‘Silicon Valley’ Returns to Satirical Form (TV REVIEW)

[rating=8.00] “Daily Active Users”

“Consider the possum…”

After what felt like a whole season of “I don’t even remember if I watched last week’s episode”, Silicon Valley has taken a very human turn in the last two episodes. If that seems like a common sense part of storytelling, well, you’d be right. However, considering the series is depicting a satirical/close to reality version of the actual Silicon Valley, there wasn’t always a need for that connection. That is, until we were subject to the same formula for each episode ending in a culmination of vague interest and belly laughs, followed by a nonchalant omission of the actual nuances of said story building to the collective memory of the viewers.

That being said, just as Gavin asks his board, consider the possum. An animal that is by all means harmless, feared by many, revered by few, and plays dead when in danger. Is Silicon Valley that possum? While we’ve finally reached a point where Pied Piper is launched and should by all means be doing well, we’re back in the failure side of the business world. The series had been lauded as brilliant and original by critics in the past, but now sits at a solid ‘B’ by most.  Is this where SV plays dead? With the series finale close on the horizon, one call only hope that next week’s season finale is the kicker to get the possum off of its back, and into the habit of being casually awesome.

Just as Monica feared, the interface of Pied Piper sucks. The target audience (for all intents and purposes, let’s say you and me) are not generally hip to what a compression platform really means. In fact, as we welcomed back the focus group and moderator (al a last season’s Hooli nightmare) Richard finally explained the platform in a way to makes sense. Was it just me or had they never really done that before? It was smart in that explaining exactly what’s happening on the platform gave both their test group and actual viewers a chance to cling onto what it is they actually do. However, due to Richard’s inability to relate to anyone with an IQ lower than 125 it becomes a labor of love, making it perfectly clear that unless they’re able to make their platform easy and relatable to the public then they have quite possibly reached the end of their journey.

An abundantly engrossing dynamic this week came about with Jared and Gilfoyle’s constant back and forth regarding Jared’s inability to lie. He lacks this due to the extreme moral clause his brain seems to have latched onto, and Gilfoyle is amusingly aware. The twist came with Jared’s loophole around the issue; to keep Richard from letting the company fall apart he buys them daily active users. There’s been some shady shit happen in the past with this group, but this definitely takes the cake. While Jared has the best intentions, he’s also making things worse. By essentially making the company look profitable he’s started a snowball effect they won’t be able to pull out of without turning to additional shady shit.

Gavin in the meantime calls back to the dudes’ quick rise in the tech world by bringing back Jack and “the box” (Jack in the Box? Curly fries– no, Tacos). What Richard and co refused to fall into, Gavin turns into an ace to get back into power at Hooli. It makes sense for him to go this route, and with Jack at the helm there’s bound to be some sort of revenge plot in the works. Realistically it will backfire in favor of the dudes as television tends to lean towards the protagonists when it comes to a final showdown, however it should be interesting to watch.

While I’ve complained about this season’s lack of originality on and off since episode two, I have to say it would be interesting to see the dudes completely fail. Calling on the human element they’ve brought into play lately, it would make sense to end the series with a disappointing failure and possible inkling of a future company that could once again change the tech industry.

Regardless of content issues or story ruts, the one thing SV can consistently deliver on are scenes that are gratuitously appealing to the eye. For instance, as Richard addresses the dudes on what they’re game plan should be to get folks to understand Pied Piper we see the daily active user board jump up and down. Hilarious in its inception, you can’t help but compare each of his ideas to the numbers ticking behind him. Similarly watching Dinesh and Gilfoyle toil from tech conferences to outside a strip mall is fantastic. By far though the final scene and credits sequence depicting a day in the life of one of Jared’s paid for DAU’s is stunning. As the credits roll over a dark warehouse of underpaid east Asian workers chain smoking and creating accounts/interacting with the Pied Piper platform on computers older than most of the audience is, we get a chilling look at both the industry and the utter devastation Pied Piper faces. If nothing else, these showrunners are killin’ it with their visual cues.

Next week promises intrigue and likely not much of a shake up as we get to the season finale. Ideally we’ll get a dick math/Richard running for his life-esque moment to tie us over into actually wanting to tune in next season. But for now let us try and remember that we did in fact watch this week’s episode so we don’t get stuck on a re-watch and miss out on some other key Sunday night programming.

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