Summary
The Chair Company turns the Tecca conspiracy on its head in Episode 7, solving the mystery but presenting an even bigger problem for Ron to deal with.
Ron did it. He finally found out what Tecca is up to. And, as predicted, Tecca are up to something. There is a conspiracy afoot. It certainly seems that way, anyway, which is an appropriate revelation for the penultimate episode. But it turns out not to be the big question underpinning The Chair Company after all. Episode 7, “I said to my dog, “How do you like my hippie shirt?””, reveals that question to be whether Ron can do anything about it.
That has always been the question on some level, but before it was a matter of whether he could get to the bottom of the mystery. Now it’s a matter of whether his desire to expose the truth and to get revenge for his public embarrassment outweighs his love for his family, since the real string-puller behind Tecca turns out to be much closer to home than he realised.
The bigger question for us, the audience, is whether this can sustain the second season that The Chair Company has already been renewed for. It’s weird because the single episode remaining seems like it’d be enough to tie a bow around everything we’ve seen thus far, and I’m not sure how much more mileage there is in the idea. I guess we’ll have to wait and see in that regard. It’ll be interesting to find out either way.
If nothing else, this episode is really good. I think it’s in competition with the quasi-Halloween special and that truly bonkers fifth episode for the best of the season. It isn’t as openly wacky as those two, but it has a great one-liner hit rate, and it actually meaningfully moves the plot forward, which is good since the show’s reluctance to do so was becoming problematic. Ron’s vindication gives the whole thing a slightly different texture, since we now know for certain that he isn’t barking up the wrong tree.
Maybe the secret was Ron getting suspended from work – his justification to Barb, that Jeff was “being mean to everybody, especially the women, and some of the weaker men” had me rolling – which finally gave him enough time and determination to really dig into the investigation. He has some good leads in that regard, including the other government buildings with Eastern European bugs, and the overflow of Tecca chairs he stumbled on at City Hall. Natalie is also proving useful, tracking down the home address of Delaware City Hall purchasing director Teresa Bonaventura by trying to deliver a ham to her office. Aside from a brief hiccup in an adult video store, Ron’s on the right track.
His latest theory about what’s really going on turns out to be accurate, as far as we can tell. Tecca is stripping the chairs and then reselling the parts in a seemingly infinite loop, which turns out to be made possible by Teresa being compromised mentally, which Ron discovers when he visits her at home. Someone in the city government of Delaware is using her incapacity to line their own pockets, and suspecting it could be the semi-corrupt mayor, Ron makes amends with Mike to have him follow him around on a pub crawl while he attends a party for Barb’s business investor, Alice Quintana.
The big twist of The Chair Company Episode 7 is that Alice Quintana is the villain Ron is looking for. He somehow failed to notice – a commentary, I’m sure, on how little attention he has been paying his family – that Alice is the assistant purchasing director of Delaware. The pieces fall into place eventually, though. Ron finds a photo of her with Teresa, and gets a timely call from Oliver Probblo identifying her as the woman who took the “staff” photos for the Red Ball Market Global website. The designer of that website turns out to be Alice’s nephew, and the colour scheme is based on his extremely limited sex life.
But the triumph of Ron’s discovery is undercut by the fact that Alice has invested embezzled money in Barb’s business. If he exposes her, he’ll ruin Barb’s business. And after she unflinchingly supported him during his misguided Jeep tours era, can he really bring himself to do that? He plans to, but it turns out he can’t. Privately, Barb had even shared how proud she was of Ron looking into the Tecca conspiracy, which her therapist rather unethically shares with him. He can’t bring himself to ruin her business and his relationship with her, so he stays quiet as they slow dance, looking at himself crying in the mirror over her shoulder.
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