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| ‘Silicon Valley’ Season 3, Episode 5: The Scrappy Innovator | ‘Silicon Valley’ Season 3, Episode 5: The Scrappy Innovator |
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| On a recent family trip to Epcot Center, we went on the park’s signature attraction, Spaceship Earth, an 18-story spherical wonder that looks like the ball set on the first hole tee on God’s celestial golf course. The first half of the ride is a gentle ascent along the benchmarks of human communication throughout the centuries, from cave drawings to the printing press. But the world has changed since 1982, the day Walt Disney’s “Future World” opened, and so the last stage has been updated to show the inside of a garage, where a shaggy, bearded man is crouched over a desk, building the first home computer. It’s a mystery whether the man is supposed to be Steve Wozniak or Steve Jobs, but the iconography is central to the legend of Silicon Valley: Innovators in a garage, with big ideas and minimal resources, poised to change the world. | On a recent family trip to Epcot Center, we went on the park’s signature attraction, Spaceship Earth, an 18-story spherical wonder that looks like the ball set on the first hole tee on God’s celestial golf course. The first half of the ride is a gentle ascent along the benchmarks of human communication throughout the centuries, from cave drawings to the printing press. But the world has changed since 1982, the day Walt Disney’s “Future World” opened, and so the last stage has been updated to show the inside of a garage, where a shaggy, bearded man is crouched over a desk, building the first home computer. It’s a mystery whether the man is supposed to be Steve Wozniak or Steve Jobs, but the iconography is central to the legend of Silicon Valley: Innovators in a garage, with big ideas and minimal resources, poised to change the world. |
| Erlich Bachman’s grimy “incubator” in “Silicon Valley” is just such a garage, even though his actual garage, as we learned last week, is too plagued by rodents for human occupation. Richard, Jared, Gilfoyle and Dinesh have spent a chunk of this season in a sleek tech playground, with its surprise waffles and bank of thousand-dollar computer monitors, but they were always destined to return to the garage. Richard wants to do for file compression what Mark Zuckerberg did for political conspiracists, farming simulation games and dubious promotional algorithms, but he can’t skip any steps. He and his compadres must continue to code amid the stale musk of Cheetos and bong water. | Erlich Bachman’s grimy “incubator” in “Silicon Valley” is just such a garage, even though his actual garage, as we learned last week, is too plagued by rodents for human occupation. Richard, Jared, Gilfoyle and Dinesh have spent a chunk of this season in a sleek tech playground, with its surprise waffles and bank of thousand-dollar computer monitors, but they were always destined to return to the garage. Richard wants to do for file compression what Mark Zuckerberg did for political conspiracists, farming simulation games and dubious promotional algorithms, but he can’t skip any steps. He and his compadres must continue to code amid the stale musk of Cheetos and bong water. |
| The lingering question about Richard, however, is whether he’ll ever leave the garage. On two separate occasions, he’s been told that Pied Piper is too valuable for him to determine its future: Once when Laurie Bream installed Jack Barker as C.E.O. and again when he overachieved on the storage box, nearly costing him a chance to make his compression platform. And Sunday night’s episode opens with a humiliating spectacle of Jack’s empty desk chair serving as interim C.E.O. while Laurie looks for a suitable replacement. (Though it should be noted, per Jared, that a Haworth desk chair is “like a spa day for the buttocks,” so there’s a point in its favor.) Though Gilfoyle and Dinesh are back on board after staging a small mutiny at the beginning of the season, even they admit their new chair-boss is “a lot sturdier” than Richard. | The lingering question about Richard, however, is whether he’ll ever leave the garage. On two separate occasions, he’s been told that Pied Piper is too valuable for him to determine its future: Once when Laurie Bream installed Jack Barker as C.E.O. and again when he overachieved on the storage box, nearly costing him a chance to make his compression platform. And Sunday night’s episode opens with a humiliating spectacle of Jack’s empty desk chair serving as interim C.E.O. while Laurie looks for a suitable replacement. (Though it should be noted, per Jared, that a Haworth desk chair is “like a spa day for the buttocks,” so there’s a point in its favor.) Though Gilfoyle and Dinesh are back on board after staging a small mutiny at the beginning of the season, even they admit their new chair-boss is “a lot sturdier” than Richard. |
| As it happens, Richard has shown enough “mettle,” as Laurie puts it, to earn back his job as C.E.O. of Pied Piper. He’s fought for the integrity of his product and won, surviving the likes of Russ Hanneman and Action Jack. Sunday, he kept Pied Piper from drowning in red ink by firing all noncore staff, selling $70,000 in office equipment, and retrenching at Erlich’s incubator. He may have a tendency to babble inarticulately under pressure (“Why is this thing people say?,” he retorts) and an even worse tendency to make catastrophically impulsive decisions, but it’s not just good code and good fortune that’s earned his company a $250 million valuation. He’s scrappy. | As it happens, Richard has shown enough “mettle,” as Laurie puts it, to earn back his job as C.E.O. of Pied Piper. He’s fought for the integrity of his product and won, surviving the likes of Russ Hanneman and Action Jack. Sunday, he kept Pied Piper from drowning in red ink by firing all noncore staff, selling $70,000 in office equipment, and retrenching at Erlich’s incubator. He may have a tendency to babble inarticulately under pressure (“Why is this thing people say?,” he retorts) and an even worse tendency to make catastrophically impulsive decisions, but it’s not just good code and good fortune that’s earned his company a $250 million valuation. He’s scrappy. |
