All the Weird Stuff Cut from ‘The Office’ Finale
It’s been 10 whole years since we bid goodbye to The Office — and by “goodbye,” we mean that the show technically stopped making new episodes, but everyone just kept playing it on streaming services 24/7, paving the way for an inevitable reboot.
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The last episode was full of memorable moments — the reunion panel, Dwight and Angela’s wedding and the brief return of Michael Scott until he mysteriously disappeared, never to be seen again. And impressively, they resisted the urge to reveal that Dunder Mifflin was some kind of purgatorial afterlife from which there was no escape. But not everything that was scripted for the show made it into the final cut, and some truly odd scenes ended up on the cutting room floor.
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For starters, the finale nearly began like every MTV Movie Awards Show in the early 2000s: with a spoof of The Matrix. In the scrapped cold open, Jim and Pam utilize trained cats and a random warehouse worker’s twin brother to make Dwight think that he’s inside the Matrix. Then also get Hank, the building security guard, to pretend that he’s Morpheus’ brother “Dorpheus.”
Somewhat prophetically, their ensuing conversation is not wholly unlike the recent The Matrix Resurrections, with Dwight insisting that The Matrix is a fictional franchise, only to be informed that this mistaken belief is really part of the machines’ master plan. Shocking everyone, Dwight takes the blue pill and opts to stay in reality because he’s “truly happy.”
We also nearly got a scene where Kevin reveals that his ownership of a local bar is due to the fact that his PBS celebrity led to so many people wanting to buy him drinks that he accumulated a “$16,000 credit,” and it was “cheaper” to simply make him a partner — thus disproving the whole “Kevin is a secret genius” theory.
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In addition, one of the sweetest scenes in the episode almost included an extremely bizarre follow-up. In the version that aired, Erin finally gets to meet her birth parents, played by Hollywood legends Joan Cusack and Ed Begley Jr.
But originally, the show was going to shed some more light on their backstory, with Erin’s parents revealing that they are puppeteers and clarifying that they gave her up for adoption because they were so freaked out and depressed after working on the 1980s Jim Henson family movie/bed-wetting bonanza The Dark Crystal, telling Erin: “We just didn’t think it was safe to bring a baby into a world that gave us nightmares.”
The show also narrowly avoided including a sequence in which Angela’s estranged sister delivers a wedding toast in their creepy private language, which Kevin assumes must be Canadian.
But who knows? Maybe some of these plot points will be revisited when Peacock finally makes The Return of The Office 2049: Legacy.
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