What did he get out of it? *Spoilers*

Follow up, what did he get out of helping the tech kid at the end? By helping him get the hotel passed, he loses his shop, right?

My understanding was that he got a low rent agreement on the shop from her dad for 10 years in return for stepping up and taking the charge. Wifey was just at the beginning of her career and this would have ended it for her, thus Chip taking the heat was the best option for the couple at that time (moneywise).

The stool is a common metaphor in recovery circles, and is often represented by a triangle in a circle. Unity, Recovery, Service (URS) aka U R Sick, and Honesty, Open-mindedness, and Willingness (HOW) and probably a slew of others I've forgotten. I was thinking that his "new type of stool" was going to be symbolic in some way and maybe it was just something they didn't get around to (or had to drop) in the storyline. I remember when My Name is Earl came out, and I always had the feeling that it was originally going to be a man in recovery making amends for his past transgressions, but then a studio suit got involved and changed it to a lost lottery ticket. The problem with recovery-based shows is that if done well and accurately, they have a limited audience which gets the jokes, so they water it down to make it more accessible, but then it becomes indistinguishable from everything else. I did like the "you have a platitude problem" line instead of you have an attitude problem. That was actually new to me.

I think my percentage of Chimp DNA is higher than others. Cleaver Greene

I'm hoping the second season goes into that more. Maybe it's all up in the air right now to add suspense and keep people watching? I would love to hear more of the backstory/reasoning for all that, I think they could go somewhere really interesting with it...

My guess is we'll find out later what the emotional significance of the stool shop is to Chip.

I think he either loved his wife so much that he took the fall to "save" her life, or she was the dominant one in the relationship.

Honestly, after watching Chip's reaction to Dennis calling him about about what the "truth" is, I feel like Chip's truth is some combination of the truths Tilly and Jerry have told him and has no real knowledge of what actually happened to him. So I think that has kind of put Chip into a place of having no choice but to follow the piper so to speak.

And that had worked well for all of them until people started to throw wrenches into their delicate system. Which is why the agent immediately shows up as soon as Chip starts to question things. Just my thought. But I think there's more to what happened to Chip that we've been told.