Office Baby: “It’s a girl!”

     For many fans of The Office, Pam and Jim's wedding was six well-deserved years in the making. The eventual birth of their child, first revealed at the end of season five, has been fleeting and rushed in terms of storytelling.
     The overall arc of the hour-long episode wrote itself: Jim and Pam finally bring their little bundle of joy, a girl named Cecilia Marie, into the paper-filled world of Dunder Mifflin. What surrounded that story was a mish-mosh of hit or miss subplots, including Andy finally asking out receptionist Erin and Dwight's sudden desire to birth a child sooner than later.
     The Office works best when multiple storylines aren't trying to compete for the viewer's love. In this episode, the two sub-storylines seemed to stray away from the Beesly-Halpert baby love fest, but the writers enforce the main focus of the episode by always bringing us back to the newlyweds. As seen throughout this season, Michael is in fine form while trying to be the center of attention but masking it with the compassionate and overbearing nature he has presented during past seasons.
     The episode, titled "The Delivery," may be the high point of a rather back-and-forth season. After starting off on a high with Jim and Pam's wedding, the show is teetering between a rather dull story involving Dunder Mifflin's bankruptcy and subsequent takeover by another company.
     This is not to say that the season has been short on laughs, but that any future punches the show's producers could possibly dish out seem poised to fail. "The Delivery" was chock-full of laughs and a rather straightforward story for a show that revels in over-the-top storylines. But for the rest of the season, viewers must anxiously ask, "Is this as good as it gets?"