Things You Forgot Happened In The Office Finale

The Office, one of the great American sitcoms about a great American workplace (the dour Scranton office of Dunder Mifflin, a slowly failing paper company) is deeply embedded into the minds and hearts of millions. Endlessly quoted and turned into memes, reruns of The Office air on local stations and cable TV nearly endlessly. Not to mention, it's one of the most popular streaming shows of all time, at one point ranking as Netflix's most-viewed offering. 

The low-key, hilarious adventures of Michael Scott, Jim Halpert, Pam Beasley, Dwight Schrute, and all the other Dunder Mifflin rank and file are so voluminous and omnipresent that it's easy to forget that The Office had a definitive ending. After nine seasons, the show concluded with a two-part final episode that aired on NBC in May 2013. It packed a lot into its one-hour runtime, wrapping up complicated character arcs and hanging plot threads and throwing in plenty of surprises. But if you've spent most of your time binging the earlier seasons, it's easy to forget what went down in its big finale. So, if you want a refresher of everything that went down in Scranton, here are all the major events that happened on The Office just before it closed for business.

If you don't remember exactly when down in The Office finale, well, here's some major good news. The "will they or won't they" of Dwight Schrute and on-again, off-again girlfriend/co-worker Angela has finally been resolved, and the two are getting married. The ceremony and its preparations include a lot of bizarre (fictional) traditions from Dwight's heritage, which are blended with modern matrimonial customs. 

And despite a mutually acrimonious relationship characterized by savage pranks and nasty revenge, Dwight selects Jim Halpert to be his best man (or "bestest mensch"). Jim knows when it's time to put the mean and childish tricks aside, and he decides to pull a series of "guten pranken" — good pranks, or nice surprises, in other words. Jim plans and executes an epic bachelor party for Dwight, which includes a limousine ride, a bazooka-firing session, and a lap dance (which utterly baffles the groom-to-be).

However, on the day of the wedding, just before the ceremony, Jim pulls off what he calls his "best prank ever." He lies to Dwight, telling him that he just heard from the minister that "it's tradition" that the bestest mensch be a man older than the groom. As Jim is younger than Dwight, he resigns the post, only to reveal an extremely suitable replacement.

Throughout the finale, Jim conducts a series of good pranks to celebrate Dwight's marriage, but perhaps the best of all is when he forces two former co-workers and friends to resolve a workplace dispute that drove a wedge between them. 

In the past year, Dwight — now regional manager — tells viewers via a solo interview segment that he's aggressively managed his Dunder Mifflin branch and secured contracts as a paper supplier for the phone book, local school district, and county government. He also had to clean house a bit, mentioning that he hasn't seen accountant Kevin "since we let him go." The footage reveals that Dwight fired the not-very-bright Kevin in a unique way. He presented him with a cake that spelled "get out" in frosting. Kevin didn't understand what it meant, so Dwight had to explicitly let him know he terminated. Oscar later tells Kevin's replacement that he was let go for gross incompetence. He had a "magic number" called "Keleven" which he used to balance his accounts when they just wouldn't go.

Kevin goes on to own a bar, and Jim steers the bachelor party there, forcing Dwight and Kevin to reconcile. The former accountant's heart was broken by the termination. "It was nothing personal," Dwight explains. "It's just that you were terrible at your job," he adds, citing Kevin's lack of organizational and time management skills and how the office had to throw away his computer because his "internet searches were so filthy."

Andy Bernard is tough to like, as he's a rage-prone whiner who constantly talks about his wealthy family and how he went to Ivy League school Cornell, where he believes he was popular due to his involvement in the a capella group Here Comes Treble. In the final episode of The Office, viewers learn that Andy experienced some mortifying downs along with some redemptive ups. 

Andy went after his dream of appearing on TV's America's Next A Cappella Sensation, only for the show to air footage of his humiliating audition. "When I started sobbing uncontrollably, apparently that struck a chord with quite a lot of people," Andy reveals. "The clip went viral, as they say." The Office reveals that it became fashionable for a time to mock Andy. YouTube parodies of his video sprung up, and Bill Hader (playing himself) impersonated the man known as "Baby Wawa" on Saturday Night Live. After declining to join a support group with fellow viral stars "Star Wars kid" and "double rainbow guy," Andy was invited to speak at Cornell's commencement (as a joke), which led to his new position in his alma mater's admissions office.

The other least-liked Dunder Mifflin employee, Toby, the milquetoast HR guy (and Michael Scott's mortal enemy), moved to New York to become a famous novelist. So far, it hasn't happened, and he lives in an apartment with six roommates.

Clues carefully doled out over many seasons of The Office provide a convincing backstory on why sunny but naive receptionist Erin Hannon is the way she is. She experienced some delayed development due to being born four months prematurely and spent ages three to six hospitalized most of the time. She also grew up in the foster child system, a very lonely world for her apart from her foster brother, Reed, with whom she shared the same temporary home during two lengthy time periods.

In the latter seasons of The Office, Erin starts a search for her birth parents, which is apparently covered extensively during the in-show Office documentary. At the Q&A session with Dunder Mifflin employees in the finale, a woman in the crowd asks Erin to elaborate on her feelings toward her biological mother. "I would just imagine that you were so angry at her that you would hate her," the stranger suggests. Erin, forever kind and understanding, says she'd "have to meet her" to assess her anger. Erin then realizes what viewers already have — this woman is her birth mother. Better still, the guy seated next to her is Erin's biological dad. And in a nice little surprise, the two are played by Joan Cusack and Ed Begley Jr. in two of The Office's greatest guest spots.

While most of the action on The Office focused on the cool, young people at Dunder Mifflin, many secondary plots involved the workplace's older, exhausted sales staff. Phyllis Vance, who went to high school with Michael Scott and often bore the brunt of his boorish behavior, fell deep in love midway through the show's run with Bob Vance of Vance Refrigeration (which shared an office park with Dunder Mifflin). And for 16 years, she worked alongside Stanley Hudson, a man who didn't suffer fools, didn't like to work harder than absolutely necessary, didn't like Michael Scott and his shenanigans at all, and certainly didn't like to be a paper salesman at a Pennsylvania paper company's branch office. 

But as ascertained from the finale of The Office, old, dour Stanley is gone, replaced with happy Stanley, who's divorced his wife, lives just outside of the Everglades in Florida City, Florida, and sits on his front porch "all day, carving birds." The Dunder Mifflin staff doesn't begrudge Stanley his happiness, but Phyllis has a hard time accepting his absence in the office. When new salesman Malcolm comes on board, Phyllis feeds him regular deliveries of her homemade fudge, seemingly trying to make the new guy gain enough weight to one day more closely resemble the heavyset Stanley.