – was that Jim would sincerely rather be with Pam than do anything else even when doing something else would seem like the more logical choice.
It wasn’t going to cost him Pam. The trip would, however, mean that Jim would have to spend several months on the road without seeing Pam or their kids in person. That would be true even if Pam were really excited about this opportunity for him and was urging him to go.
I have a hard time understanding Jim’s apparent decision to abandon Athlead but then again I knew a guy in real life who said he regretted every business trip because it meant not seeing his toddler daughter, saying that in particular at that age, every day you see something new in the child.