The Office (USA)/Grief Counseling

Grief Counseling
Season 3, Episode 4
Airdate	October 12, 2006
Production Number	305
Written by	Jennifer Celotta
Directed by	Roger Nygard
Stream
← 3x03 The Coup	3x05 → Initiation
The Office — Season Three

Grief Counseling is the fourth episode of the third season of The Office, and the thirty-second episode overall.

Starring: Steve Carell (Michael Scott), Rainn Wilson (Dwight Schrute), John Krasinski (Jim Halpert), Jenna Fischer (Pam Beesly), B.J. Novak (Ryan Howard)

Starring: Melora Hardin (Jan Levinson), David Denman (Roy Anderson), Leslie David Baker (Stanley Hudson), Brian Baumgartner (Kevin Malone), Kate Flannery (Meredith Palmer), Mindy Kaling (Kelly Kapoor), Angela Kinsey (Angela Martin), Paul Lieberstein (Toby Flenderson), Phyllis Smith (Phyllis Lapin)

Guest Starring: Creed Bratton (Creed Bratton), Charles Esten (Josh Porter), Ed Helms (Andy Bernard), Rashida Jones (Karen Filipelli)

Co-Starring: Ursula Burton (Hannah Smotridge-Barr)

Plot Overview

A former manger, Ed Truck, died over the weekend and Michael offers his support to the office (an offer that isn't accepted, considering that the majority of the employees never knew Ed). But, after Creed informs him that Ed didn't die of old age and was actually decapitated while driving drunk, Michael and Dwight harshly break the news to the rest of the office. This leads Dwight to request that Angela freeze his head if he ever dies.

Jan offers to give everyone the day off, but Michael tells her that things work differently in Scranton and that they want a statue of Ed. Eventually the statue turns into a robot with moving arms and light-up eyes, but with an extension cord in case there's a robot uprising and they need to escape.

Due to the fact that nobody wants to hear about how Ed was decapitated, Michael takes it upon himself to push people through the stages of grief through his own style of grief counseling. In the conference, Michael goes into extensive detail about how much it hurts to lose Ed. Before he can get too far into counseling, Pam is rescued from the session by Roy, who is still trying to win her back. Unfortunately for Pam, they waited for her to get back before continuing on. She manages to divert the conversation into everyone recounting deaths from movies they've seen.

When Toby tries to calm Michael down by telling him that death is just part of the cycle of life using the example of a bird that flew into the window earlier that day, Michael freaks out and attempts to revive the bird. When he realizes that the bird is dead, he decides to hold a funeral service for the bird.

Meanwhile, in Stamford, Jim is assigned to supervise Karen's sales assignment. However, instead of working, Jim and Karen search for a bag of potato chips that were missing from the vending machine. The two call several stores (including one in Montréal), with no luck. Eventually, after being routed through the manufacturer, distributor and vending machine company, Jim discovers that they sell the chips in the machine next door.

Arc Advancement

Characters

• Karen: When Karen calls a store in Montréal, she speaks fluent French to the person at the other end of the phone.

Trivia

The Show

• M.I.A.: Jan and Oscar do not appear in this episode, although Jan's voice is heard over Michael's speaker phone.

Behind the Scenes

• Switched: This episode was switched with "Initiation" apparently as a reaction to a shooting at an Amish school that occurred on October 2 in Pennsylvania.