Someone tries to hide a major problem from their boss only to make the problem worse. Someone tries to teach their difficult co-worker how to get along better with others and fails. Someone tries to impress their boss by acting like someone they aren't or by trying to hard. An employee on leave comes to visit and gets sucked right back into working. All of these situations are classic sitcom tropes (with a couple bordering on being straight-up clichés.) and all of them were featured on Superstore tonight. This could've made "Back To Work" feel unoriginal and tired, a bit of a comedown from last weeks episode. Instead, "Back To Work" manages to be just as strong as "Strike" by rooting things in the strong setting and character work Superstore has been doing since it started and tying it to the fall-out of last week's strike, giving each story a specificity that either transcended the trope or made it funny enough to be irrelevant.
Like last week, much of the episode's action is spurred in response to Jeff (Michael Sutton), the mild-mannered district manager who Corporate sent in response to the strike. Jeff has decided to stick around for a day to observe and see what can be done better. Once again, Sutton plays Jeff perfectly as an ordinary guy trying to do his job in the face of the other character's shenanigans and watching him be perplexed and slightly frustrated about the craziness around him, while being a reasonable guy is a treat. The just trying to do his job part also remains key to the character's success. He's not a corporate monster but he does work for corporate and he represents their interests. He's willing to listen to the Cloud Nine employee's suggestions and concerns about how corporate could improve but he's also going to give them suggestions of his own because "everything is a two-way street". For Amy, this is enough to write him off entirely as someone who will listen to their complaints but not actually respond to them. This seems accurate, but we never get to find out if this is the case though because Amy winds up being too busy looking for a missing thumb to actually give Jeff her concerns and suggestions.
For the second week in a row, we see nothing spurs Amy into making rash decisions like the casual callousness of corporate. Only this time, instead of leading the employees to strike, Amy is hoping for a perfect day, like the fabled "March 14th" of a few months ago. What better way to prove Jeff and his "two-way street" remarks wrong than by giving the impression that there's no way for the employees to improve? Unfortunately days like "March 14th" can't be manufactured and when Amy tries to get Marcus, a less-than-bright employee to help her with a staff shortage in the deli, he promptly slices his thumb off in a shocking and hilarious sequence. Amy quickly springs into action, storing the thumb in a container of guacamole and trying to get Marcus to the hospital before Jeff can discover what happened. Unfortunately their efforts to conceal the incident lead to the container with the thumb getting lost in the store. Here, Amy's efforts to avoid confirming Jeff's suggestion that improvements could be made by them as well as corporate lead to the quick derailment of her big chance to get her concerns listened to, which was her original goal. It's funny watching her, Garrett and others scramble around the store in search of the thumb and blow off Jeff's efforts to listen to their concerns because this is a time-sensitive matter but it's poignant too. Trying to create perfection has only led to chaos and trying to hide the chaos only leads to a customer producing the thumb in front of Jeff, making this all an exercise in futility. Entertaining futility with lots of funny moments for Amy and Garrett, but futility all the same, and the irony was Jeff didn't wind up having suggestions for improvement. Had Amy not caused an incident trying to prove him wrong, she'd have proven him wrong.
It's a good character story for Amy, well played by Ferrara, and it's good to see Amy's growing resentment with corporate carrying over from the last episode. It also suggests an interesting lesson. Amy wants change but after the failed strike and the thumb fiasco, it's clear she doesn't know how to actually make this happen. Jeff's "two-way street" remark rubbed her the wrong way and rightfully so, but maybe if she took it to heart and worked to manage her frustrations with corporate, she might be able to cause the corporate change she so badly wants after all. It's an interesting implication (though never outright stated in the episode) and whatever direction Amy's story goes as the season progresses, I hope this will be further explored.
