The episode guest stars Andy Buckley, Jack Coleman, Sendhil Ramamurthy, Jerry Minor, and Michael Schur.
The series—presented as if it were a real documentary—depicts the everyday lives of office employees in the Scranton, Pennsylvania, branch of the fictional Dunder Mifflin Paper Company.
"Free Family Portrait Studio" received mixed reviews from critics, with many noting that the episode did not feel like a proper season finale.
Dwight Schrute offers free family portraits in the office, and many members of the office take advantage of the opportunity, including Creed Bratton with his very elderly parents, Toby Flenderson with his teenage daughter Sasha, Meredith Palmer with her teenage son, Kelly Kapoor with Ravi, a desperate Ryan Howard holding up various signs to try to win back Kelly's affection yet again, and Pam Halpert with a reluctant Jim and their children Cece and Philip.
Jim suspects that Dwight's motive for giving away family portraits was to get revenge on Jim for a prank involving a fake Velcro suit, but Dwight's real motive was to try to get some of Philip Lipton's DNA to run a test to determine who Philip's actual father is.
After doing so Dwight goes into the bathroom to retrieve the diaper, but Angela chases after him as he makes a break for the hospital to run the DNA test.
However, David surprisingly shows up to the office and assures everyone that he is indeed buying Dunder Mifflin from Sabre with the $20 million that he got from selling a toy-vacuum invention called "Suck-it" to the United States Military.
Upon hearing this news, Sabre CEO Robert California approaches David in an oddly excitable tone, introducing himself as "Bob Kazamakis" and takes him to the conference room to negotiate.
When Andy is reinstated as manager, he relishes the "delicious moment" he can have when he fires Nellie, but she begs him by reciting Shakespeare's quality of mercy quote from The Merchant of Venice.
Former Office writer/producer Michael Schur appears as Dwight's cousin Mose for the 10th time, and the first since the episode "Garden Party" earlier in the season.
Club wrote that "Free Family Portrait Studio" proved to be "a disheartening conclusion to the show’s worst season, offering little optimism to sustain our already dwindling enthusiasm over the summer months.
[11] HitFix reviewer Alan Sepinwall wrote that he hoped the new showrunner, following Paul Lieberstein, would undo the developments made in the finale, criticizing the season's run of Andy Bernard as manager and Nellie Bertram's character.
[13] She complimented the good writing and character moments, but criticized the possible return of Nellie and the handling of the Angela-Dwight storyline over the season.