What I’m Watching: Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley: Season 5, Episode 6 “Artificial Emotional Intelligence” (B+)

I find the rivalry between Dinesh and Gilfoyle to be more than a little tiring sometimes, and it was refreshing to see someone else point out the amount of time that they both waste on feuding with each other, resulting in them teaming up to try to get him fired. I think it’s fair to presume that, though we’ll never know, Dinesh’s code likely had fewer errors simply because it took him hours longer to complete it. I suspected that Laurie was manipulating Richard when she threw up and inspired him to be compassionate towards her, but she just doesn’t have any emotions in the first place, and as a result had no issue selling the gift he had given her when she saw it as the most logical business decision. Fiona coming back to see Richard was an intriguing development, and Jared found her to be quite the companion, but Laurie dismembered her for parts rather brutally without a second thought. Gavin going to China and finding it to be a far less ruthless and unkind place than he remembered set him up perfectly to follow a man with a Pied Piper shirt back to Jian Yang’s setup. Leave it to the treacherous Jian Yang to have accidentally figured out a way around Richard’s patent which Gavin tried to usurp from him, only to be fantastically undercut by the suspiciously polite Yao, played by Tzi Ma, a familiar face from “The Man in the High Castle,” “Hell on Wheels,” and “24,” who is sure to be just the latest obstacle in Gavin’s attempts at world domination.