Tim Robinson, Shannon Shae Marie and Michael W Gaines in The Chair Company | Image via WarnerMedia
Summary
The Chair Company feels a bit off in “Happy Birthday, a friend”, with a misplaced focus highlighting how little the core plot is developing.
The Chair Company isn’t getting worse in any meaningful sense, but I think Episode 6, “Happy Birthday, a friend”, is the point where it has reached the outer limit of how much great throwaways and weird juxtapositions alone can sustain it. You can sort of feel interest waning. The absurdity of Ron’s pointless quest to uncover a chair-related conspiracy was funny – correction: is funny – when it was informing a story of loneliness and frustration. But here, a surprisingly increased focus on Ron’s boss, Jeff, gives the show a different, more unwelcome vibe. Jeff’s insecurities don’t feel the same as Ron and Mike’s. And his idiocy returns the action to Fisher Robay in a way that’s a bit at odds with how the previous episode shifted things away.
I liked how Ron’s work and home lives were being neglected the deeper he tumbled into the conspiracy, as that made sense with the unsubtle theme of him being prone to losing himself in flights of fancy on account of his own unfulfilled ambitions. Jeff trying to take over the mall project on account of an offhanded comment from one of his rich friends about wasting his life on the 9-to-5 grind is still funny but feels like it only exists to give Ron more things to be annoyed about – as if he didn’t have enough already.
There are undeniably correlations to be made between Ron and Jeff, but a lot of their anxieties are the same, so a lot of their outbursts, overreactions, and overreaches are the same, which muddies the work plot by having the two of them compete for attention and control. There’s also a suggestion of sabotage that is eventually revealed to be a bunch of dorks using the development site as a setting to race their remote-controlled cars, which, again, is funny on the face of it, but exists to be something comically mundane that Ron nevertheless flips his lid about, slightly assaulting Jeff in the process when he tries to calm him down. Will Jeff be feeling insecure enough to penalise Ron for that, or will it be another thing like the HR complaint that kind of fades into the background of the Fisher Robay scenes to get some laughs now and again?
The fact that I’m asking this question earnestly suggests that we’re spending too much time on this kind of thing and nowhere near enough on the Tecca stuff, which barely moves forward at all in The Chair Company Episode 6. There’s a chance that this might be the point, that Ron being so close to the bone that he jumps on any potential lead with demented fury is actively hampering his investigation, but it might also just be a case of wonky pacing and misplaced focus. There are only two episodes left to wrap all this up, and I’m not even totally sure what needs wrapping up, since the shape of the actual mystery is so inscrutable.
The most meaningful lead comes from the bug in Ron’s home that hails from Eastern Europe and has once been glimpsed before in a government building in Delaware, Ohio; the Delaware website has the same colour scheme as the Red Ball Market Global website, which is the same as the tattoo on the guy Ron accosted and took photographs of earlier, who he suspects might have designed both webpages. It’s hardly a major clue – in fact, by design it comes across like the conspiratorial thinking of a madman, which it might be – and any investigation into it has to be shelved either way since Ron’s throwing a birthday party for Seth.
Jeff turns up at the birthday party and complains that it’s a bit too much like a kid’s party for his liking, which is very funny, and Mike gets Seth a gift and includes a handwritten card signed off with the episode’s title, “Happy Birthday, a friend”. Again, funny. But the party’s a disaster since Seth gets quietly frustrated about how obviously Ron’s heart isn’t in it, sneaks too many drinks, and eventually vomits in the middle of the kitchen while the birthday cake is being served. Barb is quite right to point out that Ron didn’t get a grip on Seth’s drinking as he promised he would. His mind is elsewhere, on the mall development and the Tecca chairs and the seemingly threatening calls he keeps receiving.
At the end of the episode, Ron heads to City Hall and gets chased by a cop type who pursues him from the file room to a big auditorium-type space which is positively packed with neatly-ordered Tecca chairs. But so what? Ron is absolutely beaming to have discovered this haul, but at the moment, it’s totally unclear why any of it would be of any significance whatsoever. They might just be chairs. And so close to the end of the show, if not necessarily the end of the story, he’s going to have to face the idea that his being totally right or totally wrong is perhaps both equally terrifying.
