Part of me didn\u2019t 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 \u201cknow\u201d 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\u2019s tattoo and a pair of websites?\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
These plot points have propelled us through The Chair Company, and the fact that they\u2019re almost too good to be true is a part of that propulsion. So is the comedy that comes with it. But \u201cI Said To My Dog, \u2018How Do You Like My Hippie Shirt?\u2019\u201d proves that vindicating Ron is a total blast. Suspended from work and reaching the end of his rope, he\u2019s determined to leave no stone unturned\u2014and the episode unearths one stone after another in the process.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There are loads of tremendous callbacks this week, and they\u2019re looped into the story in highly satisfying fashion. Thought you\u2019d seen the last of the Tamblay\u2019s guy or the Tamblay\u2019s loyalty club group chat for that matter? Here\u2019s a little vignette that\u2019ll prove you wrong and fire one of the few functioning synapses remaining in Ron\u2019s 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\u2019s even an explanation for something as inconsequential as the bug that crawled into Ron\u2019s phone a while back: The rare breed the exterminators found are attracted to sources of heat, like \u201ca phone that has too many tabs open.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a smart move to let everything fall into place when Ron is at his lowest. \u201cI Said To My Dog\u201d doesn\u2019t let the victory of \u201cHappy Birthday, A Friend<\/a>\u201d linger: A smash cut disrupts Ron\u2019s euphoric memory of the room full of chairs with a reminder that, a little while earlier, he shoved his boss. It\u2019s oh so Ron to try to gloss over this life-altering fuck up by adopting a dog while the other Trospers are asleep; it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n HBO renews Task, I Love LA and The Chair Company in one fell swoop<\/a>Loneliness washes over a lesser The Chair Company<\/a><\/p>\n Barb\u2019s complex reaction to these developments is a mark in the show\u2019s favor: She\u2019s rightfully pissed about all the pressure that Ron\u2019s recklessness (he\u2019s just a little suspended from work) places on her and Everpump, but she\u2019s caring and compassionate while her husband freaks out about his wound. Here\u2019s one reason to like this scene: some overdue screentime for Lake Bell. Here\u2019s another: what it reinforces about Barb and Ron\u2019s marriage. Sure, they have their ups and downs like any other couple, and yeah, Ron\u2019s an obsessive idiot. But she\u2019s still going to track down some antibiotics for him when he can\u2019t find the bacitracin. Ron\u2019s various boondoggles be damned, he and Barb still love each other.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s episode-six grin throughout this outing\u2019s frenzied race across Delaware City\u2014especially when a pair of mini I Think You Should Leave sketches broke out in the porn shop and the Tamblay\u2019s group texts. But the genius of \u201cI Said To My Dog\u201d really shines through with the revelation that the investor who\u2019s poised to make Everpump a reality is also the mastermind behind the Tecca scheme. Ron\u2019s been itching to get away from Alice\u2019s party to join Mike on the tail of Delaware\u2019s corrupt mayor, but it turns out their actual target has been plying him with drinks and passed hors d\u2019oeuvres the whole night.<\/p>\n The confrontation between Alice and Ron is as conventional as the show gets. It\u2019s a criminal mastermind toying with a hero who\u2019s this close to cracking this thing wide open\u2014only that hero\u2019s rebuttal includes an awkwardly worded defense of the sweet old lady the criminal mastermind is working her chair-fencing scheme around. It\u2019s stuff like that, or the introduction to and return of the \u201cpepper patty balls\u201d guy, that helps \u201cI Said To My Dog\u201d bring the whole Chair Company project into focus: As unclassifiable as the show has been, at its heart, it\u2019s a style parody\u2014like 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\u2019s room to do more than tell jokes and play around with rhythms and clich\u00e9s. The preposterousness of the conspiracy, and Ron\u2019s paid-off hunches, justify spectacular scenes of a constituent badgering the mayor to use his hot tub, Natalie describing her \u201cham delivery\u201d ruse, and the feud between the Romance Depot guy and the customer he accuses of insufficient porn fandom.<\/p>\n But there are deeper layers here, because the show is dealing with the roots of conspiratorial thinking, too: not only \u201cThere must be an explanation for why this happened,\u201d but also \u201cThere must be an explanation for why this happened to me.\u201d Armed with the truth about Alice and Tecca, Ron almost lets the latter get the best of him; it\u2019s touching (in a weird, Chair Company way) that he relents, preserving Barb\u2019s Everpump dreams in the process. There\u2019s still a smidgen of selfishness in his reason for not, to use his appropriately juvenile turn of phrase, \u201ctelling,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n There\u2019s still time for The Chair Company to do so, though. Because we still don\u2019t 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\u2019t mind if that question went unanswered. But with things tying together so neatly in \u201cI Said To My Dog,\u201d it\u2019ll be surprising if it is.<\/p>\n Stray observations\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2022 It\u2019s kind of a bummer that the peak of season one contains no new scenes with the Fisher Robay crew\u2014but barring Ron from the office keeps things streamlined.\u00a0
\n\u2022 Maybe the Wendy\u2019s runner is paid promotional consideration, maybe it isn\u2019t. Either way, it\u2019s a nice bit of midwestern specificity to make Tara\u2019s main client an Ohio-based burger chain. (Though, did you hear? They\u2019re coming out with a ham. Well, Wendy\u2019s isn\u2019t coming out with a ham\u2014they might start selling ham at this new thing called Wendy\u2019s Carvers. It\u2019s like a new, nicer Wendy\u2019s called Carvers, and it has ham.)
\n\u2022 The last word from the disgruntled Tamblay\u2019s customer feels right at home in the Chair Company\/I Think You Should Leave universe, and it\u2019s also a great punctuation to Ron\u2019s \u201cThey\u2019re switching out the parts\u201d epiphany: \u201cThey made me think I could wish things into the world.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Part of me didn\u2019t want any of it to connect. The web of corporate and municipal corruption that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":150912,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[156,111,139,69,437],"class_list":{"0":"post-150911","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-new-zealand","10":"tag-newzealand","11":"tag-nz","12":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=150911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150911\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=150911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=150911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=150911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}