Summary
The Chair Company remains brilliantly weird and ridiculous in Episode 2, as it continues scraping the surface of a larger conspiracy.
All the comedy in The Chair Company lives in the space between how other people see Ron Trosper and what he’s actually like. A lot of other comedies – including some all-time great ones – have worked on the same basis. It isn’t that Ron is totally delusional, just that he has managed to build a Jenga-style life on mostly false pretences. His daughter thinks he’s great at talking to people, but every scene in Episode 2, “New Blood. There’s 5 Rons Now”, proves he isn’t. He’s done quite well at work, but doesn’t seem to be all that good at his job. He’s a quintessentially nice guy, but a co-worker identifies – perhaps correctly – that there’s “a darkness inside him” competing with the light.
A lot of these contradictions were evident in the season premiere, but they come into even starker relief here. Part of this episode’s arc is Ron having to convince his daughter’s future in-laws to sign off on a wedding venue that might be haunted, a thoroughly ridiculous proposition that is funny because Ron is in such a terrible headspace that it’s almost impossible he’ll be able to pull it off. It has nothing to do with the overarching plot, but it is intimately connected to why someone like Ron is so frantically obsessed with figuring out what’s going on with Tecca. It’s the only way he can go back to cosplaying the person people think he is.
What Ron’s willing to do in pursuit of this goal seems almost limitless. His quest to find the next link in the chain, a seller of patterned shirts, seems like a relatively simple endeavour. But he’s trying to do it while fulfilling his professional responsibilities, and those include travelling with his colleague, Jamie, to whom he’d rather not explain why he’s going off-piste on his own investigations. So, he tries to ditch her by facilitating a minor traffic accident that almost kills her and causes her profound emotional distress. There’s that darkness again, peeping out.
If the comedy lives here, the mystery lives in a different but adjacent property. Ron’s obsessive focus on getting to the bottom of a conspiracy that seems extremely inconsequential is semi-justified by all the evidence he turns up implying that there really is a conspiracy, and that it’s potentially much more dangerous than a fragile office chair. He’s probably the wrong man to be uncovering it, given his efforts to acquire a fingerprint dusting kit result in him ordering a plastic children’s detective set complete with a tiny fedora, but here we are.
If nothing else, The Chair Company Episode 2 seems to give Ron an unexpected ally – Mike Santini, the eccentric hired goon who smacked him over the head last week and told him to stop looking into Tecca. It’s totally by coincidence that Ron runs into Mike again; he’s working security in a diner where Ron is trying to backtrace the remnants of a meal left in the bushes by a garishly attired, possibly overweight observer. But since Mike is the only other person who knows he was paid to scare Ron (by an anonymous intermediary), he’s the only avenue into a shadowy underworld where Ron’s burgeoning internal darkness might be more suited.
Mike’s also part of the show’s deliberate idiosyncrasies. He’s a thug, but he’s also an older dude who believably fakes needing an air machine when Ron fights back. He’s a thug, but his preferred listening in the car is a ridiculous, profane double-act in which two idiots just scream lewd things at each other. That Mike finds this entertaining is a tip-off that he exists in a world of unsophisticated noise and confusion that Ron is ill-equipped to deal with.
Ron’s superpower isn’t talking to people, that’s for sure. But he does have one – it’s luck. Despite the show’s premise being predicated on his inability to rationalise a moment of bad luck, his entire existence seems predicated on a run of good fortune that he has mistaken for competency. You can see this in how all his ludicrous efforts to play detective end up paying off in unexpected ways. You can see it in Tara’s father being receptive to all the ham-fisted cliches that Ron delivers as profound insights. You can see it in Ron’s impromptu gifting of the plastic fedora to Seth, which ends up becoming a sort of hip trend. He’s an expert at falling on his feet.
He’s probably going to need to be. The episode ends with Ron receiving a picture taken moments prior from the little side room in his hall, meaning that someone is watching him, and that someone is inside his deepest sanctuary. And yet he’s really no closer to uncovering what any of this is about, because he’s too busy overthinking every step of the journey. How far can his luck continue to carry him?
RELATED:
