I can’t stop thinking about the Season 3 finale of The Office.

In quarantine, I’ve returned to comforting classics. Sometimes at the end of the day, I don’t want to put in even the minute amount of mental and emotional effort it takes to experience a new piece of media. So, for the past few weeks I’ve been working through the first three seasons of The Office. There really isn’t anything more comfortably basic than that. I was a bit surprised at some of the rough edges of this mid 2000s show - the racial humor misses a lot, and the gay jokes are very, very lazy - but I mostly got what I expected. It’s a funny sitcom with charming and well-realized characters. Even though I haven’t put these episodes on in several years, I still know most of these episodes by heart. It’s an enjoyable and uncomplicated choice for dinnertime viewing.

Until the season 3 finale. That one hit different.

The emotional core of the show through the first 3 seasons is the romantic tension between Jim and Pam. Michael is still the main character in the large ensemble cast, and he gets his own moments of genuine sincerity, but the only storyline that the show consistently treats with full seriousness is Jim and Pam’s. The fluctuations in their “will they/won’t they” dynamic defines the pace of the show in those early seasons, with emotional climaxes between these characters marking inflection points in the show’s lifespan.

The first season establishes the characters, positioning Jim as the best friend and secret admirer of Pam, unable to pursue a relation while she is engaged to Roy. Season 1 ends with the barest hint that Pam may have unspoken feelings for Jim in return, indicated by a slight awkwardness after Jim asks out visiting saleswoman Katy. Season 2 is marked by a steady escalation in romantic tension between Jim and Pam, as Jim grows increasingly frustrated as Pam moves closer towards her wedding date. The season ends with Jim’s last-ditch confession of love. In a smart remix of the previous season, Season 3 reverses Jim’s and Pam’s roles. After Pam rejected his advances, Jim left the Dunder-Mifflin Scranton branch for the Stamford branch, where he eventually began a relationship with his coworker Karen. Meanwhile, Pam got cold feet and called off her wedding with Roy. After Jim and Karen are forced to relocate to the Scranton branch, Pam takes on the role of distant admirer, jealously watching the new couple. In the penultimate episode of the season, Pam publicly confesses to Jim that she called off her wedding because of him. She effectively says to him, I was wrong to be Roy and I am ready to be with you, if you’ll have me. So, going into the finale of Season 3, Jim must make a choice. Karen, or Pam.

He chooses Pam. Obviously. Of course he does. The are the main couple. The one true pairing. The show had been building to them finally getting together for three seasons. There was never any other real choice. Just as Roy was an obstacle for Jim, Karen was introduced as an obstacle for Pam. Once those two romantic rivals are dealt with, they all but completely disappear out of the show, only appearing for brief cameos in later seasons to indicate they are doing fine, elsewhere, off screen. Ultimately, they were only here to dramatize the Jim and Pam’s love story.

Yet, the show goes out of its way to complicate that love story in season 3 with Karen. Even though the outcome is inevitable from the jump, the show doesn’t make Jim’s choice easy.

Karen is everything Pam is and more. Comparing two real people along these lines would be nonsense, but within the implicit framework the show establishes for finding a suitable romantic partner for Jim, Karen excels on almost every level.

Pam is quiet and aimless. She is trapped in her hometown in a dead-end receptionist job that requires her to babysit her infantile boss. She is only just now, in her mid-to-late twenties, coming out of her shell. Having ended her relationship with Roy, her high school sweetheart, Pam is finally taking unsteady steps towards actualizing herself. She is starting to take art classes she has always had an interest in, she is experimenting with dating for the first time in her adult life, and she is generally learning to be more proactive in her life and stand up for herself more. Seeing Pam’s growth as a person in Season 3 in storylines where she is acting alone, apart from Jim or Roy, makes for some of the best parts of the season. But for every two steps forward, she takes another back. Despite Roy treating her terribly throughout the previous seasons, Pam briefly gets back together with him late into Season 3 when she is unable to deal with watching Jim and Karen together. Even with Pam’s improved assertiveness in their restarted relationship, the result is predictably catastrophic.

