“Chair Company” recap: Ron’s dark story

Until this moment in Al-Kursi Companythe show didn’t touch much on the backstory. We know the basics of Ron’s ideal home life, but I didn’t expect to see any flashbacks. It just didn’t feel like that kind of show to me – perhaps because every episode so far has placed bits of characterization within weird digressions and silly gags as much as the actual ongoing plot.

But “Bahdel Harmon’s (Disputed) Birthplace” is the strongest episode yet — and arguably the first to truly prioritize the study of Ron Trosper’s central character — and the backstory is a big part of that. Script credit by the former SNL Co-lead author W The other two Sarah Schneider, co-author, puts the flashbacks to good use and delivers ultimate closure.

After the first of the three dips into the past (more on that later), we continue with Ron who is still understandably horrified by the security camera footage of the masked man in his backyard and lamenting the drunken voicemail he and Mike left at Tecca. He still continues to investigate, perhaps closer than ever to discovering the real truth at the heart of Tika’s conspiracy (if there really is something out there).

This time, Ron was less focused on Red Ball Global than the chairs themselves. They were sold out on Tecca’s website, so he decided to steal one from the office and disassemble it. He initially asks the janitor for help, but cancels the mission when his co-workers walk out to the beignet truck. However, by the end of the episode, Mike had successfully moved the chair to Ron’s garage. And there’s another strong lead from Steven Drewko, who appears to have tracked down RBGM CFO Ken Tucker himself. This provides a slight cliffhanger next week.

This is just a small part of what is happening. This increases his paranoia even more than usual, putting Ron in a difficult situation once again with a series of strange and possibly related annoyances. Most specific in this episode are the multiple instances of stolen identity, if you can call them that. First, Ron wakes up to a visit from a stranger who has supposedly arranged to buy an old set of Beatles figures from him verklempt When Ron has nothing for him.

But the biggest problem is that someone provided his name, phone number and photo to multiple modeling agencies. Now he hears from them one by one, and knows he couldn’t have a career in modeling even if he wanted to. (The first agent says his face is “a little extreme.”) In one case, the agency chose the titular name “Bahled Harmon” instead, sending Ron into a brief jealousy spiral.

This is clearly an unnecessary distraction at work, especially when Jeff confronts him about another fake email, one that “aggressively” requests a pay raise. (This time, Ron doesn’t seem to have the strength to fight back and say he’s a fraud, probably because… He is Interested in a pay raise?) And that’s not the only work-related stressor in this episode. There’s also Amanda’s perennial problem: HR found a photo of Ron with his arm around her in high school, which supposedly contradicts his previous comments about their dynamic. As he explains to the outside observer, Dr. Stevens, Amanda was foolish at the time and her mother was working downstairs and “she came out of that little door in the hall all dirty to give Amanda her lunch. She worked the pipes or something.”

There are also other, more serious sources of tension, such as the fact that Douglas doesn’t show up for work – likely because he’s ashamed of his behavior at the bug party. However, in Ron’s mind, Tika may have killed Douglas after Ron used his name in the county clerk’s office. As usual, the true explanation is neither the expected version of events nor Ron’s worst-case scenario. It turns out that Douglas was stuck under a fallen refrigerator for two days, and Louis rescued him by delivering a sandwich (at Ron’s panicked request). He even bathed him in front of the paramedics receipt. how Which For a good person, Ron?

Then, the sound of police sirens is immediately heard outside Ron’s house when he arrives home. we He knows Maybe there’s nothing really wrong despite all the flashing lights and cops standing around — the show has taught us how to watch it at this point — but Ron’s horrified reactions seem pretty justified this time around. And again, the truth is neither what we expected nor what we imagined (“Barb’s throat was torn across the table”): the cops are only here to collect the grill that the con man offered to donate to the station.

That visit from the cops was the final straw for Ron, who immediately pulled the trigger to get his family out. In practice, this just means having Mike’s friend (“the really bad guy,” he makes sure to mention) faking a bug infestation while dragging Barb and Seth to stay with Natalie and Tara in his future daughter-in-law’s guest room. With everyone under one roof, the previous glimpses of backstory are starting to pay off.

