‘The Chair Company’s Big Episode 7 Reveal Has To Be A Massive Red Herring

Ron has been suspended from work when we begin this penultimate episode, though he’s happy as a clam picturing that great big room full of chairs. He was put on indefinite leave after accidentally, but quite forcefully, shoving his boss, Jeff (Lou Diamond Phillips). This has not phased him, though he appears more manic and unhinged than ever. He’s even purchased a dog, Baby (the name of one of my dogs!) to replace the family pet they lost (that dog did jump on people a lot) which leads to some pretty hilarious exchanges with Barb (Lake Bell).

Everything comes together for Ron this episode. He tracks down the purchasing director of Delaware City and discovers that she’s also on permanent leave, and someone else is approving the purchase of all these Tecca chairs. He tracks down a delivery truck filled with the chairs that takes them to a Tecca warehouse, where they unload them and load them into a different truck (whereupon he’s accosted by children throwing rocks at him and throws his burner phone into one of the juvenile’s faces).

His phone is broken when visiting a porn shop to ask the owner about the illicit photos he found back at the other Tecca warehouse and when he gets his new phone, a string of Tamblay text messages appears, leading him to one about how the clothing company is evil and sold an altered, but still used, shirt back to a man. This leads him to believe that the Delaware City government and Tecca are somehow selling used chairs back to people in an elaborate, and incredibly inconvenient, scam.

And this leads him to a party he attends with Barb, where he discovers several things. The woman who has invested in his wife’s business is the same woman approving all of these chair purchases, and the same woman that took the photos of Oliver Probblo and his acting buddies. Alice is the mastermind, the devious player behind all of it, and apparently she’s invested in Everpump to create a conflict of interest for Ron.

It all feels a bit neat and tidy, quite frankly. Ron was right all along. He’s been uncovering a vast criminal conspiracy this whole time. But what if it’s a head-fake? One weird bit is when Ron encounters his wife’s business partner, George, at the party and George tells him that Barb was saying all sorts of nice things about him. She knows all about his investigation and she thinks it’s really cool. George can’t remember the exact words, but it was “a lot of nice things.”

Don’t you think that’s just a little bit strange? Barb isn’t exactly the kind of person to not speak her mind. If she had any idea that Ron was investigating a chair company and that this is why he’d been such a loose canon recently, surely she’d confront him about it? She confronted him when she thought he was starting up the jeep tours company again. Why wouldn’t she bring this up given how stressed out she is and how important her Everpump business is at the moment?

What if – and this could be totally off the mark – but what if Natalie didn’t actually lie to the Delaware City people when she showed up there, telling them she was delivering hams? What if, instead, she discovered that the woman in charge of purchasing the chairs was also the investor in her mom’s business? What if she sent her father on a wild goose chase with the retired purchasing director and worked out a deal of some sort with Alice? Or what if she learned something completely reasonable about the chairs and came up with some other plan to give her dad the answers he needs in order to get him to stop?

My suspicion grew when Natalie arrived at the Delaware City government building and we hear someone ask if she needs help and then they cut away. We have to take Natalie’s word for it when she speaks with Ron next. We don’t even see who she ends up talking to. I think that’s very strange! Whatever conversation she has offscreen, it feels like it was left out for a reason.

Could she have somehow gotten George and Alice to go along with this? Alice reveals that she’s behind everything, giving Ron closure and reaffirming that he was onto something from the start, and then George pushes the stuff about Barb thinking he’s really cool and brave and smart, giving Ron a reason not to blow everything up.Then Ron smiles and makes sad faces at himself in the mirror for ten minutes while slow-dancing with Barb at the party.

This might not quite fit. Natalie would also have to coordinate the plan with Oliver (unless the pictures were actually taken by Alice but not part of any actual conspiracy). Alice would have to agree to play along as a make-believe villain, which is no small ask. And it’s pretty dicey to let the investor in your mother’s company in on this kind of scheme since it puts Barb’s company at risk . . . unless they’re all actors, like Oliver.

But it’s also certainly possible that Red Ball Marketing Global isn’t some elaborate scheme and there is not a vast conspiracy with Tecca and local governments. Maybe RBMG is just a random project created by the tattooed tech guy (one stripe for each of the two women he’s slept with, for a total of four stripes . . .) and I guess the reality is, this show has thrown so many wild curve balls at us that I simply don’t trust anything anymore. It could go either way, but I am pretty certain this “reveal” is a red herring. George learning any of this from Barb is just too far afield for me to believe.

I’m in the rabbit hole with Ron, folks. I’m excited about Wendy’s Carvers. I’m going to talk to Professor Robay to get that little guy a job. I’m stuffing my face with that sub sandwich from the place where they found the bugs. It’s so good! And I’m apologizing to Mike. That’s not how you treat friends, especially when it comes to Seth’s birthday party. He could have been the mailman!

There Is More To The Story

Whether or not Ron is right or this is Natalie trying to give him resolution so he doesn’t have a complete meltdown, there must be more to the story – even if it’s not related to Tecca. For one thing, there’s still the mystery of the chair itself. Not the chair company, mind you, but why a perfectly good office chair would quite literally burst apart when someone sat in it. Chairs break, sure, but an office chair like this breaking in such spectacular fashion is pretty unusual. Typically a chair starts to break down over time. This one must have been tampered with.

It could be that the Tecca chairs are all garbage and part of a scam, but no other Tecca chair has collapsed this way. Doris, thank goodness, is still alive. Which leads us back to Douglas and the rest of the Fisher Robay team. I don’t trust Douglas and I don’t trust Jeff and I think someone completely uninvolved with whatever is going on at Tecca sabotaged his chair to make him look like a fool out of some petty desire for payback or out of jealousy. We have one more episode to go. HBO has already renewed Season 2. Anything is possible.

I think there might be a conspiracy but I also think we’re clearly witnessing Ron’s mental breakdown. Both things can be true. Maybe the biggest question I have at this point is why everybody around Ron is so unhinged and weird. They say such bizarre things. The guy at the party who brought his own “pepper patty balls” in a ziploc bag and keeps sneaking them because he doesn’t like dinner while giving Ron knowing glances. The porn shop guy. The shirt salesman. Outside of his immediate family, everyone Ron encounters is genuinely bizarre and sometimes violently so. Ron is the lodestone drawing every weirdo around right to him and I’m afraid that he is at his limit.

What did you think of this episode? Any theories? Let me know on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.

Some choice bits of dialogue:

“They made me think I could wish things into the world.”

“Baby bit the rat box.”

“The rat poison could’ve come from the rat tooth to my bat bite.”

“Why do you use soap?” “It makes it look like waves!” “No it doesn’t!”

“Porn is in a really weird place right now.”

“Charity work? The soup kitchen?”

“They stack the turkey.”

“He was being mean to everybody. Especially the women, and some of the weaker men.”