The Chair Company Season-Finale Recap: Scary to Watch

What? Did you expect a normal finale of The Chair Company? In a way, the end of this season of TV is extremely predictable — predictable in just how unpredictable it is. We knew that questions would likely be answered, and that new ones would crop up, especially given the news of the season-two renewal. We knew that things wouldn’t wrap up neatly, especially after a penultimate episode that cleared up a little too much. The story is not over. The show must go on.

I’m still thinking about what to take away from “Minnie Mouse Coming Back Wasn’t on My Bingo Card,” what to make of it all. Everything ties together, sort of, but mysteries remain about how deep it all goes, how much is real and how much is fiction. It’s much easier to imagine another season of this show now, given the lack of real resolution: Not only are there new layers to uncover with the actual Tecca conspiracy, but there are newly revealed threats, both new characters and people we already knew.

Like Mike Santini. I want to take a second to praise one of the funniest and most terrifying supporting characters of the year, embodied by Joseph Tudisco in a performance imbued with both menace and a deep yearning. And those two modes are interconnected: Mike is gross and horny, but he’s also a lonely man who desperately wants community and connection, which leads him to do horrifying things. We learn about some of those things at the same time as Ron in this episode, not long after he gets back in touch with Mike to renew their investigation.

The truth comes out when Ron pays a visit to Mike’s daughter, Lynette, and gets rebuffed by her aunt. But Lynette pays a visit later and reveals that she’s not actually his daughter. Her real dad died in a car accident, and Mike received his heart. He became close to the family for a time, showing up at Lynette’s wedding so a piece of her dad could be there, but he became obsessed with the idea of being Lynette’s dad (and her mom’s husband) and grew angry when they didn’t return his affection. In his worst moment, he reacted to Lynette’s gentle rejection by trying to kiss her and said, “I’m attracted to you even more than I was your mom, because you’re younger.” The family got a restraining order.

And that’s not even the end of it, because we see in the final montage of the season that Mike also has a guy zip-tied to the toilet in his bathroom! These Mike reveals are the most genuinely disturbing parts of the episode; there’s very little humor in Lynette’s story, just real fear and real pain. And yet Ron doesn’t even have time to fully process this revelation or worry about his own family, because he receives that call finally asking him to meet.

More on that soon. Like so much of this show, the bulk of this finale revolves around the question of whether Ron is truly a good person. He sacrificed glory for Barb, sure, and he’s making an effort to be a good dad again: He calmly shuts Natalie down when she calls him up about charges against the mayor, and he says all the right things when Seth comes clean about preferring stop-motion animation to basketball, encouraging him to apply to RISD. (I thought Seth’s new passion was going to be something really weird or specific, but it’s actually nice, and we see him showing some of his work to Barb and Natalie during the montage.)

Even early on, though, you can tell that Ron is second-guessing his choice. Seth isn’t clever enough to get any sense of what his dad is referring to in his obfuscatory description of the “really important” investigation that has kept him busy, but Ron’s language undermines Barb’s role in her own success. In his vague telling, Barb only got the funding because of his snooping, making him the hero of this story. That’s his only way of coping with this turn of events.

We get another example of Ron’s lingering ego when he takes Baby on a walk, only to fall and hit his head after losing her. He eventually tracks the dog to the home of some guy named Asher, her true owner. Asher’s energy is off from the beginning, but he seems grateful for Ron, even acquiescing to his ridiculous request to post about him saving Baby (née Minnie Mouse) on Instagram. Then, in a darkly funny twist, it turns out Minnie Mouse went missing for a reason: Asher allegedly has a history of yelling at her, and people have discussed rescuing the poor dog for a long time. In Ron’s effort to brag about heroically returning a dog, he exposes himself as an ally to a possible monster.

Getting his job back at Fisher Robay won’t really fill the void in Ron’s life. It never could. Despite Douglas’s smug suggestion of moving Ron down “three or four rungs … or five,” he’s right that the job was always too much for him, that he was heading for a breaking point. But Jeff actually dangles Ron a lifeline anyway, suggesting they hash out Push-Gate over a beer. Ron is noncommittal, though, and in the end someone else takes over as project lead. In a moment of weakness, he calls the Columbus Herald tipline and mentions his “corporate political fraud thriller story,” backing out before he can name any names. The journalist calls back to ask more, aware thanks to caller ID that Ron Trosper was the “anonymous” caller.

