Ben Is As Good At Pranks As He Is At Live Broadcasting!

It wouldn't be Parks & Recreation if a character wasn't starting a whole new job, and in the latest episode, we get three! Well, two and a half: after getting bounced out of city council, Leslie returns to her old job as Deputy Director of the parks department, and learns, much to her consternation, that things have changed since she's been away. Finding herself on the outside of inside jokes, assigned a spirit dog she didn't endorse, amid people who've abandoned the processes she established is, of course, extremely challenging for Leslie, a person whose whole identity rests on the idea that she does everything right. But when Ron points out that she's not going to be in the parks department for long and that she should be proud of having mentored her staffers — including Tom, who's embarking on the Business Liaison job he invented for himself last week — so well that they can carry on her legacy in her absence, she finally settles down, inasmuch as Leslie is capable of settling down, which is not much.

Elsewhere in City Hall, Ben is getting down to business as City Manager, and learning that, for all his other good qualities, Chris is not quite the mentor Leslie is. The dynamic of Ben's partnership with Chris was that Chris was good cop — the most positive "good cop" in history, probably — while Ben was the hardass who had to turn people down when they wanted more money. So now that Ben is in charge, he's decided that the path to success for him will be to combine both impulses into his one role: everyone is welcome to share his exotic French cheese, and while they're in his office, he can tell them their dependents no longer have health insurance!

Ben's new strain of weirdness inspires his co-workers to take him down a peg. Since he bragged about the unpasteurized cheeses he smuggled back from Paris, Donna and April arrange for a couple of cops to fake-arrest him, even bringing him down to the station to wait for the Customs officers Ben is told are en route. When the ruse is revealed, Ben responds in the toughest way possible: by writing a memo informing staffers that if they ever do anything like that again, they'll be suspended — whereupon Andy suggests that it might be more productive for Ben to prank them back!

And if Leslie, for instance, had been the target of IllegalCheeseGate, this would make sense: the retaliatory prank would actually be a perfectly executed series of increasingly complex operations that would dissuade her co-workers from trying to top her since they'd have learned, without question, that they never could. What Andy hasn't considered, unfortunately, is what we learned in the S3 episode "Media Blitz": Ben is not great in high-pressure situations that require him to project casual confidence. It apparently doesn't take long for Andy to realize his mistake and warn April and Donna to play along, and when Ben comes into the parks department bullpen to initiate the gag, the effort is...painful. Hilariously painful.

Naturally, a way-too-nervous Ben flubs the prank except for the payoff — the explosion of a bunch of squibs in his shirt — and when April expresses her admiration for his having covered her in fake blood, Ben Learns The Lesson that his employees can respect him even as they fuck with him. And while this is a valuable lesson for known tight-ass Ben to learn, I really feel that this whole B-plot is just an elaborate framing device for the delighted reaction shot Retta gives the camera in the clip above — which: totally worth it.