Chris Sheridan
The following recap contains spoilers for The Chair Company S1E2 “New Blood. There’s 5 Rons Now” (written by Tim Robinson & Zach Kanin and directed by Andrew DeYoung).
The Chair Company S1E2 finds Barb Trosper (Lake Bell) waking up to an empty bed: Ron (Tim Robinson) has gone for a run. This must be a rarity, since Barb searches the house for him. Ron suddenly notices someone coming up behind him, and as he picks up pace, so too does the man behind him. The man runs past: just another guy, not actually trying to catch him.
Barb hears a thump in the house and calls out again for her husband. She sends him a panicked text, and he sprints home as the show’s title card overwhelms the screen. Blasting through the front door and yelling for Barb, Ron finds her in the living room. He asks her if she’s okay, and she assures him that everything is fine, but Natalie (Sophia Lillis) needs to talk to him. Natalie and her fiancee Tara are changing the wedding venue to a haunted barn as opposed to the location they already have a deposit on. Both Ron and Barb think this is ridiculous, but Barb pumps the brakes and says they’re not necessarily saying “no,” but…Tara’s parents might be the problem, and Natalie asks Ron for help convincing Tara’s father that this is what she and Tara want. Ron agrees. He’s just glad they’re okay, and he’ll do anything for the family he loves so much.
Arriving at work, Ron starts looking underneath the cars around him. He finds what he’s looking for: the pipe the man from last week’s episode used to thwack him on the head. In his office, he takes a picture of the man’s shirt, which he ended up with, and does an image search to locate the vendor. He adds it as a stop before he gets to the TV interview he’s supposed to arrive at later for the upcoming shopping mall.
Jamie (Glo Tavarez) appears, having been told to accompany Ron to avoid any “hiccups.” Ron successfully blows her off. Ron does another Google search for a fingerprint dusting kit and orders one. It’s not cheap. Jamie pops in again, with Brenda (Zuleyma Guevara), who will not let Ron leave without Jamie. Ron insists that she at least take her own car.
On the road, after calling Terry (Tara’s dad) and inviting him and his wife over for a game night, Ron rapidly accelerates, trying to lose Jamie. He speeds through a red light and as Jamie tries to follow, she nearly runs into a truck turning through the intersection. Ron looks back and sees Jamie screaming and panicking in her car. After a moment of contemplation, he drives off without checking on her.
Ron arrives at the clothing store with the shirt in hand, asking the (very odd) clerk about it. The clerk somehow knows who the shirt might belong to—one of the store’s members—and invites Ron to join the membership program for more information. After Ron signs up and pays the $65 member’s fee, the clerk admits that he in fact has no idea who the owner of the shirt is. Ron angrily leaves as death metal pounds over the soundtrack.
Ron gets to the site of the interview, where a distraught Jamie is being comforted by the interviewer. Jamie tells him she almost got hit by a truck and Ron kept driving. Ron feigns ignorance and gets ready for the interview. He receives multiple text messages regarding the clothing store’s membership program and appears to feel maybe a little bit bad as he watches Jamie cry and retch off to the side. He returns home that night to an Amazon package containing the fingerprint dusting kit, and excitedly opens it, only to find that it is merely a novelty: everything’s solid plastic, including a tiny hat. Frantically deleting the deluge of emails from the clothing store’s membership program, he receives one more email regarding how he accidentally saw up his colleague Amanda’s skirt when the chair collapsed, and he has to meet with HR.
The next morning during the meeting, HR asks a series of bullsh*t questions before telling Ron that an “outside observer” will be visiting the following week, and makes him watch a video about “peeping toms.” Ron does notice in the video, however, that one of the scenarios involving a man laying in the dirt to look up the skirts of passing women ends with him getting up and getting the dirt off of his back: just like the residue on the back of the shirt. He goes outside and looks around the outside of the office, finding white rocks and dirt that appear to match what was on the shirt, and locating a takeout box and empty soda can. He concludes that his assailant spent time here in the bushes. The box says “Jane’s Cafe,” Ron’s next stop in his investigation.
Ron arrives at the very rowdy cafe, asking the waitress if someone had ordered the rice dish and worn the shirt, and the waitress, having no interest in talking to him, calls the cafe’s security (“You guys have security?”). The security guard shows up, and Ron finds himself face to face with the man who assaulted him (Joseph Tudisco). The man shoves Ron into a furnace room and asks Ron if he’s stupid, coming into his place of work. Ron cowers, but when the man threatens to come to Ron’s house (“I see that wedding ring!”), Ron gets a burst of courage and screams at the man to never come to his house. The man starts gasping for breath, clutching his chest and asking for his “air machine.” Ron panics looking for the machine, but it was a ruse and the man flees.
Ron pursues him into the alley, blocking a few thrown boxes, and faces the man down, asking if he works for Tecca and demanding to know who hired him, citing that the man mentioned “the chair company” when he attacked him. The man counters that he doesn’t know who hired him, and he’s never head of Tecca. Ron starts screaming and clutching his head, having a classic Tim Robinson freakout until the man finally tells him that a man he’d never met, whose face he never saw, hired him to scare Ron. Ron says that he needs to find this man, because Tecca might be hurting and even killing people. The man thinks for a second and offers to help if Ron can pay him (I’m starting to see a pattern of Ron spending a lot of money and going nowhere).
The man, Mike Santini, provides Ron with a burner phone selected from a bag of a curiously robust collection of phones and tells him that he’ll call him when he locates the man who hired him. In his car, Ron hides the phone in his thermos. The next day at the office, Ron goes to Jamie to apologize for the incident on the road. Jamie cautiously mentions that Ron has “a darkness” to him. Ron cuts the conversation short and answers a call from Mike, saying that he located the man, “Jim X,” and they need to meet that night. Ron declines because he has the game night. Mike demands that he will come with him.
In the car, Mike tells Ron to retrieve the gun from the floor of the car, but as images of Ron’s family flash before his eyes, Ron screams that he only wants to talk to the man. Mike screams back that he needs to get revenge on this man, and Ron screams back louder that he has a job and a family, and he’s a good man who won’t do it, and exits the car.
At the game night, Ron and Terry step out to the back porch. Ron tells Terry that he wants to talk about the haunted house wedding. Terry agrees that they need to “shut it down.” Ron pushes back: there’s a lot of badness in the world, and the fact that their daughters found each other and make each other happy is a miracle. The other place was nice, but what wouldn’t they give to see their daughters happy, to give them everything they wanted? The scene ends with Terry on the verge of tears, agreeing with Ron.
They step back into the house, and Ron flashes his daughter a thumbs-up. As music softly kicks in, Ron happily glances around at his extended family, his heart filled with love. But as Ron receives a new text from an unknown number, the music suddenly sours as he reads the text: “No way out,” as well as a picture taken at that moment of him sitting on the arm of the chair. He glances towards the front door, from where the picture was taken, and sees the closet door slightly ajar. As he moves slowly towards the door, and reaches out to open it, we’re jump-scared by the family laying down the Twister tarp and that’s where we end it for the week.
Wow, the paranoia really got pumped up this week, and we’re only on the second episode. Ron’s investigative skills were surprisingly good, and while some of it went nowhere (and was very expensive), we did get some progress with him meeting Mike. Things are also escalating quickly because Mike is clearly a lunatic with his mob enforcer-esque Brooklyn accent and overall demeanor. This might be the Robinson/Kanin magnum opus, as a fusion of surreal comedy and genuinely compelling and uneasy conspiracy thriller. Next week we’ll probably get some answers, but likely twice as many questions.
