Erin’s adorableness and innocent naivete has been a bright spot all this season, but, long-standing crush aside, I didn’t think it’d be enough to carry the bulk of an episode. Fortunately, I was wrong, because “Secretary’s Day” looks behind Erin’s cheerfully upbeat child to reveal her increasingly disturbing and traumatic past—and finds comedy gold!

The episode opens with the gang huddled around Oscar’s computer to watch a Sesame Street clip of Cookie Monster redubbed with Kevin’s voice (a comparison long overdue).  Like a cruel preschool nickname, it takes off, and pretty soon the entire office is united in torturing Kevin with their best and worst Cookie Monster impersonations. (And it’s a credit to the show that the funniest part for regular viewers is not the actual clip itself but the fact that Angela loves it.)

Kevin files a complaint with the weasely new guy Gabe, who sees it as an opportunity for him to assert whatever authority he has by cracking down on the harassment (what is his position anyway? I thought he was the tech guy, too). His stern(?) warning (??) goes ignored, so Gabe tries to lower the boom (???) by suspending Jim, Pam, and Dwight without pay…which he later finds is beyond his authority(!).

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I get wary when The Office tends to fall back on material that’s been endlessly mined before—guest stars, Michael being an idiot, the threat of a new manager coming to make sweeping changes, romances that ultimately go nowhere—on the one hand, a lot of that stuff made The Office great (and granted you can’t go for six seasons without repeating some things), on the other, most of the rehashes this season fell splatastically flat.

But not tonight.

Call me a pessimist, but I never expected a lackluster season like this to deliver an episode so consistently laugh-out-loud funny as “Manager and Salesman”—it’s among the series’ best and may be in the running for highest number of laughs.

The CEO from Sabre (Kathy Bates in the show’s best cameo since David Koechner [and whatever happened to him?]) drops by to check in on the Dunder-Mifflin branch but mainly to make some changes, namely consolidating Michael and Jim’s jobs into one and setting the two in competition for the manager position…until they discover there’s no cap on sales commissions, leading to a similar power struggle over the salesman position.

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