What I’m Watching: Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley: Season 2, Episode 8 “White Hat/Black Hat” (B+)

Richard really is a master of saying too much, and he did marvelously in this installment, returning several times to talk to Seth and work himself up into being paranoid and thinking that their big launch was going to be sabotaged. That it was, of course, and the brilliance of it being Russ’ uber-expensive tequila bottle resting on the delete key and not some insane hack was just so perfectly fateful. The humor of Richard getting sworn at repeatedly in front of children isn’t what does it for me – it’s the more self-deprecating attempt by Richard to defend the impressive quality of their error by arguing that Endframe wouldn’t have been able to delete nearly as much data that really gets me. Similarly, Jian Yang having a celebratory smoke just as Erlich finished pitching a service that isolates and demonizes smokers was also fantastic. I like Monica as a character because she’s the smartest one in the room but hardly the least flawed, and she always seems to get herself into trouble around much dumber people. Gavin hiring Bannercheck to come back and take over Nucleus backfired immediately as he realized that absolutely nothing was actually being done, and that man really has a knack for getting angry, as evidenced most recently when he was told that he would now forever be associated and linked with Nucleus, unable to pawn off what is sure to be a dismal failure on any other unsuspecting sap. It’s just a shame we won’t see more of Patrick Fischler.