Plot
While browsing an office chair catalog, Michael Scott (Steve Carell), who has broken up with Jan Levenson, becomes enamored of one of the female chair models. As a result, he decides to resume dating with the help of the office employees, even going so far as threatening to fire them if they do not help. No one in the office wants to set up any of their friends with Michael, but when Michael learns that the chair model had died in a car crash some time ago, Pam Beesly (Jenna Fischer) takes pity and sets him up on a blind date with her landlady (Brooke Dillman). Unfortunately, the date does not go well, beginning with Michael pretending he is not who she was supposed to be meeting. After Michael admits his own blind date was a failure, Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson) convinces him that he needs closure on this person he loved who is gone. The two end up in a cemetery at the grave of the chair model where Michael "grieves". The two wind up singing "American Pie" by Don McLean and dancing on her grave.
With Michael busy, Kevin Malone (Brian Baumgartner) and Andy Bernard (Ed Helms) work to reclaim parking spaces that they have lost due to construction. They arrange a meeting with the bosses of the office park, and are given the parking spots back. The spaces are retrieved, Kevin feels happy to have won one, as his fiancée Stacy broke off their engagement and it's been a hard time for him.
While flirting, Jim Halpert (John Krasinski) reveals he is ready to propose to Pam, even going as far as telling her that he is not going to do it at work ("because that would be rather lame") and when he does it, it will "kick her ass", and Pam is not sure if he's joking. Alone with the camera, Jim reveals that he was not joking and shows an engagement ring that he bought "the week after started dating." At the end of the show, while walking back to his car, he stops and gets down on one knee. When Pam stops and looks he says he has a question to ask her. After a second or so of hesitation, he asks her if she will wait while he ties his shoes. She laughs and they continue walking hand in hand. At the end of the episode, Michael and Dwight are seen singing "American Pie" and dancing in the same cemetery at night, presumably having never left.
Read more about this topic: Chair Model
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)