As each lead takes Ron down more chaotic and violent side quests, it’s a small miracle that Ron keeps the investigation a secret from his family.
Photo: Sarah Shatz/HBO
When it comes to Ron and Mike’s attempts to get to the heart of the Tecca conspiracy, it’s always one step forward and two steps back. Or maybe it’d be more accurate to say “one step forward, two steps back, three steps over, two steps down, and one step into another dimension.” As The Chair Company enters its second half, it’s difficult to tell just how deep this all goes, but I’m having a great time watching it play out.
There’s not much Fisher Robay in this episode; outside a brief glimpse of Ron overseeing the progress on the mall development, there’s only one scene set at work. Fresh off those few days trapped under a refrigerator, Douglas is back at work in a wheelchair that he’s supposed to use for two to eight months — “It’s sort of up to me,” he claims. However, he seems to get a kick out of using his new disability to boss people around about ADA compliance and the danger of leaving bags out on the office floor. It’s hard to tell how to read his tearful speech about surviving on frozen food, maybe because he also uses it to kind of get away with the mistakes party that offended everyone.
Ron can’t be bothered much with Douglas. There are more pressing sources of anxiety, like the serious meeting that Brenda says they need to have. Ron’s free now and clearly stressed about what this could mean, but she’d rather do it another day when Jeff is around. (This type of thing is one of my all-time pet peeves.) We’ll have to wait with Ron to figure out what it’s all about.
The main focus of the episode, of course, is following up on the Ken Tucker lead from Steven Droyco. It turns out he didn’t actually find the real man; he spotted him as a model playing Humpty Dumpty in a “spot the difference” game at a bar. It confirms what we may have already guessed: Red Ball Global Media is a shell company, and the “staff” are actually models with fake bios on the website. The meeting with Droyco also explains an earlier eerie occurrence: He was the one at the abandoned Tecca building who screamed when Ron was there a few weeks ago. It turns out Droyco got his hand caught in a pipe while testing a revenge plan: snatching his boss’s turds from the pipes and returning them to his desk. He wanted justice for being forced to work naked — for being told that everyone there worked in the nude, when that clearly wasn’t true.
Droyco’s experiences should feel like the most concrete eyewitness proof yet of Tecca’s corruption and evil, but it’s a little hard to know how seriously to take his insane stories, and even Ron seems skeptical. Everything that comes out of Droyco’s mouth sounds fake and nonsensical, like the detail that “it turned out [he] was supposed to be the boss.” Thankfully, Mike’s erotic obsession with the “gorgeous women” in the game allows him to figure out the real name for the model who played Humpty Dumpty and Ken Tucker: Oliver Probblo. And he manages to find the guy, too, in a sketchy town outside Dayton where Mike seemingly used to live.
So commences a night of harrowing encounters and trauma both physical and mental, starting with Ron and Mike’s trip to meet Oliver at a bar after one of his shows. He plays Scrooge in a yearly production of A Christmas Carol, but likes to stay sharp in the off-season by performing in places like jails.
The man, it turns out, is just as bizarre as you’d expect — for one, his drama coach locked herself in his bedroom and is squatting there. Oliver does provide just enough information to keep Ron going on this deluded quest, explaining that the Red Ball Global photos were taken during an exercise for “life of the party” classes. And he offers another name for Ron and Mike to track down: “Maggie S.,” who had the photos taken and assigned everyone their staff roles. He even offers to get her full name from the emails on his iPad, which … does not happen, due to a confluence of unfortunate events totally unrelated to the actual task at hand.
Event one: Ron tries to be helpful by pointing out to a man (credited as Dale) that his sleeve is “almost going in soup.” This completely sets the guy off, presumably because he’s on a ton of coke. Relatedly, event two: Oliver buys some coke in the restroom but uses Scrooge money, which the dealer notices a minute later. These two conflicts heat up very quickly, with Dale plunging his elbow into the soup and then getting in Ron’s face, telling him to kiss it. Pushed to his limit, Ron’s violent side comes out — if you can call bopping a man on his dented head “violent.” Then Oliver splashes his blameless girlfriend in the face, and the three men flee, chased by a group of enraged barflies.
Again, none of this has anything to do with Tecca or shell companies or drug trafficking. It’s just a crazy, surreal, stupid situation that Ron gets into by seeking out the shadiest people possible in pursuit of something that might not really exist. And it continues at Oliver’s apartment, where their attackers find them and the chaos ratchets up to intense levels. Oliver eliminates one pole-climbing threat by plopping a hat on his head, leading to a big fall — then takes this as an opportunity to evict his squatter. A good Samaritan neighbor steps in to pull men off men. The drug dealer steals Oliver’s iPad, stopping the search for Maggie S.’s name. (As if he can’t access his emails any other way.) Chasing after the guy only gets Ron into another weird situation: He catches the building super in a back room cheating on his wife and gets pressured into kissing the girlfriend on camera as leverage. To cap it off, the drug dealer knocks him out.
It’s pretty handily the craziest thing Ron has gone through yet on this show, and it’s even crazier that he thinks he can keep it all a secret from his family. Barb, Seth, and Natalie aren’t in the episode all that much, but there are seeds planted for future weeks: Seth, for example, seems to be seeking Tara’s counsel about breaking something to his parents. And Natalie is still justifiably concerned about her dad, calling him up during his night from hell and getting no information from him. He even requests that Mike move his phone because he doesn’t want Natalie to know he’s in the hospital. So much for transparency with her about what he’s up to.
“I Won. Zoom In” gets its title from Mike’s texts, and it does feel like the first episode to start peeling back the curtain and revealing who this guy really is. It’s notable that Ron refers to Mike as his brother in the hospital room; he’s increasingly the only person Ron thinks he can rely on, even if he knows not to partake of the old pepper chicken he had sitting in his fridge. And Mike seems to want a brotherly relationship with Ron, maybe just because he has so few people to talk to in his everyday life. The moment when he reaches over to grab the steering wheel is completely misguided and ridiculous, but there’s a yearning for playfulness and camaraderie there. It’s something he doesn’t have with his estranged daughter, Lynette.
Stopping on the way home from the hospital, Mike tells Ron he no longer wants to be paid for his services. He wants to be a good, selfless person now, not someone like Scrooge who looks back on a life of misery and unkindness. The two men exchange grateful texts later that evening, home safe and stumped about where to go next. Lest that ending skew too wholesome, though, John Solomon’s script ends with one last dip into the funny and indelible. Keeping with Mike’s sad-and-horny streak, the adaptation of A Christmas Carol he’s watching turns out to be a porno. The episode leaves us with the startling image of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come putting Scrooge’s huge dick in her mouth. Sure, why the hell not.
• “Thank you so much for showing me Frankenweenie. It meant a lot.”
• The Trospers move back to their house, but the “exterminator” tells Ron he found a couple bugs he’d never seen before. He really wants one named after himself if he discovers a new species.
• Love that bit of the score that plays on the drive to meet Oliver.
• Mike suggests getting giant meatballs made with “gray beef” while they’re in town, which sounds like something from It’s Always Sunny. In fact, Mike would totally fit into that world, now that I’m thinking about it.
• “I hate those Nazis. I’ll say it.”
• “How about I take a little selfie?” “Don’t you dare take a selfie of me.”
• I don’t blame Oliver for forgetting his ID at the bar in the madness, but the fact that he stuffed the copper cup in his pocket instead is hilarious.
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