What were doing here is amazing, Thomas Middleditchs Richard tells a group of coders in the superbly dark new season of Silicon Valley. We are building the worlds first truly open, truly free, decentralized Internet! Still a few bugs in the system, though. Mike Judges HBO comedy has taken a leap this season, as the Pied Piper crew takes a hard look into the dark web. Satirizing tech-bro start-up culture feels really different than it did a year ago, before Mark Zuckerberg got called in to sweat his way through a Senate enquiry about stealing Facebook users personal data, before the world found out about Cambridge Analyticas digital fingerprints on the 2016 election. The show couldnt have planned ahead for these headlines. (Or could it?) But now its a nastier, more paranoid show and all the funnier for it.
Silicon Valley has become a prescient satire about a world where smart-fridges are listening in on customers private lives and streaming their data to the cloud. Its a comedy where the tech guys have to keep remembering to hide from their own phones, lest they get spied on via emotional recognition protocol. Martin Starrs Gilfoyle used to be a fairly simple comic character; suddenly, hes turned into the heart of the series, both the resident surly asshole and the bitterly prickly sage who understands the apocalyptic business theyre in. As Gilfoyle frets at one point this season, A.I. is starting to operate on levels we dont even understand. Elon Musk himself gives humanity a 5% shot at surviving A.I. and he is a Walt Disney-level optimist.
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How did this software upgrade happen? Give T.J. Miller credit for radically improving the show by pressing the auto-destruct button on his career. Last year, the actor quit amid a host of bizarre rants, forcing the writers to find a way to kiss off his character Erlich. This was supposed to be the season the Pied Piper foursome Middleditchs Richard, Starrs Gilfoyle, Kumail Nanjianis Dinesh and Zach Woods Jared moved on while still making the incubator owner/muttonchopped venture capitalist the butt of their jokes. Erlichs nemesis Jian-Yang (Jimmy O. Yang) has gotten them thrown out of their house, via his app Hacker Hostel. They try to expand Pied Piper with partners like K-Hole Games, who make that hot video game Undead Sex Offender.
T.J. Miller, enjoyable as he was, isnt missed at all. His increasingly cartoonish asshattery came to make him seem vestigial and out of place the token lazy sod in a comedy about work addiction. Of course, in terms of whatta-douchebag subtext, he remains the gift that keeps on giving, the magic bag that never runs out of douche. Last week he made headlines when he got arrested for calling in a fake bomb threat on an Amtrak train. (Great this guy might end up single-handedly ruining train travel in America. What a dick.)
But with Erlich gone, Gilfoyle has finally come into his own, as the only guy whos a big enough misanthrope to appreciate what theyre doing. Hes hacked into Seppen Appliances, makers of the smart-fridge. When Gavin Belson (Matt Ross, whos also killing it this season) tips off the offended party about who did it, the company sues Pied Piper. As Jared says, Their complaint specifically cites sullying their smart-fridges with mime-simulated fellatio.' Seppen is horrified by this hack: Our customers invite us into their homes. The kitchen is the modern hearth. We cannot have that trust violated. But the hacking prank just exposed the level of data theft thats going on the smart fridge spies on any customer raiding the ice-box for a late-night leftover. As Martin Starr sneers, You thought a mime performing fellatio was bad? What happens when your customers find out that every single thing theyve ever said in front of their hearth has been recorded?
I really do love how Martin Starr has become the conscience of the show, by turning into the stereotypical kind of paranoid Gen X jerk who cant shut up about HAL 9000 when people talk to Alexa or Siri. Theyve been listening to us all this time, he fumes. All these devices are listening to us. In one excellent scene this season, he turns into a parody of The X-Files Lone Gunmen, ranting on the floor of his pad, cigarettes and coffee strewn all around. (All thats missing is the Meat Puppets t-shirt.) Hes got that mean gleam in his eye, whether hes brooding about the prospect of our A.I. robot overlords or bashing social media. Hes become the voice for the darkness behind the brave-new-world tech fantasies: the idea that the corporate cloud is data-fracking the private conversations we have in front of our TVs, toaster ovens, bread machines or smoke detectors.
Silicon Valley always seemed idealistic at heart these lovable underdogs chasing their Pied Piper start-up dream. But its taken a toll on them. Richard has gotten twitchier and sweatier, no longer able to control his temper. Dinesh is in a grim place this season, even when hes karaokeing Dont You Want Me. Even Jared, the voice of calm emotional reason, admits, The Internet as we know it is rife with identity theft and spam and hacking. These guys sincerely hope the brave new World Wide Web theyre building will be a better place than the old one but theyve got the fear and you can see it. It was a more innocent time when this show began a few years ago; now, the comedy has inevitably gotten closer to Black Mirror. Nothing can ease these guys anxiety not even mime fellatio.
Gilfoyle is still a total tool he sets up his computer to blast a Napalm Death song through the office whenever the price of Bitcoin drops below a certain level. But hes gone from an arrested-adolescent jerk to a prematurely middle-aged jerk, behind that crazier-than-ever beard. Its a logical step from Starrs Freaks and Geeks incarnation as the shy young Garry Shandling fan to his Party Down adulthood as the hard sci-fi guy who lectures porn stars about the difference between fantasy and science fiction. Hes always had that nasty edge here,from the beginning when he used to deadpan-bark things like Ive got a story why dont you choke on my balls? Now, finally, the rest of the show has caught up with him. Silicon Valley is asking a very timely question: In the not-so-distant future, will we all be Gilfoyles?