Let’s take a moment to talk about the first two flashbacks, which deal with Ron and Barb’s parallel career paths. Six years ago, Barb had the idea of ​​starting her own business selling stylish breast pumps, and Ron decided to join in by going into business on his own as well. But while it immediately outperformed, he struggled to find investors for his pocket rounds. He recounts one particularly disastrous investor meeting — and by “disastrous” I mean “manslaughter.” He took one of the men out onto the trails and sped to impress him, then crashed into a tree trunk that he thought the Jeep could comfortably clear. The man hit his head hard on the windshield and stopped talking, most likely having a concussion, so Ron drove him to his hotel to sleep.

This is honestly a crazy, character-defining confession, and one that may not come up again for the rest of the show. But Ron’s reactions are clear. He wanted to do something good, to provide a way for soldiers to live on the edge a little during peacetime, but investors are more interested in VR’s hackneyed potential. However, he cannot give up. In his quest to achieve his lofty goals — or more accurately, in order to keep up with Barb’s success and avoid returning to Fisher Robay with his tail between his legs — he will continue to invest his time and money. Of course, we know that Ron an act Return to work eventually when the pocket rounds don’t work.

Back in the present, Ron checks in with Natalie about her engagement, and is concerned about the way Tara is ignoring her artistic passion and, worse, forcing her to add olives to everything. Here the scenario draws an interesting generational parallel: Ron says he doesn’t want his daughter to be “brought in” to support Tara, and Natalie points out that he does with Barb. But Ron doesn’t think he’s taking a secondary role in his career, or at least he doesn’t want to. The idea seems neutered. In retrospect, this insecurity makes his criticism of Tara seem like a complete projection, even if he had a valid point.

So Ron does something risky to prove how much he’s doing with his life: he tells Natalie the truth about the conspiracy he’s investigating. In his explanation, he goes deeper than we realized, filling in an unseen scene of him dissecting a Tecca chair. Apparently, the chair was missing its attachment, a lever made in Hungary in the same shape and size as sticks of an opioid called Thebaine. He is now delusionally confident that Brucell Pharma (a company with Ken Tucker on its board) is smuggling Thebaine into the country using Tecca as a front.

But Natalie doesn’t react by calling him crazy like you might expect. Instead, she offers unequivocal support, saying, “I love you, I trust you, and I got you.” It’s a nice subversion at the moment, and I’ll admit I was impressed by the extent of it Ron He was touched. But when Barb leaves a business dinner to meet Dryko, Natalie tracks his location on her phone, and is clearly concerned. And the episode’s final flashback reshapes our understanding of what we’ve just witnessed. At the height of Ron’s denial of the failure of the Jeep Tours, he completely disconnects from reality, forcing Barb and the children to micromanage him and play with him until he lets go. “He’ll grow out of it,” Barb reassures teenage Natalie as she watches Ron mutter to himself in the garage. “All we can do is tell him we love him, we trust him, and we got him.”

Those closing moments reframe our understanding of this man, but also the investigation around which the entire show is centered — and yet they fit perfectly with what we’ve seen so far. This isn’t the first time Ron has been obsessed, and it may not be the last. I also think about whether Al-Kursi Company It’s just gone from good to great, and I’m afraid things are going to get dark.

• Hats off to Aaron Shimberg (who directed the excellent film A different man), which captures those final emotional moments in sickening close-up.

• It was very difficult for me to not just include every funny or weird moment in this summary, but that’s the purpose of this section! I’ll start by saying that I love the way Ron writes down random key phrases and clues in a spreadsheet.

• One of Ron’s colleagues is obsessed with how Jeff’s treatment of the office might be: “I’m just really worried.”

• Tim Robinson’s over-the-top “this is really weird” line is probably my biggest laugh in this episode inexplicably. The way he says, “What’s that guy that hit me?” He is also great.

• I’m not sure how Ron knew the spelling of the name “Bahld” when he Googled it.

• It turns out that the yearbook photo found by HR was after the curtain closed, rendering Ron’s gesture of affection for Amanda meaningless. like if He was messing around with the girl playing the beggar.

• A short, sweet hallucination sequence with eyelid-squeezing goggle patterns that Ron wears while sleeping.

• “I found this item in your underwear drawer. It was all tangled up in your tiniest pair of panties.”

• “It stinks.” “It’s not smelly. It just smells like a burger. That’s good.”