Karen, on the other hand, is confident and directed. She’s is career-driven and steadily climbing ranks within the company. When it comes time to move to Scranton to continue pursuing both her career and her romantic interest in Jim, she does so readily. She is already comfortable being assertive. Where Pam entertains the dumb ideas of of her coworkers, only occasionally silently subverting their goals, Karen talks back to the idiotic men around her, calmly calling out Michael or Dwight when they are acting foolish or misogynistic. Karen even has some of Pam’s best qualities, like her sharp wit and playfulness. Pam was once Jim’s go-to accomplice in playing pranks around the office, but in Season 3 Karen easily slides into that role. Whereas Jim and Pam’s relationship in Scranton largely felt unidirectional, with Jim sweeping Pam away into miniature adventures to break up the monotony of the work day, Karen and Jim feel on more equal footing. Their relationship in Stamford could be Jim acting goofy to entertain her, like when he goes to great lengths to get the flavor of potato chips she likes, but it could also be playfully antagonistic, with Karen terrorizing Jim in Call of Duty, or them fighting over the best chairs in the office. When they get together, Karen is even able to toy with prank-master Jim himself, effortlessly playing with his innocent and gullible nature at David Wallace’s party by pretending she has complicated romantic history with many of the attendees.

The seemingly perfect chemistry between Jim and Pam in the first two seasons, that seemed to indicate a destined relationship, is easily replicated and improved between Jim and Karen. In his first new position after leaving Scranton, Jim finds another attractive coworker, around his own age, who also indulges his juvenile tendencies. With the introduction of Karen as a viable love interest, the show shatters the belief that Pam is a once-in-a-lifetime, perfect match for Jim. He should be able to move on.

And he deserves to. Jim is a big ball of potential. He is effortlessly charming and funny, and able to blend his people skills with actual leadership. Even in this job that he explicitly does not care much about, he is quickly rising in the ranks and being given more responsibility. When Jim is given any opportunity to take on a creative leadership role, he excels, like when he organizes the Office Olympics, or stages a reading of Michael’s movie script, or even just when he is left in charge while Michael is on vacation. If he had any amount of ambition, he could do whatever he wants. Pam recognized this, but all she could offer him throughout Season 2 were weak urgings for him to leave this place. When the two are submitting fake job applications for Dwight for a lark, Pam can see that Jim is fully qualified for better positions that would take him out of state. She at first encourages him to apply, but walks that back by the end of the day because she would miss him. Pam was stuck in place, and wanted Jim to stay with her. When he does finally leave, she is miserable.

Karen also recognizes Jim’s potential, but she isn’t tied down in the way Pam is. She is actively trying to bring Jim out of the little world he has been trapped in, and she intends to go with him. Jim is slow in moving towards his future, and it takes Karen a lot of work to pull him forward, but she puts that work in, first by strengthening their relationship. Jim is distressed by even minor escalations in their relationship, like when Karen plans to move into an apartment two blocks away from Jim’s place, but Karen pushes past that. When she becomes aware of his lingering attachment to Pam, she puts in the emotional work over the course of weeks to talk through those feelings and help him to move on. By the end of the season, they are a solid team, traveling together to Dunder-Mifflin’s New York City headquarters to apply for a corporate position. The night before their big interviews, Karen shows Jim around New York City, offering him a glimpse at a new life. She’s comfortable here, and has friends in the city. They get a nice meal, catch a show, hit up a cool bar. That night, Karen commits to Jim that, if he gets the corporate job, she would follow him here. In the aftermath of Pam’s beach-side public confession to Jim, Karen can clearly see that this is a pivotal moment in her and Jim’s life. “We don’t have a future in Scranton,” she says. “There’s one too many people there.” Jim, as is typical, responds with a joke. Karen laughs, but insists, “No, but you get it right? We can’t stay there.”

And for a brief moment, it looks like Jim gets it. He responds, fully serious, with “Yeah. I do.” I do not think his wording is accidental. He takes her hand and they jog past traffic to the other side of the street. I found this moment so exciting, watching Jim appear to commit to a path of growth. He has been trapped in the gravitational pull of Pam and Scranton for as long as we have known him as a character, but it looks like he has finally escaped. He has found his own happy future not by fighting for the affection of an old friend in his home town, but by leaving and discovering new aspects of himself. And it was Karen that got him there.

