The Chair Company Recap: No Way Out

By
Ben Rosenstock,
a culture writer and critic who primarily covers TV and film

The Chair Company
New Blood. There’s 5 Rons Now.

Season 1

Episode 2

Editor’s Rating

4 stars

The Chair Company
New Blood. There’s 5 Rons Now.

Season 1

Episode 2

Editor’s Rating

4 stars

Photo: Sarah Shatz/HBO

Oh yeah, that’s the stuff. The Chair Company was delightfully absurd from the beginning, but the bizarrely named “New Blood. There’s 5 Rons Now” is possibly weirder, funnier, and scarier than last week’s premiere. Now that the “premise” of the show is established, Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin have space to really play around with the show’s nightmare logic. I’m already excited for next week.

There is still a storyline here; in fact, there are several ongoing threads, and I’m sensing that some seemingly throwaway scenes and interactions might remain relevant much later in the season. Broadly speaking, the plot follows a man who thinks he has discovered some sort of criminal conspiracy related to a chair company, then starts to lose control of his life as he travels deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole. That’s easy to get our heads around, even if some of the detours aren’t.

At the beginning of the episode, Ron is still paranoid following that inexplicable run-in with the apparent Tecca enforcer. To be fair, it’s hard not to panic a little when you get a text from your wife like, “Oh my god, come home now!” It turns out the issue is less dangerous and more domestic: Natalie wants to change her wedding venue at the last minute and hopes Ron can convince her fiancée’s dad to get on board.

We’ll return to that at the end of the episode, but Ron and The Chair Company have bigger concerns for the time being. At work, he gets started on the next stage of his investigation: tracking down his attacker using the floral shirt and baton he left behind. After ordering an expensive fingerprint dust kit for same-day delivery, he heads to the store where the shirt was bought. Unfortunately, because he also has a big TV interview today about the mall, Jamie is following closely behind in her own car. So he exploits her bad driving to lose her, action-chase-style. She almost gets hit by a big truck when Ron runs a red light, and he can hear her screaming and sobbing as he semi-guiltily drives away.

What makes The Chair Company unique isn’t the plot itself, but how things go down. Take the shirt salesman, whose deliberate enunciations sound vaguely alien, almost Lanthimos-esque. He seems to recognize the shirt when Ron asks him about its buyer, pointing out the dirt stains and using a red ball to pantomime a belly “pushing up into the buttons” and depict a man who is “at his limit.” Of course, the salesman doesn’t actually remember the guy. It’s all a ploy to get Ron to sign up for another expensive membership, a choice that haunts him later in the episode when he gets rapid-fire notifications with irrelevant news from other members.

The interview itself goes fine, because you can never predict what will specifically go wrong on this show. Ron even offers a genuine apology to Jamie, who then extends an invitation to church and gets nothing in return. More concerning is the HR rep who keeps prodding Ron even though she knows the skirt incident with Amanda was an accident. The peeping tom educational video is funny, but I’m especially tickled by the rep’s oddly phrased questions (“Any kissing or sex?”) and Ron’s over-the-top way of denying that he’d ever be attracted to Amanda. You can’t really blame HR for raising an eyebrow at his claim that she “looked completely different” in high school.

Returning to the investigation, Ron makes a big jump that turns out to be … completely correct. The dirtied shirt of the peeping tom in the video reminds him of his attacker’s dirty shirt, leading Ron to find the man’s hiding spot outside the office. There’s a food container sitting there from Jan’s Café, a chaotic Waffle House-esque diner where Ron’s attacker works security.

Here’s where the attacker, whose name is Mike Santini, goes from Ron’s biggest threat to his only true ally. It’d be so easy if this guy were a Tecca enforcer, threatening Ron to protect the company from a scandal, but it turns out someone anonymously hired him to scare Ron. He’s just as clueless about the true nature of what’s going on.

It seems extremely possible at this point that Ron is totally off the mark about the company hurting people, that this whole investigation will lead nowhere, or at least lead somewhere completely different from what he expected. Or maybe Ron is completely right, but nobody will believe him because he’s acting so crazy. Or maybe he will be vindicated. I really have no idea, and that’s a fun place to be.

Either way, it’s clear that The Chair Company is a character study as much as an actual twisty conspiracy thriller. It seems important that Jamie sees both a darkness and a light in Ron; he’s usually a good dad and a good boss, but there’s something darker waiting to come out, especially if anyone comes between him and his family. It’s hard to know how to take some of Ron’s explosions of rage and/or pain and/or shock. In this heightened world, and with our understanding of the typical Tim Robinson character, those reactions provoke giggles. But Friendship also let viewers see some of those Robinson character quirks as evidence of selfishness, male ego, and real mental instability. This feels like a potentially similar case, even if we’re mostly on Ron’s side.

Ron makes plans to join Mike to meet his employer tonight at his usual place of work: the parking lot of a storage space. Mike even provides a gun so he can get some real answers out of this “Jim X.” But after considering it, Ron just can’t handle becoming a guy who could threaten another man with a weapon. He insists he’s a good man and rambles about the things that he can’t bear to lose, like “making love to Barb on a soft bed.”

Speaking of Barb, it’s worth pausing here to check in on the Trosper family. Ron’s wife and kids still aren’t exactly well-rounded characters, but again, that hardly seems to matter. In this episode, Seth basically just shows up to quietly accept the plastic hat Ron pretends he got for him. (It actually came in the fingerprint kit.) Natalie wants a haunted-house wedding. That’s about it.

But it is sweet to see Ron successfully convince Natalie’s future father-in-law, Terry, to let the crazy kids have their way with the venue. His discreet thumbs-up and Natalie’s happy reaction make for the most earnest moment of the episode. When you get something warm and uncomplicated like that on this show, you know it’s not going to last long — and sure enough, Ron gets a creepy text reading “no way out,” accompanied with a photo of himself taken seconds ago behind the cracked front closet door.

“New Blood. There’s 5 Rons Now” leaves us on that almost Barry-esque cliffhanger, with Ron approaching the closet as game night continues unimpeded a room away. There’s something unsettling and indelible about it, especially with Keegan DeWitt’s bass-y drum machine kicking in over the cut to credits. “Tim Robinson does Mulholland Drive” might not be for everyone, but if you’re willing to roll with the vibe here, this show is a treasure trove of hilarious oddities. And I have a feeling it’s only getting weirder from here on out.

• As a fellow metro Detroiter, I assume Erebus is a reference to the haunted attraction in Pontiac, Michigan, which lots of my friends visited growing up. The venue Natalie wants is a fictional haunted barn in Ohio.

• When Brenda catches Ron bent over looking for the baton, he claims he dropped a “Hershey’s Hug” he was saving for later.

• “I’m right about a lot of things that people have zero clue that they even know is going on.”

• Ron’s little scuffle with Mike is pretty funny, especially Mike throwing boxes at him after escaping outside.

• Mike shows Ron some sort of radio show(?) featuring a pair of comedians called Wazey Waynes, who seem to scream and swear in disturbingly filthy, nonsensical ways.

• Terry really didn’t like the Trospers’ now-dead dog.

The Chair Company Recap: No Way Out