One of the best parts of the first season of Silicon Valley was watching the main cast bounce off each other in the close quarters of the ‘incubator’ house-share; Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani) and Gilfoyle’s (Martin Starr) squabbles, Erlich trying to mentor Richard or Jared’s (Zach Woods) awkward interactions with any of them.
A prime example of the group’s great chemistry would be the Season One finale “Optimal Tip-to-Tip Efficiency”, which sees the whole team retreat to their hotel room during the TechCrunch Battlefield to regroup, only to ultimately, and hilariously, spend their time creating a complex algorithm for how many handjobs Erlich could give the audience.
Pied Piper extending out beyond the boundaries of the incubator definitely has many advantages, like adding new characters and bringing our protagonists into conflict with the rest of the valley, but in the first episode it also felt like we’d lost much of that internal interaction that defined the first season. Thankfully “Runaway Devaluation” brought some of that back with its B-plot, with Dinesh trying to get himself out of donating $5000 to his cousin’s Kickstarter campaign for an messaging app called ‘Bro’. “Exactly like the Yo app?” “Yes, but less original.”
Dinesh describing the situation to Gilfoyle and Jared, and attempting to explain how he was the cool cousin, is one of the episode’s highlights in both its verbal and physical comedy, and something that the show needs to remember to not lose as it expands its world. Nanjiani has probably his strongest episode of the show so far, nailing Dinesh’s undercurrent of pride, arrogance, deviousness and fear in the scenes where he tries to convince his cousin to give-up and then to defer any potential donators. “Fecal eclipse. Loses something in translation. We don’t have a word for it.”
The A-plot is a mirror of last week’s, with Pied Pipers ascension and the team’s confidence brought to an abrupt halt when Laurie tells Monica to inform the group that Raviga will not be funding them, due to the financial, political and legal risks of Gavin Belson’s lawsuit. “Who cares? We have a 3-foot stack of term sheets from the top VCs on the face of the planet” Erlich says. So he and Richard head off to meet the potential investors that they reverse-negged last week. The scenes of their triumphs become sites of defeat though, as all the investors turn them down due to the lawsuit and their behaviour last round, not least Erlich’s use of “some pretty assertive vaginal metaphors”.
“Runaway Devaluation” makes fun of useless apps and Kickstarter, and also takes aim at common underhand practices in the tech industry, like the freezing intimidation lawsuit and what the guys eventually refer to as a “brain-raping”. Jared, thinking he’s made a meaningful connection with a guy at a venture capital firm on ‘Bro’, sets up a meeting for the whole team to discuss Pied Piper. Richard, Dinesh and Gilfoyle are naively happy to be asked technical questions for once, but Erlich and Jared realise that they’re never going to be funded by these people, that they’re going to get them to explain their ideas, then steal them – “Like what happened to Yelp.”
Left with only the $50,000 from the Startup Battlefield success and told by his lawyer that he’ll need $2m for a legal team, Richard secretly takes a call from, and then meets with, Gavin Belson. Gavin offers to acquire Pied Piper before it’s killed by Hooli in a couple of months. He tells Richard that he and his company aren’t different, that if he goes it alone and gets big then he’ll just become the CEO of what other start-ups would see as another “soulless corporation”. Belson hands Richard the terms and we wait for the inspirational rejection speech. But Mike Judge has left one of his best jokes until last – Richard’s interrupted by a mariachi band and we’re left with a cliffhanger while the two sit awkwardly across from each other, serenaded as the credits roll.
Silicon Valley air Wednesday nights on Foxtel’s The Comedy Channel.