And still. Jim goes back. After a lovely night with Karen, after both he and Karen have successful interviews, after Michael drops out of consideration, seemingly guaranteeing that one of them will get the position, he goes back and asks Pam out to dinner.

Jim is kind of a dick. We had seen this before back in Season 2, when he treated his girlfriend Katy terribly because he was obsessed with Pam. At an office party with Katy as his date, he very nearly confessed his feelings for Pam right there. When Roy beats him to the punch by announcing a date for his and Pam’s wedding, Jim becomes despondent and cold before callously breaking up with Katy. After a season and a half, he didn’t really change. Karen did a tremendous amount of work to help him move on from Pam and move forward in his life, and Jim reciprocated that attention and affection all the way up until the point at which he had to make a final commitment, and then he backed out. On the precipice of leaving to start a new life with Karen, Jim flees back to the familiarity of Scranton. Not only was Karen counting on him, but Pam had nearly moved on. While Jim and Karen are in New York, back in Scranton we see a version of the office without Jim and Karen. To the camera, Pam laments how she and Jim never got the timing right, but she is optimistic. She has a fun day playing the role of loyal subordinate to Dwight. She doesn’t need Jim to save her from her dull life. She is on her own journey, nearly achieving the self-sufficiency she has been striving for all season. She will be okay. But Jim swoops back in at the last minute, redirecting both of their lives.

And Pam, as Karen eloquently says in the season finale, is kind of a bitch. While Pam sees her public confession as the culmination of her own personal journey of being more proactive in getting what she wants, she is really just acting as a disrupting force in Jim and Karen’s lives. When Jim confessed to Pam, he did so get his unspoken feelings off his chest, and when Pam doesn’t reciprocate, he promptly leaves for the Stamford job he had lined up ahead of time. Jim only ever knew Pam when she was with Roy, so he shot his shot, and then excused himself when he missed. Furthermore, Roy was clearly terrible for Pam. He never respected her feelings and couldn’t even be bothered to help her plan their wedding. Roy was an entitled asshole, and Jim’s confession also served to wake Pam up to the terrible state of her engagement. Pam’s confession has no such justification. She had many opportunities to express her feelings to Jim before he began dating Karen. After she makes her confession, she has no exit strategy for moving on with her life. All she has to say to Karen after the fact is a weak, “I’m sorry if it made you feel weird.” She sees her crush in a happy relationship with a good person and she feels compelled to insert herself. This is not self-actualization, it’s just selfishness.

The one thing that Pam has on Karen, the only thing, is time. Jim and Pam have a long history, and for all that Karen does for Jim, she cannot cover that deficiency. The thing that turns Jim around is a little note Pam slipped into this application materials before he left for his interview. Pinned to the note is a crinkled gold medal made from a yogurt top. It’s a callback to the awards Jim and Pam made for the Office Olympics back in Season 2. That’s all it takes, a memory from the past, for Pam to halt Jim’s future and pull him back to Scranton. Karen could eventually accumulate the history with Jim that Pam already has if she was given a fair shot, but she never will be.

I find this ending genuinely upsetting because it feels terrifyingly, resonantly true. Jim had a choice between his past with Pam and his future with Karen and he defaulted to the past. Faced with a new city full of possibilities and an old town filled with memories, he returned home. The new will never beat old. You can’t escape the gravitational pull of your past.

The show goes on for 6 more seasons after Jim and Pam get together, showing other minor relationship hurdles they have to deal with - a brief long distance stint, meeting each other’s families, getting married, having kids. While all of the previous season finale’s ended with significant Jim and Pam moments, only one of the following finales focus on them, when Pam is unexpectedly revealed to be pregnant at the end of Season 5. It’s notable that, unlike the major life decisions that concluded Seasons 2 and 3, this moment is explicitly not a choice for either character. Pam unexpectedly got pregnant, and it serves only to force the couple to accelerate the timeline on which they get married next season. The rest of their storyline is rote. There are no more choices left to make.

I hope Jim never regrets his choice. If he ever does, he’ll still just be stuck in the past.