Part of me didn’t want any of it to connect. The web of corporate and municipal corruption that Ron Trosper discovers in the first six episodes of The Chair Company is outlandish and flimsy enough that it could be made of pure coincidence. An American pharmaceutical company is smuggling Hungarian opiates into the United States via an office furniture subsidiary and laundering their crimes through the local government? And we “know” this because of circumstantial evidence that includes, but is not limited to, a single chair dissected by Ron, an invasive insect species spotted by a shady exterminator, and the corresponding color schemes of one man’s tattoo and a pair of websites?
These plot points have propelled us through The Chair Company, and the fact that they’re almost too good to be true is a part of that propulsion. So is the comedy that comes with it. But “I Said To My Dog, ‘How Do You Like My Hippie Shirt?’” proves that vindicating Ron is a total blast. Suspended from work and reaching the end of his rope, he’s determined to leave no stone unturned—and the episode unearths one stone after another in the process.
There are loads of tremendous callbacks this week, and they’re looped into the story in highly satisfying fashion. Thought you’d seen the last of the Tamblay’s guy or the Tamblay’s loyalty club group chat for that matter? Here’s a little vignette that’ll prove you wrong and fire one of the few functioning synapses remaining in Ron’s brain. Did year-round Scrooge Oliver Probblo and the life-of-the-party class seem like a dead end? Have a deliriously digressive phone call from that coked-up raconteur at just the right moment. There’s even an explanation for something as inconsequential as the bug that crawled into Ron’s phone a while back: The rare breed the exterminators found are attracted to sources of heat, like “a phone that has too many tabs open.”
It’s a smart move to let everything fall into place when Ron is at his lowest. “I Said To My Dog” doesn’t let the victory of “Happy Birthday, A Friend” linger: A smash cut disrupts Ron’s euphoric memory of the room full of chairs with a reminder that, a little while earlier, he shoved his boss. It’s oh so Ron to try to gloss over this life-altering fuck up by adopting a dog while the other Trospers are asleep; it’s oh so The Chair Company for that dog to then immediately stick its snout in rat poison and bite the guy who brought him home.
Barb’s complex reaction to these developments is a mark in the show’s favor: She’s rightfully pissed about all the pressure that Ron’s recklessness (he’s just a little suspended from work) places on her and Everpump, but she’s caring and compassionate while her husband freaks out about his wound. Here’s one reason to like this scene: some overdue screentime for Lake Bell. Here’s another: what it reinforces about Barb and Ron’s marriage. Sure, they have their ups and downs like any other couple, and yeah, Ron’s an obsessive idiot. But she’s still going to track down some antibiotics for him when he can’t find the bacitracin. Ron’s various boondoggles be damned, he and Barb still love each other.
And that gives Ron something to lose when he finally stumbles his way into the center of the conspiracy. I put on my own version of Ron’s episode-six grin throughout this outing’s frenzied race across Delaware City—especially when a pair of mini I Think You Should Leave sketches broke out in the porn shop and the Tamblay’s group texts. But the genius of “I Said To My Dog” really shines through with the revelation that the investor who’s poised to make Everpump a reality is also the mastermind behind the Tecca scheme. Ron’s been itching to get away from Alice’s party to join Mike on the tail of Delaware’s corrupt mayor, but it turns out their actual target has been plying him with drinks and passed hors d’oeuvres the whole night.
The confrontation between Alice and Ron is as conventional as the show gets. It’s a criminal mastermind toying with a hero who’s this close to cracking this thing wide open—only that hero’s rebuttal includes an awkwardly worded defense of the sweet old lady the criminal mastermind is working her chair-fencing scheme around. It’s stuff like that, or the introduction to and return of the “pepper patty balls” guy, that helps “I Said To My Dog” bring the whole Chair Company project into focus: As unclassifiable as the show has been, at its heart, it’s a style parody—like trying to do a Police Squad! with Fincher, Lynch, and The Onion as the reference points rather than Quinn Martin and MAD magazine. The show speaks the language of a thriller fluently, with its sincere commitment to the genre demonstrated in all the disparate threads electrifyingly pulled together this week. Within that rock-solid structure, there’s room to do more than tell jokes and play around with rhythms and clichés. The preposterousness of the conspiracy, and Ron’s paid-off hunches, justify spectacular scenes of a constituent badgering the mayor to use his hot tub, Natalie describing her “ham delivery” ruse, and the feud between the Romance Depot guy and the customer he accuses of insufficient porn fandom.
But there are deeper layers here, because the show is dealing with the roots of conspiratorial thinking, too: not only “There must be an explanation for why this happened,” but also “There must be an explanation for why this happened to me.” Armed with the truth about Alice and Tecca, Ron almost lets the latter get the best of him; it’s touching (in a weird, Chair Company way) that he relents, preserving Barb’s Everpump dreams in the process. There’s still a smidgen of selfishness in his reason for not, to use his appropriately juvenile turn of phrase, “telling,” and he does end the episode grinning at himself in a mirror. But for a few seconds, at least, Ron shows he can make this whole ordeal about someone other than himself.
There’s still time for The Chair Company to do so, though. Because we still don’t know if what happened to Ron on that presentation stage was an accident or if the busted chair was placed there on purpose. As a staunch proponent of letting the mystery be, I wouldn’t mind if that question went unanswered. But with things tying together so neatly in “I Said To My Dog,” it’ll be surprising if it is.
Stray observations
- • It’s kind of a bummer that the peak of season one contains no new scenes with the Fisher Robay crew—but barring Ron from the office keeps things streamlined.
- • Maybe the Wendy’s runner is paid promotional consideration, maybe it isn’t. Either way, it’s a nice bit of midwestern specificity to make Tara’s main client an Ohio-based burger chain. (Though, did you hear? They’re coming out with a ham. Well, Wendy’s isn’t coming out with a ham—they might start selling ham at this new thing called Wendy’s Carvers. It’s like a new, nicer Wendy’s called Carvers, and it has ham.)
- • The last word from the disgruntled Tamblay’s customer feels right at home in the Chair Company/I Think You Should Leave universe, and it’s also a great punctuation to Ron’s “They’re switching out the parts” epiphany: “They made me think I could wish things into the world.”