But what really kickstarts Ron’s detective brain again is the realization (thanks to some indignant words from a caller who otherwise limits himself to heavy breathing) that the conspiracy doesn’t end with Alice Quintana. When he reluctantly joins Jeff and his intense friend Grego at a karaoke bar, he’s in the perfect state of mind for one of his biggest, most goosebumps-inducing realizations yet: One of Jeff’s songs has the exact same melody and vocal sound as that catchy-as-hell Red Ball Market Global jingle. Ron immediately leaves and goes to Jeff’s office, where he finds some intriguing files and photos that show Jeff hanging out with movie star Danny Donovan (whom we saw at that Sedona getaway a few episodes back) and Stacy Crystals.

Here’s where the fascinating opening scene of the episode comes into play. At the time, we had no context for this new set of characters: a bride, her klutzy cigar-smoking father, and the friendly old man named Stacy Crystals who offered to introduce him to some studio musicians after hearing his poem at the wedding. And we didn’t recognize the kid who popped up to cut those dreams short by shooting Crystals, accusing him of wrecking his dad’s life. I wondered if this was some flashback, but later we see Jeff learning the news that his friend got shot and asking if Danny is okay. If Jeff is even more evil than we thought — if he’s complicit in some cover-up, either in conjunction with Alice Quintana or separately — we’ll have to wait until next season to find out.

When Ron heads to his high school gymnasium to meet with the mystery figure who has been calling him, stalking him, and taunting him with a Jason mask, the finale returns to the inciting incident of the show: the broken chair that left Ron sprawled on the ground, unintentionally looking up Amanda’s skirt. And what do you know, the subplot that just won’t disappear comes rearing its head once again. Apparently, the stalker is Amanda’s boyfriend, enacting revenge on her behalf after decades of resentment for some obscure slight from their high school days. (Ron once accidentally spit a gummy bear in her cleavage, a memory that drove her insane.) Now he claims Amanda broke Ron’s chair with her mind, something she can apparently do when she feels strongly about something.

I’m not quite sure what Amanda’s boyfriend wants with Ron now and why he’s still so angry, but those final moments are unnerving and funny and inexplicable, down to the freeze frame of Ron’s alarmed expression. The Chair Company can be appreciated as a character study about a man caught between genuine goodness and his darkest impulses, but it’s also just a thrilling, batshit, sometimes deliriously funny way to experience 30 minutes every week. Did Amanda really break Ron’s chair with her mind? I don’t know. I’ve seen crazier.

Company Secrets

• I’m not totally clear on Natalie’s deal. Was she getting sucked into the conspiracy with Ron for real? She and Tara are arguing in this episode after she spilled the beans about Wendy’s Carvers, but there’s no real resolution to that.

• “I’ve just seen the Christmas ones, and they’re always just, like, Santa can’t do it.”

• “I’m home alone at a sleepover, and we’re terribly behaved boys.”

• “She can get in a lot of trouble.” “I’m not gonna tell anybody Wendy’s is doing a nicer ham restaurant.”

• I have to stay, that whole shed sequence at Asher’s stumped and terrified me. (Tim Robinson’s over-the-top but deserved “Oh my god!!!” defused the tension somewhat.) More nightmare logic, I guess, and Ron wakes up again on his couch a moment later.

• It turns out Barb was actually kind of teasing Ron with her comments about his conspiracy theorizing relayed through George last week. Her condescension about his silly little hobby (running around like a “dumb detective”), combined with Jeff egging him on by emphasizing his “nice, simple life,” really plays on Ron’s ego and pushes him toward selfishness again.

• I love the physical comedy of Ron angrily leaning on the wall of Jeff’s office.

• I can’t tell — do those files indicate that Jeff and Crystals are the CFO and CEO (respectively) of Red Ball Market Global and Tecca?

• What a wild ride!