‘The Chair Company’ Episode 3 Recap – Was This the Halloween Special?

There’s a thing about jump scares where they almost never work because savvy viewers have come to expect them. I don’t know if I’d quite classify what happens in Episode 3 of The Chair Company as a traditional jump scare, but it’s pretty close, and it works an awful lot better than most you can think of. Sometimes the most effective horror lives where you least expect to find it. A knockabout Tim Robinson comedy, even a deeply conspiratorial one like this, is the last place you’d expect one of the most lastingly terrifying images of the Halloween season.

And yet here we are – for bonus points, on the same day and the same channel where It: Welcome to Derry just debuted. It’s a string of escalating terrors that begins with the creeping dread of an unusually messy home – Ron’s passive-aggressive running commentary is great here – and ends with a dirty woman who supposedly died two years prior writhing on a pile of hoarder’s garbage and begging for popcorn. I’ll grant you that it sounds pretty funny written down, but it’s properly unsettling in execution.

Why, you may ask, is Ron Trosper, of all people, skulking around this ramshackle house in the middle of the night? Well, the property is the home of a guy named Steven Droyco, who supposedly worked at Tecca. Ron and Mike track him down and creep inside with flashlights after he dementedly turns them away. It’s a silly sequence that morphs without warning into a chilling one, highlighting that the show’s existence at the intersection of genre – it’s as much a workplace sitcom as a conspiracy thriller, and now as much a horror as either – remains the best and most exciting thing about it.

I’ve neglected to mention the outcome of last week’s cliffhanger, but that’s only because it turns out to be nothing of any importance. Sure, there was someone hiding in Ron’s hallway closet, but it was only one of Mike’s tiny associates who meant to send the picture of Ron to him, not Ron himself. The experience does inspire Ron to get some overly expensive home security, and it later leads to a bit of a disagreement with Barb over a knocked-over box of jeep tour flyers that she thinks might be him obsessing over starting his own business again, but it’s mostly just a fake-out.

But Ron’s forward momentum is based on the fact that he can’t decipher which moments in his life, like this, are real or imagined; which are everyday horseplay, and which constitute a genuine chair-related conspiracy. It’s still funny in Episode 3 that this entire show has been brought into being by Ron being furious that he can’t speak directly to anyone involved with a chair company. It’s an outgrowth of a frustration – a relatable one, to be fair – about not being able to speak to anyone directly involved in anything. Tecca turns out to be hidden behind a nebulous parent company called Red Ball Market Global, whose website is full of asinine corporate boilerplate and whose repetitive hold jingle drives Ron steadily mad as he listens to it for hours and gets progressively more drunk.

It’s sometimes easy to forget that Ron is trying to balance his sleuthing with a pretty important work project. You get more of a sense of that here, because there’s a minor controversy about whether the new mall will include some kind of football activity that keeps metastasising into a major issue behind Ron’s back. It’s a nice capsule example of the kind of unimportant corporate minutiae that would drive a middle manager like Ron to obsess over a chair. But he remains separate from his responsibilities now, the same as he’s separate from the office’s social circle – as the boss, he isn’t invited to Douglas’s “mistake party”, which is themed around people being willing to, or at least potentially willing to, commit some kind of social faux pas the boss is better off not knowing about. The whole thing goes badly, but we never find out why, rooted as we are to Ron’s perspective.

In between all this, Ron’s also trying to be the head of his household. He’s already worried that neither he nor his family is safe, hence the cameras, but what they inadvertently reveal is that Seth has taken up drinking. It’s framed as a big deal, but then treated as a kind of anti-reveal; Seth had a drink at a party, found it made him more confident and relaxed, and has taken to sinking a couple of Buds at home to take the edge off. It’s a non-issue. The most relevance it has is that Ron uses Seth’s drinking as a justification for the box of flyers being upended.

But Episode 3 of The Chair Company does end with a man dressed as Jason Voorhees lingering outside Ron’s home, which, given how everything else has gone, could be another red herring or a legit serial killer ready to butcher the entire family. You can never quite tell, which is precisely what continues to work about this show, even as so much of it becomes so much more confounding.

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