The Chair Company recap, Episode 5: 'I won. Zoom in.'
Things get REALLY weird — which, for this show, is saying something
A review of this week's The Chair Company, "I won. Zoom in." — with spoilers — coming up just as soon as I pay for the coke with Scrooge money...
Alan Sepinwall
Through its first four episodes, The Chair Company gracefully walked the borderline between Robinson and Kanin's usual lunacy and genuine emotions from characters who live in something resembling the real world. With this fifth installment, they jump into Crazytown with abandon, and don't look back. There are a few brief scenes involving Ron's family and and coworkers that are mostly normally, but almost every scene operates on varying degrees of cartoon logic. And even those family and work moments are a lot weirder than they could be. Douglas, back at work but temporarily using a wheelchair, suggests the most difficult part of his near-death ordeal was that he could only eat whatever was within reach from the freezer: "I was able to survive, even though I couldn't pick." Like so many other Robinson/Kanin characters, he is fixated on entirely the wrong thing, and everyone else just goes with it.
Mostly, though, "I won. Zoom in." is so strange, so full of jaw-dropping dialogue and imagery, that it feels like a kind of Dayenu episode(*) for sickos.
