The Office Season Finale - “Goodbye, Toby”

Now that I’ve had a night to sleep on this, I’ve calmed down a tad about the non-engagement of Jim and Pam. I’m gonna run through the highlights of the episode for me and then address this at the end cause I do have something to say about.

• The lack of Andy in the hour-long episode was totally made up for in his absolutely inappropriate proposal to Angela. Why did she agree? Dwight’s face through that was heartbreaking and his talking head when he said he was too late or something like that was priceless. I’ve really grown to like Dwight. I hated him at first.
• “…the best thing to happen to this office since World War II” is now one of my favorite Office lines ever. I think that is so funny.
• I loved (!) the Kevin is mentally ill thing. Because he didn’t act any different than he normally does! That was played really well.
• Amy Ryan rocked and I hope she comes back next year. This is definitely the first proper love interest Michael has had on the show. They were so cute together.
• The Yoda impression was…I have no words for how much I laughed at that. And then when she did it right back! Finally someone who gets Michael!
• Holy crap Jan is pregnant from a sperm bank! Did not see that one coming at all. She is such a bitch of a character to come back and ruin Michael’s life all over again. Though I’m uber excited to see him try to do the dad thing. That’s gonna be hilarious.
• Poor Toby. I love that he just got ripped on the whole episode. Thank you Paul Lieberstein for putting yourself down so much in your episode. He’ll be missed.
• Ryan getting arrested for fraud instead of drugs. Awesomeness. I love that they were all watching it over and over on YouTube and that Michael got so upset about it.
• Jim calling Ryan on his BS was fantastic. If Jim doesn’t take that job, it is betraying that character
• Dwangela is back!
• The “Goodbye, Toby” song had me laughing so hard I couldn’t breathe. Funniest thing of the whole season. Just classic.
• This episode should be a prime example of why going spoiler free into a finale is wonderful idea. I had no idea anything was going to happen.
• I loved every single JAM moment. We got more than usual and John Krasinksi was so adorable in that talking head when he decides to propose that night that I wanted to jump into the TV and hug him. He also made me cry when talking to Michael about Pam.

I loved this episode, thought it was the best of this really off-kilter season. I do of course have a problem with it. JIm was supposed to propose to Pam in the finale. Since coming back from the strike this has been hinted at and most of us were looking forward to it. Once we caught on that Pam wanted it to happen, I got so excited for a real happy moment to cap off the interrupted season. And we were robbed of that. If this had been a normal season without a huge break from the writer’s strike and the full lot of episodes, Jim not proposing to Pam in the finale would have been fine - a good cliffhanger in fact. But I feel that, because the strike took away some of our show this year, we fans deserved that proposal this season to put a nice finish to the arc. Instead Jam has been left off mid-sentence when it doesn’t even make sense to do so. This would have been the perfect episode if that proposal happened (whether or not we got the answer). Apart from that, I loved it.