The Chair Company fans are comparing Mike to Brad Pitt's Fight Club role - speculations say it all might be inside Ron's head

Ron and Mike face off in The Chair Company as fans speculate whether Mike is a Fight Club-style hallucination (Image via HBO)
Ron and Mike face off in The Chair Company as fans speculate whether Mike is a Fight Club-style hallucination (Image via HBO)

The Chair Company Episode 6 basically shows that this office is one head injury away from surrealism. And according to fans, that might be exactly what’s happening. In a Reddit discussion for Episode 6 (titled "Happy Birthday, a friend"), one user summed up the mood of the episode with:

“Mike’s his Brad Pitt from Fight Club, now that’s something.”

Well, yeah, the math is math-ing.

Episode 6 throws itself face-first into chaos. Ron is already two TBIs deep and spends this chapter wandering through a workplace that feels like a fever dream. From explosions at construction sites to eye-vibration masks, the man is only getting closer to an MRI. So when fans suggest all of this might be happening inside Ron’s concussed noggin, we see the point.

This episode of The Chair Company also saw a guy who plopped a birthday cake on a pile of puke. Corporate America has been through a lot, but even HR couldn’t prepare for something like that, could they?


The Mike-as-Tyler Durden theory on The Chair Company

Okay, first, we need to be clear that The Chair Company fans are comparing Mike to Brad Pitt's famous character because of the weirdness of Ron’s interactions with him. Mike is objectively a good person, but he’ll also drop $110 on a Chocolate Kong for someone who barely tolerates him.

The surrealism hits when Ron starts interpreting normal moments as existential threats. The post-mask vision. The phone call voice said, "You gotta calm down." The construction-site break-in turns out to be a bunch of dudes playing with RC cars. This is the definition of what an unreliable narrator is.

Redditors are having a field day stitching it together, on the other hand. Was the birthday chaos real? Did the puke-cake saga unfold in the actual universe? Or is Ron hallucinating Mike as his spirit guide? Maybe he is the HR-safe version of Tyler Durden, who is pushing him toward rebellion?

RELATED: The Chair Company perfects "The Butterfly Effect"

Some moments (like Jeff’s Sedona vacation pictures, HR moving into the office like a squatter, paper clips drifting toward Miss Magnet) feel like Ron’s reality is glitching. The Kafkaesque tone makes the Tyler Durden theory likely.


How does The Chair Company hit the corporate nightmare nerve so perfectly?

Part of why this Fight Club theory has legs is because The Chair Company has an existential dread of being one meeting invite away from a breakdown!

Fans keep saying that the show nails the horrors of corporate communication. Now this includes stuff like bosses telling you someone "wants to talk to you this afternoon" with no context, the labyrinth of HR logic, the bizarre tasks from upper management, and the daily suffering no one knows how to fix.

Episode 6 sprinkles some weirdness on that anxiety. And when Ron insists, "I just wanna walk the present in. I wanna walk three feet," Reddit agreed we’ve all had episodes where the smallest task feels like an odyssey.

By the time the episode ends, fans are exhausted alongside him.


The Chair Company is streaming on HBO Max.

NEXT UP: Is Ron "just actually living in his own mind"?

Edited by Sohini Sengupta