| Still, “The Empty Chair” finds him snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, through the types of sitcom devices the show usually does well to avoid. Richard is furious over Laurie meeting publicly with potential C.E.O.s, despite her assurances that she has a plan. We learn later that the plan is to court highly qualified yet unavailable candidates and severely unqualified candidates (like Big Head) to make Richard’s reappointment look like the correct choice rather than the expedient one. That contrived misunderstanding between Richard and Laurie leads to a second contrived misunderstanding when Richard walks into the wrong conference room and winds up spilling invective to a tech blogger he assumes is Raviga’s P.R. person. He then has to clean up another self-inflicted disaster. | Still, “The Empty Chair” finds him snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, through the types of sitcom devices the show usually does well to avoid. Richard is furious over Laurie meeting publicly with potential C.E.O.s, despite her assurances that she has a plan. We learn later that the plan is to court highly qualified yet unavailable candidates and severely unqualified candidates (like Big Head) to make Richard’s reappointment look like the correct choice rather than the expedient one. That contrived misunderstanding between Richard and Laurie leads to a second contrived misunderstanding when Richard walks into the wrong conference room and winds up spilling invective to a tech blogger he assumes is Raviga’s P.R. person. He then has to clean up another self-inflicted disaster. |
| To an extent, that’s the “Silicon Valley” formula: Someone from the gang makes a huge mistake, usually Richard, then they scramble to clean it up. Dinesh losing his personal hard drive this week is a smaller mistake that the show handles more deftly than Richard’s loose talk, if only for the spectacle of Gilfoyle posing as a Geek Squad member to get it back. Gilfoyle’s commitment to the scheme is typically halfhearted. When asked why he’s not wearing the Geek Squad shirt, he deadpans, “I spilled coffee on it. I’m a neeeerd.” | To an extent, that’s the “Silicon Valley” formula: Someone from the gang makes a huge mistake, usually Richard, then they scramble to clean it up. Dinesh losing his personal hard drive this week is a smaller mistake that the show handles more deftly than Richard’s loose talk, if only for the spectacle of Gilfoyle posing as a Geek Squad member to get it back. Gilfoyle’s commitment to the scheme is typically halfhearted. When asked why he’s not wearing the Geek Squad shirt, he deadpans, “I spilled coffee on it. I’m a neeeerd.” |
| “The Empty Chair” ends with the pointed metaphor of Richard winning Jack’s C.E.O. chair, but struggling to fit in it comfortably. Thomas Middleditch, a master of physical comedy, gets bounced around by the hydraulics, fiddles awkwardly with the headrest and, finally, reclines into someone’s lap. The chair may be sturdy, but not with him fidgeting around in it. If he can’t sit straight and lead, he’ll never get out of the garage. | “The Empty Chair” ends with the pointed metaphor of Richard winning Jack’s C.E.O. chair, but struggling to fit in it comfortably. Thomas Middleditch, a master of physical comedy, gets bounced around by the hydraulics, fiddles awkwardly with the headrest and, finally, reclines into someone’s lap. The chair may be sturdy, but not with him fidgeting around in it. If he can’t sit straight and lead, he’ll never get out of the garage. |
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| • Bachman’s partnership with Big Head continues to develop on Bachman taking advantage of Big Head’s dim affability and Big Head inadvertently becoming a tougher negotiator than he seems. “I would hope that a handshake deal would be good enough for you,” Bachman says, “because we’re headed down a long road and that road must be paved with trust. Blind trust.” | |
| • As Laurie Bream, Suzanne Cryer has had her own formidable chair to fill after Christopher Evan Welch, who played the former Raviga head Peter Gregory, died between the first and second seasons. But Cryer and the writers keep getting better at mining Laurie’s specific social miscues for laughs. Her attempt to engage Monica in casual bar banter by bringing up H. L. Mencken is an excellent case in point. | • As Laurie Bream, Suzanne Cryer has had her own formidable chair to fill after Christopher Evan Welch, who played the former Raviga head Peter Gregory, died between the first and second seasons. But Cryer and the writers keep getting better at mining Laurie’s specific social miscues for laughs. Her attempt to engage Monica in casual bar banter by bringing up H. L. Mencken is an excellent case in point. |
| • Another wonderful Jared episode, from his excitement over running the estate sale (“The chairs are arranged in ascending order of lumbar support”) to the multiple windows into his sad past. When Dinesh mopes about his missing hard drive, Jared’s cheery optimism masks a deep hurt: “I found my retainer in a Dumpster. I found my biological father in the Ozarks. This should be no problem.” | • Another wonderful Jared episode, from his excitement over running the estate sale (“The chairs are arranged in ascending order of lumbar support”) to the multiple windows into his sad past. When Dinesh mopes about his missing hard drive, Jared’s cheery optimism masks a deep hurt: “I found my retainer in a Dumpster. I found my biological father in the Ozarks. This should be no problem.” |
| • Richard can’t even wear an executive jacket right. Asked how he looks after he gets dressed up for an interview, Bachman likens his loose black sport coat and white button-up to a ventriloquist dummy. | • Richard can’t even wear an executive jacket right. Asked how he looks after he gets dressed up for an interview, Bachman likens his loose black sport coat and white button-up to a ventriloquist dummy. |