This post discusses “Intellectual Property,” the May 7 episode of “Silicon Valley.”
I’ve written before about the limits of the idea that the best television shows are like novels. Episodes and seasons often don’t have flexible lengths that can be expanded or contracted to meet the needs of the story. Because the mark of a successful television show has long been that it runs indefinitely, it’s extraordinarily rare that the tenure of a show’s entire run will be known when it starts, allowing showrunners to construct an arc that neatly spans the full number of episodes available to them. And at the end of the day, it demeans what’s unique and thrilling about the television form to try to garner prestige for it by comparing it to an entirely different way of telling stories.
All of that complaining aside, I found “Intellectual Property” to be a tiny bit thrilling, not necessarily because it’s the best episode of “Silicon Valley” to air this year; the episode isn’t even totally focused on the big idea of the season. In fact, it’s a little bit diffuse, split between Dinesh’s (Kumail Nanjiani) date, Erlich’s (T.J. Miller) latest bloviating pitch, Monica’s (Amanda Crew) disastrous attempted bait-and-switch on Ed Chen (Tim Chiou), Big Head’s (Josh Brener) appointment as a guest lecturer at Stanford, Gavin Belson’s (Matt Ross) downfall at Hooli and Richard’s (Thomas Middleditch) frenetic work on his vision of a decentralized Internet.
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Despite these things, when the big plot trap sprang at the end of the episode, it felt like something “Silicon Valley” had been working to for a very long time.
Follow this authorAlyssa Rosenberg's opinionsThe series obviously had to recalibrate after Christopher Evan Welch, who played venture capitalist Peter Gregory, died between the first season and the second. The show generally rose to that challenge, though “Silicon Valley” has never developed Peter’s replacement at his firm, Laurie Bream (Suzanne Cryer), or any of the women on the series, with as much depth as the men. The moment that Richard learns that not only did Peter Gregory have the same dream for a decentralized Internet, which has been made possible by Richard’s compression algorithm, but also that Gavin put a patent on it to get Peter to focus on the projects that became Hooli, “Silicon Valley” completed this process. It has turned Richard into Peter and put him in a position where to achieve his dream, he has to mend Peter’s broken relationship with Gavin by proxy. The sight of Richard showing up at Gavin’s gates, seeking out his bitter rival at a moment of mutual professional despair, gave me a bit of a zing.
It was also a nice reminder that “Silicon Valley,” for all its savage humor, has a thread of optimism running through it. There’s essentially no one on the series who is presented as truly irredeemable. Aly and Jason (Aly Mawji and Brian Tichnell), the “brogrammers” from Hooli who were instructed to duplicate Richard’s algorithm, got beaten down by the system Richard escaped and were humanized for it. The irksome, profane billionaire Russ Hanneman (Chris Diamantopoulos) turned out to be the person who helped Richard figure out what he really wanted to do with his algorithm. Erlich is a pontificating, lightly racist joke in “Silicon Valley,” but his skills as a pitchman are genuinely valuable, and he has proved willing to sacrifice and make himself vulnerable to keep Pied Piper afloat.
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Gavin has been “Silicon Valley’s” biggest villain for more than three seasons, and as I wrote last week, it was immensely satisfying to see his myopia ultimately lead him to drive himself off a cliff. But he has always been a tragic figure as much as he is a malevolent one. Richard’s vision is an opportunity for Gavin to redeem himself of his vindictiveness* and to recover his reputation as a visionary. Whether he’s able to take it will be a huge test for the character. And whether Richard can work for him without adopting Gavin’s worst traits will be an interesting test of what “Silicon Valley” thinks about Richard as a person and the culture of the Valley as a whole.
*Gilfoyle’s (Martin Starr) joke that Dinesh might become “the first Pakistani man to be killed by a drone inside the United States” for giving up PiperChat to Gavin and putting him in a position to be fired was the great stand-out dark joke of this episode.
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