Also an exercise in futility is Jonah's efforts to improve Dina's standing in the eyes of her co-workers, all of whom still resent her for not walking out with them. After a season where most of Jonah and Dina's interactions revolved around her one-sided feelings for him, it's refreshing to see them in a story that has nothing to do with that. Dina remains a female copy of Dwight Schrute (both the "gifts" she gives to her co-workers by breaking into their lockers and her attempt at reading the apology letter Jonah writes her are things I could easily see Dwight doing) and the show's broadest character, but the material here (her disdain of the motivating story Jonah tells her leading her to give him a book on how to tell better stories is one of the better jokes of the episode) is funny enough to work, and Ash's performance continues to be strong enough to avoid steering Dina into the caricature territory that most Dwight Schrute imitators are in. the story does serve to teach us something important about Dina though: she doesn't care if people likes her, she cares about doing what she thinks is right. When the store walked out, she stayed behind because she felt it was the right thing to do and when she sees Amy fretting to Glenn about possibly getting fired over the thumb incident, she blackmails Jeff into not submitting his incident report for the same reason. The "jerk actually cares" moment has been done to death in fiction to the point where I knew how Amy and Dina's story would resolve the moment Dina walked into frame, but it works here because it doesn't feel like the writers are showing us a secret, sensitive side of Dina. They're showing us the same Dina we know and tolerate doing something to help a co-worker and it feels honest. Dina's a jerk but she's not heartless. It also works because the show does a convincing job of making us think the story will end on Jonah contemplating his need to be liked so that when Dina does walk into frame in Amy's story, the dovetailing of the two plots is unexpected. Feldman also shines in this plot, not having much to do beyond react to Ash, but doing that reacting like a champ.
Glenn, Mateo, and a returning Cheyenne (Nichole Bloom) wind up in stories that are much slighter, but manage to add to the comedy and poignancy of the episode. Glenn's attempt to come off as a hardass boss isn't even a story as much as it is a running joke/excuse for Mark Mckinney to steal every scene he's in but it's a great joke because of how well we know Glenn at this point. Watching him get stuck in a chair he's knocked over or calling an employee's appendicitis "Argle Bargle" or trying to be mean to Garrett only highlights the sweetness of the character. Meanwhile Cheyenne makes her return to the show in a sad, short story where she stops in for a few minutes to see people and show them baby pictures, only to be blown off by a frantic Amy and winding up back on the cash register when she tries to ring herself in, while most of the employees are away meeting with Jeff, and reamed out by a customer for talking to her baby on the phone while at the register, a phone she then puts in the customers bag. It's a brief story but a nice reintroduction to Cheyenne and a good showcase for Bloom after sitting last week out. Finally Mateo's efforts to impress Jeff is basically his exact same story from last week (Though Jeff calling him Ma-Tah-to is quite funny), but it ends on an unexpected note that suggests much more promising things are to come. Jeff assuring Mateo he noticed him before putting his hand on his shoulder and saying he definitely noticed him is a welcome swerve because of how ambiguous it is. Is Jeff going to be a love interest in addition to his role as foil/slight antagonist? What does "I've definitely noticed you" mean anyways? It's hard to say but whether this leads to a story we've seen before a hundred times or something fresh and unexpected, if Superstore puts in the same kind of thought and effort as it did with Back To Work, it's bound to be a winner.
Memorable Moments
-Best Interstitial: A man and a woman grab the same tube of Hemorrhoid's Cream. Their eyes meet and they smile. The start of a beautiful love story.
-It's nice to see Superstore keep introducing new possible side characters instead of leaning on the ones they established and developed in season 1 week after week. Besides Marcus, the one that makes a big impression this week is Peter, who's annoyed by the Gay Guy mug Dina gets him but drinks from it anyways later in the episode.
-Garrett is relegated to the sidelines this week but he gets a lot of great moments, from undermining Glenn's attempt to pretend to be mean to him by acting oblivious and then hurt ("He's right. Actually I am kinda lazy", he eventually concedes to Jeff.) from casually rifling through customer's carts in search for the thumb ("Ooh beige. That's a crazy colour for a towel".).
-Marcus' refusal to confirm that that's his thumb lying on the ground leads to a great sequence scored to We Belong Together, one of the rare times muzak plays in a non interstitial scene.
-Mateo's efforts to get a customer to repeat her calling him a lifesaver in front of Jeff don't go so well. "Now tell him what you said to me." "You're hurting my arm".
-And following that: "In the future, I'd love you to not grab our customers. Okay, Ma-tah-to?" "It's Ma-tato. I mean Mateo."
-Dina's disgust at the apology speech Jonah has written is a familiar scene, but a funny one. "Mahatma Gandhi once said, "Forgiveness is an attribute of the strong"? Ugh, starting with a quote. It's like a middle-school book report."
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