The last season premiere for Silicon Valley is here and with it are all the usual hijinks that seem to follow Richard (Thomas Middleditch) and his crew around. Called before Congress to testify on technology ethics, it doesn’t take long for Richard to fall in it. He promises not to harvest user data and to be on the up and up. Oh hey, guess who is harvesting user data? Ding, ding. Talk about falling short of promises quickly. Richard wants to punish the developer who did it, but it would hurt the company to fire him. Guilfoyle (Martin Starr) has the classic quote, “This is the cost of working with humans, Richard. They suck.” Indeed, they do. Richard finds his own way to punish the developer by harvesting his information against him, but even that ends up backfiring.
Jared (Zach Woods) is struggling to find his place in Pied Piper now. The growth of the company has created space between him and Richard. Literally, he gets moved across the office too. He loves Richard and working with him, but he doesn’t have that sense of belonging anymore. In his distracted state, he drives himself over to the old house, giving BigHead (John Brener) a surprise. I miss BigHead. He was always such a hilarious character. Maybe we’ll get more of him this season before it all ends. A girl can dream. But anyway, Jared bumps into Jian Yang (Jimmy O. Yang) too and meets a possible new project for himself. Someone who needs him far more than Richard does.
It wouldn’t be an episode of Silicon Valley without some kind of Guilfoyle and Dinesh (Kumail Nanjiani) beef or smackdown of some kind. Dinesh instant messages Guilfoyle quite often. Far more than he’s comfortable with and certainly doesn’t want to deal with, so he figures out a neat way around that. Guilfoyle programs a text bot of himself for Dinesh to annoy. The bot will respond in classic Guilfoyle fashion to any text. I was bummed how quickly they let Dinesh figure out it was a bot. I feel like that joke would have been way funnier dragged out a bit, but I distract myself. Dinesh wants his own text bot to give to people, particularly relatives. Guilfoyle gives it to him, and it ends up crashing the network. I will miss seeing these two deal with each other. Their old couple bickering and b*tching routine has truly made me so happy over the years.
On the far side, Gavin (Matt Ross) has to deal with being absorbed by Amazon. Though he retains some things, the rest is being sucked right up and right up quick. I’m curious to see how Gavin’s story will be tied up and what involvement he’ll have with Pied Piper and Richard. Ross has been incredible to watch over the years with Gavin’s evolution and changes. Six more episodes left before we bid adieu to our favorite tech nerds.
Find Silicon Valley Sunday nights at 10:00pm or whenever you want on HBONow/Go.
