It’s moving time for Pied Piper. Or is it? After surveying their new potential offices, Hooli, or more specifically, Gavin Belson, has blocked Pied Piper from using any public server space to host their site. With that sucker punch, Richard has to make a choice; buy office space (heh), or pay for Gilfoyle to set up their own servers to run Pied Piper out of Erlich’s garage. Of course an extended stay with Erlich is the last thing any of them, or their neighbors for that matte
r, actually want. Meanwhile, Richard has to deal with not wetting bed and a German sleep-talking Jared.
Where in the first season the show was about a band of awkward dweebs figuring out how to work for themselves, five episodes into the second season and everybody’s getting into the rhythm of the startup, while still being awkward dweebs. While the show’s retained a lot of its edge from the first season, it’s hard to see what direction it’s trying to slice in. Gavin watching a monkey with a new prosthetic limb immediately finding “joy” with his new appendage is good for a laugh, compared to the much sleeker ineptitude of his broken hologram conference call machine it seems like a much cruder joke that’s heading for the same punchline. It doesn’t have to be some seasons long foreshadowing like Game of Thrones, but in the season one finale where they’re all the in the hotel room getting into the math of how one could efficiently find “joy” for the Techcrunch audience… at least it built to the epiphany that saved Pied Piper.
I think after this episode, Jared is my favorite character. His ability to soak up everyone’s vitriol like an abuse sponge makes him endearing, and that he’s been living in the garage without anyone realizing speaks to the naive faith he’s willing to put in people who would treat him like a doormat. Big Head looking around confused as he constantly gets promoted for doing no work is still fun to watch. Of all the characters in the show, he seems the most aware of the absurdity happening around him (Richard probably would if he wasn’t so panicked all the time). And so he’s content to just build potato guns at the division of Hooli he’s somehow been put in charge of. And it was nice to see Gilfoyle actually putting himself out there for the company, even if it was only a little bit.
All in all, this was a fun episode. At moments it felt like some gags were chosen out of a hat, but that didn’t keep me from laughing. The absence of the annoying Russ was also refreshing. His character makes sense for the progression of the show, but he’s exhausting in larger doses. It seems like Pied Piper is starting to get the hang of being a cohesive group. All I hope is that we get to see more of the cyborg monkey. Wait, cyborg monkey… cyborg programmer… is it all actually building to a finale where the robots start taking over and only Pied Piper’s compression will be able to stop them?!
…Probably not.
Now here is a taste of Season Two’s Episode 6.
Find Episode # 4 here.
