Summary
The Chair Company gets truly bonkers in Episode 5, which is a good thing (I think). But where all this is going remains anyone’s guess.
It’s a rare show – and, in case it wasn’t obvious, The Chair Company is a very rare show – that doesn’t seem any closer to meaningfully explaining what it’s about by the time it’s halfway through. And yet even by the end of Episode 5, “I won. Zoom in.”, Ron and Mike aren’t much closer to unravelling the Tecca conspiracy, and we, the audience, are no closer to knowing whether there’s really a conspiracy to unravel. It’s certainly looking that way, but every new development seems to come with a reminder that nobody’s any closer to figuring things out than they were before.
And yet the show isn’t any worse for this. It’s arguably better, actually. The ill-advised, overly obvious structural gimmick of the previous episode gives way to the most exaggerated chaos of the season thus far, and that’s definitely the mode that Tim Robinson and co. work best in. I’m not sure I could necessarily tell you why anything that happened in this episode happened in the way it did – although I’m going to try anyway – but I can tell you that I definitely enjoyed it.
What’s interesting is that the deeper Ron sinks into the Tecca stuff, the more divorced he seems to feel from Fisher Robay. If anything, things in the office feel weirder and even more detached, with Douglas back in the office after a stint trapped under his fridge following his mistakes party, fretting about ADA compliance. It’s such a nothing issue that Ron can barely summon the energy to pretend to care about it. His mind is elsewhere, on the important meeting that Brenda wants but won’t have without Jeff being present, and the “leads” drummed up by former Tecca employee, Steven Droyco, who may or may not be a lunatic.
Droyco neatly encapsulates everything I was talking about at the top. All of his supposedly first-hand eyewitness accounts of goings-on at the company sound like the rantings of a madman, possibly invented on the fly or in some sort of psychedelic fugue state. Everything he says feels ridiculous even by the standards of this very odd show, so nobody’s ever quite sure if they’re gaining more information or being bamboozled. Even the actionable lead acquired from Droyco is arrived at by accident. He recognises “Ken Tucker” from a spot-the-difference bar game; Red Ball Global Media is a shell company with a staff comprised of model photographs and fake bios. Through Mike’s lingering perversions, he’s able to figure out that the real name of “Ken Tucker” is Oliver Probblo, who he manages to trace back to a town outside Dayton.
This is the point when The Chair Company Episode 5 goes completely off the rails. Oliver is an eccentric actor who plays Scrooge in a yearly production of A Christmas Carol and drinks at a bizarre watering hole where everyone seems to be on an extraordinary amount of coke. He recalls the photos being taken for Red Ball Global at the behest of someone named “Maggie S.”, and offers to find out her surname via his iPad, but chaos erupts because – I promise you I’m not making any of this up – Ron annoys a man with a dent in his head by cautioning him not to dip his elbow in a bowl of soup, and Oliver buys drugs with fake money and then throws a drink in a woman’s face.
The idea of a silly barfight totally unrelated to the main plot isn’t entirely unheard of, but “I won. Zoom in.” doesn’t let this idea go for basically the remainder of the episode. After fleeing the bar, Ron, Mike, and Oliver are pursued to the latter’s apartment, where the angry barflies catch up. This sequence comes to include Oliver’s acting coach, who is squatting in his bathroom, a neighbour who intervenes, and the building’s super, who Ron catches cheating on his wife while he’s trying to catch the drug dealer who ran off with Oliver’s iPad. The super, for reasons I don’t even think he understands, forces Ron at gunpoint to kiss his paramour so that he has evidence of him cheating on his wife. For no reason, really. And then Ron gets knocked out.
The only thing that is tangibly gained from this episode is that Ron and Mike’s relationship progresses to the point where the latter volunteers to help him solve the rest of this mystery for free. They start calling each other “brother”, which feels overblown, and send each other late-night texts checking on how things are going. But something still feels amiss. Ron’s reluctance to divulge two recent concussions and a hospital visit to his family feels pretty unsustainable in the long run, and Mike’s obsessive levels of horniness speak to someone whose idea of platonic intimacy leaves a lot of questions. Bizarrely, the episode ends with him being revealed to be watching a… let’s say “adult” version of A Christmas Carol. That doesn’t seem like someone on a particularly even keel to me, but what do I know?
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