Dunder Mifflin wants to acquire new clients in an area currently dominated by a small company called Prince Family Paper. They can't get a report on them as they aren't publicly traded, so David Wallace asks Michael to go out and gather information. Michael is thrilled to be entrusted with such a task but he begins to have an ethical dilemma when he sees how nice the Prince family is. Meanwhile, a heated debate erupts among the staff over whether or not Hillary Swank is hot.
Tropes
- Bittersweet Ending: Michael goes through with his task and is happy that David Wallace is proud of him but he fears that he may have ruined the kind Prince family.
- Comically Missing the Point: Roger Prince says he started the company after returning from Vietnam, which Michael takes to mean he was there on a pleasant vacation rather than the Vietnam War.
- Continuity Nod: Michael's fake name when meeting the Prince family is "Michael Scarn," the main character in his screenplay.
- Exact Words: Jim almost convinces Kevin to join the "hot" side by having him imagine himself with Hillary Swank. It almost works until Kevin remembers the question is if she's hot, not whether or not he'd sleep with her.
- Hypocritical Humor: Unstated, but Kevin — probably the closest to being the objectively least attractive person in the office — is also both the most insistent that Hillary Swank is not hot, the most vocally disgusted with her looks (many of the others on his team are at least willing to concede that she is physically attractive, though not actually "hot"), the one who polices the parameters of the debate the most, and the one who delivers the most superficial argument over why she isn't hot.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Michael is left feeling very guilty after he ends up going through with gathering the client information from the Prince family and then handing it off to corporate.
- Nice Guys Finish Last: The inhumanly nice Prince family get taken advantage of until their business is poached by Dunder Mifflin. A later episode will reveal they have gone completely out of business.
- Not So Above It All: Lampshaded; although Angela initially tries to rise above the Hillary Swank debate and get on with her work, she's so outraged by Kevin's offensive argument for Swank's lack of "hotness" that she joins the "hot" side of the debate purely because she believes that Kevin doesn't deserve to win.
- Also, Michael in the main plot: he is so charmed by the Prince family that he decides he can't go through with ruining them, but Dwight doesn't have to do very much to get him to hand the Princes' client list over to David Wallace.
- Serious Business: To most of the staff, whether or not Hillary Swank is hot.
- Social Darwinism: A discussed trope in this episode. When Michael gets cold feet about sharing the Prince Family's client information with corporate, fearing it will render their business bankrupt or at least hurt them, Dwight compares the situation to a shark eating the little fishes, saying that its a natural process, though it ends up temporarily convincing Michael to attempt to defy the trope by disposing of the information, but reluctantly gives up the information.
- Additional scenes show Michael telling the rest of the office his dilemma. While they offer sympathies, Phyllis' viewpoint is similar to Dwight's citing that its essentially how businesses operate.
