The Most Messed Up Things That Happened On The Office

Joni Mitchell was right about two things: She really didn't know clouds at all, and you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone. Focusing on the second part, let's consider The Office. For all the intense whining during its last few seasons that the show was past its prime, the calls for a reboot or reunion are growing louder all the time. Maybe we're the show's jilted ex-lovers, lonely and desperate to get back with what makes us feel comfortable. Or maybe we're wearing rose-colored glasses and have forgotten that The Office takes place in a Sartrean hellscape.

Part of what made the show so compelling was its roots in its source material, The (British) Office, a Ricky Gervais limited series with all the earmarks of anything touched by Ricky Gervais, i.e., an undercurrent of hopelessness punctuated by moments of things not being the worst. The American Office made a more sitcom-friendly decision to keep the show thematically lighter, funneling its darker elements into the plot instead.

And stuff got weird. For every Jim-and-Pam-kissing-in-the-rain moment, there was an equally horrifying Creed aside. Here are a few of the most altogether ooky examples.

The Scranton Strangler subplot was bleak enough on its own: For the show's last four seasons, viewers were given slivers of information about an ambitious local serial killer and how his handiwork mortified the residents of the Pennsylvania town. But then, when a culprit was caught after a heart-pounding car chase, Toby finally got a little bit of that sweet spotlight. He was assigned to the jury on the Scranton Strangler's trial, a jury that eventually put the alleged killer, George Howard Skub, to death.

And there's just no way they got the right guy.

Think about it this way: Either Toby assisted in putting the wrong man on death row, or Toby was right about something. Either way, not a universe we'd want to live in. (Of course, if you want to go way down the rabbit hole, there's always a chance that Toby was the Strangler all along.)

And yes, there's the scene in Season 9 when Toby goes to visit Skub in prison and Skub strangles Toby so hard he has to wear a neck brace. But that doesn't make Skub the strangler. Frankly, it's a wonder more people who got stuck in a room with Toby didn't throttle him.

There's odd. There's unsettling. And then there is Creed.

Yes, Creed. What creepy debauchery is there to bring up about Creed Bratton that hasn't already been brought up by Creed Bratton, or by the man who played him, Creed Bratton? Creed, while present from day one, started conning his way into our hearts during the first Halloween episode when he convinced Michael to fire another employee instead of him. And that was the least horrifying thing Creed did for the next eight years.

Career highlights: walking into work covered in blood and being pleasantly surprised to learn it was Halloween, faking his own death, subtly stealing Dwight's revolver after it was fired in the office and never being seen returning it, and low-key admitting to having stolen the identity of a man named Creed Bratton. And what's worse? At the end of the series, he's arrested without ever getting to scuba. If he can't scuba, what's this all been about?

You've got to admit, the writers really left all their ominous weirdness out on the field for The Office's last couple episodes. Ryan and Kelly continued down their spiraling mobius strip of self-destruction. Somebody handed an elated Dwight a bazooka, making one wonder what the next accidental workplace firearm discharge was going to look like.

Also Meredith finally secured her place as the best worst mom on the planet.

Way, way back in the second season, Meredith brings her son Jake to Bring Your Daughter To Work Day. Forward thinking on the subject of gender conformity aside, it turns out he's really only there because he's been suspended from school for being, in simple terms, the worst. We don't hear much about the troubled youth again until Angela's bachelorette party seven years later. Guidance counselors who've worked with problem children can probably see where this is going.

Yes, Jake is stripping now. Meredith, attending the party, is every bit as surprised as the rest of the guests. The only difference is, she's also overwhelmingly supportive. It's some Game of Thrones-level weirdness.

The three darkest moments in contemporary fictional history are as follows and cannot be contested: when Lily Potter died to save Harry, the entirety of The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and the snowball episode of The Office.

For seven years, Dwight, a lonely and peculiar hill goblin, had experienced the blood pressure-heightening social torture that is being a weirdo with a cool, funny, slightly sadistic deskmate who's trying to impress a girl all the time. Dwight was teased, prodded, bullied, and manipulated for the better part of a decade. It's worth mentioning that he and Jim worked together for a few years before the cameras started rolling, so there's a good chance that Halpert pulled some even more severe hijinks back before there was a camera crew making sure he stuck to the Geneva convention. The point is, Dwight was primed to lose it.

And like a true Schrute, he took his pain and used it to become a supervillain. During "Classy Christmas," he turned that Scranton office park into Jim's personal frozen hell. He turns the tables and draws literal blood, and that's still not the worst thing he does.

Some of us are still waking up with nightmares about that parking lot.

The audience thought "There's no way there will ever be a character as pants-wettingly terrifying as Creed." And then Gabe was all "Hold my powdered seahorse aphrodisiac."

Gabe Lewis, played by improviser Zach Woods, showed up in Season 6 and almost instantly got to making people uncomfortable. His earnest nature only served to accentuate his David Lynchian weirdness. The times when Jo Bennett showed up and treated him like a monster movie Igor were some of the only moments of respite from his hall monitor-esque self-serious expressions of what little authority he had.

Gabe's time on The Office was perhaps best summarized by his contribution to Erin's Halloween party in the eighth season: an exploration of deep, nauseating discomfort. He was an unstable personification of the word "moist." He somehow managed to make Erin, the world's most bubbly human puppy, curl up into an emotional ball and plug her ears when he tried to say he loved her. He was a humid Slenderman. Also, his Lady Gaga costume is still haunting some of us to this day.

People die. You can pretty much count on it. And while there are plenty of theories on the best way to go, the worst is undoubtedly "being even tangentially connected with the offices of Dunder Mifflin."

There are a substantial number of deaths on The Office, and every single one of them is the stuff bad dreams are made of. There are the suicides, which include company co-founder Robert Mifflin, who apparently couldn't stand a life amounting to nothing but paper, and Tom Peets, mentioned when Michael pulls his card from the suggestion box, reading "We need better outreach for employees fighting depression." Phyllis helpfully pantomimes a gunshot to the head when Michael can't remember him, prompting Michael to recall "that guy was weird."

Then there are car accidents, which take the lives of ex-boss Ed Truck in "Grief Counseling" and, tragically, Michael's one true love, the chair model. But the worst of the worst? That's a two-way tie.

On the one hand, you have Angela's cat Sprinkles, euthanized by Dwight via mercy freezing. On the other, there's Dwight's Aunt Shirley. The details of her passing are left obscure, but it's the way she's put to rest that cements her place at the top of the list: After being placed in her coffin, Shirley has a shotgun emptied into her corpse to make sure she's really dead.