Chris Sheridan
The following recap contains spoilers for The Chair Company S1E4 “Bahld Harmon birthplace (disputed)(written by Sarah Schneider and directed by Aaron Schimberg).
Ooh, this was a good one. At the beginning of this week’s episode, six years ago, Ron (Tim Robinson) and Barb (Lake Bell) are at a Christmas party. Both dealing with awkward conversations, they make their exit to a different restaurant. Sitting in a booth, they both express their interest in helping others. Ron says he doesn’t help people at Fisher Robay, and says he wants to show the kids that he, Barb, and they should do what they love.
In the present day, Ron is showing Mike (Joseph Tudisco) the footage of the figure outside in the office chair from last week, and expresses regret that he drunkenly left a voicemail for Tecca’s managing company. Mike calms him down and says he’ll stay out front and watch the house for the night. Inside, Barb is wearing some sort of eye covering to sleep on the couch. With her occupied, Ron deletes the footage from the outside cameras.
In the home office, Ron assembles a surprisingly complex spreadsheet encompassing everything he has learned so far. Ron calls Mike and suggests that Tecca might be putting something in the chairs, based off of the guy from last week admitting that Tecca had him assembling and disassembling chairs in the nude. Ron decides that he needs to get one of these chairs and take it apart. But when he attempts to purchase one of these nearly $1000(!) chairs from the website, they’re sold out.
The next morning, Ron is awakened by a man carrying a towel-lined box frantically pounding on the front door. The man is answering the eBay listing for a 1965 Fab Four figure collection. Ron has no idea what the man is talking about. The man cites the listing and address that Ron posted, but Ron denies doing no such thing. He slams the door on the frantic, weeping man’s face.
At a work meeting, Douglas is a no-show. Ron flashes back to when he wrote his coworker’s name on the form at the county office, but Brenda (Zuleyma Guevara) defuses the tension by announcing that boss Jeff (Lou Diamond Phillips) has planned a “surprise” for the office (it ends up being a food truck).
The HR woes continue for Ron, as HR confronts him with a high school picture of him and Amanda (the woman whose skirt he accidentally saw up when the chair broke) with his arm around her. The meeting is interrupted by Jamie (Glo Tavarez), informing him of a phone call that he should take. The voice on the other end of the line informs Ron that he didn’t make the cut to be a face model. Ron counters that he didn’t submit any application and has no interest in being a model. At home, Ron tears apart his office closet to find the photograph from a yearbook of him and Amanda, which is of them from a stage play taken during curtain call; completely innocuous.
Five years ago, Ron enters his house to greet his wife and his dog. Barb asks him how the meeting with the investor went, and Ron incredulously says that he couldn’t get him to smile, kept looking over at him waiting for him to smile, but it didn’t happen. We flash to Ron driving a Jeep with the investor through a forest. Ron figured if he accelerated, it might make the investor smile. This is probably the funniest bit of the season so far. Tim Robinson’s delivery during this monologue is hilarious, intercut with the flashback itself. Ron tells Barb, “Then I saw this log I knew I could get over.” “And…what happened?” Barb asks cautiously. “Didn’t get over it,” he replies (resulting in the investor slamming his head into the windshield and requesting to return to the hotel room to get some sleep). While the investor was interested in LED screens to get a better look at the “dinosaurs,” Ron wants a more “natural” experience for veterans. Ron says he’d rather die or kill himself than go back to Fisher Robay.
Cut to the present day, where Ron is of course back at Fisher Robay. A one-on-one is interrupted by a call from someone at a modeling agency who tells Ron that his application to be a model was rejected in favor of someone named Bahld Harmon. Stepping into an empty adjacent office room, Ron counters that he never wanted to be a model, but the man on the other end of the line says that Ron sent multiple headshots from an email address that doesn’t belong to him.
Arriving at home that night, Ron sees police cruisers with their lights on. Panicking, he runs towards the house and the cops inform him that apparently he’s donated a “big green egg.” (?) Ron, suspecting that Tecca is continuing to come after him, calls Mike for advice. Mike says he can call in a favor from a friend to get Ron’s family temporarily out of the house. Said friend is a “fumigator” who tells Barb that the house is infested and they’ll need a couple of days to get it cleared out. En route to the hotel, the Trospers get a call from Natalie (Sophia Lillis), saying that they can stay with her and Tara (Grace Reiter). Ron is opposed to “staying with Tara” but they end up going there.
At work, Ron learns that Douglas has been MIA because his fridge fell on him and he was trapped for two days, which relieves Ron because it seems to confirm that Douglas has not been behind the attacks on him. He’s not out of the jungle, however—big boss Jeff enters Ron’s office and shuts the door to confront Ron over an email (the “personal account” from which the model applications were also sent), in which Ron “aggressively” asked for a raise. Ron meekly apologizes for the email he didn’t send and Jeff slams the door as he exits.
Ron receives a customer response survey from Tecca, which he eagerly clicks on. The survey is a seemingly normal survey of yes or no questions such as “Did the product meet your expectations?” But down at the very end is a question that really got to me:
“Are we done, Ron?”
Hooo-leee sh*t, that was a good little chilling moment. Ron clicks “Yes.” That night, Ron wakes up to a text from Mike: “Meet me outside.” Outside, Mike has secured a Tecca chair for him, which he happily wheels into his garage.
Returning to Natalie’s home, Ron finds his daughter cooking. He asks her whether she’s happy with Tara. He implies that Tara is hindering Natalie’s art, her passion, and she counters that she’s happy with her fiancee, and that Ron similarly support’s Barb by taking a back seat. This is what finally causes Ron to open up about his investigation into Tecca. He reveals that he thinks that Tecca is using their chairs to smuggle drugs into the country, using a missing part to conceal the drugs. Ron didn’t find any drugs, he’s just going off of the cavity he found in the chair he took apart to make this assertion, but has done a lot of research and connected a lot of dots. Is Ron reading too much into this and potentially going nowhere, or is he right? Honestly, it could go either way. Surprisingly, Natalie completely supports her dad.
At the bar with Barb, Ron gets a call from Mike, who tells him he found one of the people he was looking for. Mike picks Ron up, and the camera travels up for an overhead shot, transitioning to a GPS phone shot of them driving through the city, then transitioning to Natalie, tracking their commerce. Finally, we get another flashback scene of Ron giving attention to the family dog in the garage. Natalie watches them through the cracked door, and Tara appears behind her, telling her that all they can do is tell Ron that they love him and trust him. Were Natalie and/or Tara responsible for the dog’s death? Is Natalie obsessed with her Dad’s affection? It certainly seems that way.
“Bahld Harmon Birthplace (Disputed)” was my favorite episode of the season so far (and arguably the funniest). Last week opened with the reveal of who took the photograph at the stressful end of S1E2, but we surprisingly don’t get an answer to who was behind the Jason Vorhees mask shaking their head back and forth in the office chair. I liked that a lot. We also get new questions as to what Natalie’s role is in everything. And the biggest thing: with the chilling customer survey from Tecca, there seems to be confirmation that the chair company is up to no good (or maybe they’re not). F*ck, we have to wait a whole week now? Truth be told though, I like the anticipation. It’s better than being able to binge, and instead let it sit…when it’s the right show, and this is the right show. I’ll see you here next week.
