Carl Bardolph saw Tom Ruffage as a collectible.
The Audacity’s most human adult character, Tom had needs, desires, and flaws that he couldn’t wave away with the signing of a check. He had served his country, but his country didn’t serve him back, and in his attempt to restore a little dignity to his fellow military veterans, he was sent off on one final assignment, for a fight that was much more personal, against an enemy far more formidable than any he’d faced in the theatre of war. Playing ping-pong on his own in “Foundering,” it looks like he’s found the strength and purpose to accomplish his mission—and to accurately mimic the appearance and behavior of his adversary, the Silicon Valley lone wolf.
But the real predators in Palo Alto could sniff out his weaknesses. To them, he was just another asset whose value could be extracted and exploited. And when they’d taken it all out, he could be discarded.
At the beginning of “Granfalloon,” Tom is Carl’s latest trophy, and a bit of borrowed authenticity for the Bardolph estate’s artificial World War I trenches. But when he shows a little spine and points out how disgusting Carl’s romanticization and fetishization of war are, his worth plummets toward depletion. When Tom is gone, dead by suicide at the risky emotional climax of The Audacity’s first season, Carl mourns, but channels that mourning into his scale model of tank platoon leader Second Lieutenant Ruffage. Tom Ruffage is no longer a man—no he is a memento to be stored alongside the other artifacts of people whose sacrifice Carl reveres, but understands only in the abstract. As history. As information to commit to memory. As data.
“Grandalloon” sees Tom as more than that, though. Before the head fake of the Caltrain sequence—where there’s little to suggest that the show is about to kill off Jamison in such gruesome fashion, though you might jump to the conclusion that it’s Duncan’s car that stopped the train—I’d argue that The Audacity’s first season finale positions Tom as the show’s protagonist. He’s the first character to push back against Carl in a way that pierces the tech giant’s armor of self-regard and insulating wealth in any meaningful way. Rob Corddry spends the rest of his screen time as if that confrontation at Carl’s jolted him from a sleepwalk, affecting a a combination of indignation at the people he’s thrown his lot in with and the groggy confusion of someone who woke up in the middle of a dream and is having trouble distinguishing between fantasy and reality. The way-too-real pyrotechnics of the WWI reenactment set the stage for this sensation nicely, as does the hermetically sealed vibe of the scenes set at the simultaneously unfolding WatchCode Forum and Las Altas gala. And after his chance “What are you talking about? “ encounter with Jeffrey, and the conversation that clears up what Jeffrey is talking about—that Xander is being retooled and sold to the U.S. military as an AI companion who’ll preempt active-duty soldiers’ moral and ethical qualms—there’s a stark revelation. Tom’s the last of these people with a soul. And everybody else wants to rob his brothers and sisters in arms of their soul before they even have a chance for it to be tested.
The flipside of Tom’s “Granfalloon journey, as I see it, is in reiterating everything Carl, Duncan, and even Anushka are willing to destroy to retain their power, influence, and wealth. Anushka remains too thinly drawn for the betrayal of her supposed principles to really have an impact, but her offer of $5 million to start a foundation in Tom’s name—after she just raked in a prospective $1 billion for turning Xander into a military contractor—is pretty rich. Far more has been invested, and continues to be invested in the finale, in Duncan’s grandiose heel turn. His time onstage at WatchCode is full-on professional-wrestling theatrics; he renders Nana (Nena? The LED backdrop suggests I’ve been spelling her name wrong all along) into his “Mean Gene” Okerlund, standing mute alongside her leather-clad interviewee as he spouts off about PINATA at length and laps up the boos of the crowd. With nothing left to lose, Duncan tries to burn the whole valley down, and the magnetism of Billy Magnussen plus Duncan’s inflated loathsomeness manages to carry “Granfalloon” for a remarkably long time. A hybrid wrestling promo/TED Talk erupts in the middle of the episode, and it remains gripping the entire time.
It’s a shame about that telegraphed reveal, though. Duncan was bound to be humiliated on that stage—pride going before the fall, as Carl foreshadows at the top of the episode—but the Myxy data being brought up in an episode where Jamison’s suddenly has a larger role in the narrative… maybe it’s just me, but I could see the faint outline of where things were going, if not the exact destination: Hamish is Jamison’s biological father.
It’s an example of the finale’s fairly good use of season one’s dangling threads. I say fairly good because while the truth of Jamison’s paternity pays off Lili’s sorrowful visit to Hamish’s house in “Lamplighters” with minimal effort, “Granfalloon” also trips over itself to remind us that we learned where Hamish’s parents live in the same episode (via Gabe signing over part of his HyperGnosis stake to them). It’s an inadvertent illustration of what I feel like this episode is trying to say: That the feelings people express (like those Lucy Punch lets out in that basement bedroom) and the beliefs that they hold (like Tom believing that a fighter pilot’s sense of remorse isn’t a bug to be hotfixed mid-flight) tell a person’s story better than their browsing history and biometrics.
There’s a lot of other plot-heavy business getting recalled and wrapped up here, including Dr. Webb’s background, Lili’s hiring snafu, and JoAnne’s missing gun. There’s some impressive storytelling in all of that, but also some of the first season’s shortcomings: JoAnne’s arc never moved all that far from its starting point, and as much as that call from the FBI portends bigger problems to come in season two, the agent could just as easily be calling about the gun she owns, registered in her husband’s name, turning up at her son’s school. At least Gary’s meddling in the JoAnne-Duncan conflict provides some satisfying comic notes, like the angry slapping fit from JoAnne that we see playing out in closeup and wide shot at the gala. But at the end of the first season, it’s hard not to feel like Sarah Goldberg and the other women in the main cast got shortchanged.
There’s such a high degree of difficulty with a show like The Audacity. If it’s going to effectively skewer its targets in the tech industry, it has to let them act as outrageously and monstrously as they do in “Granfalloon”: reformatting a revolutionary mental-health development as an instrument of death (to borrow a phrase from Gary), holding their peers and customers hostage like Duncan does at WatchCode, or Carl swiping a dollar bill out of the tip jar at the restaurant he owns—possibly putting it to the nefarious ends Duncan just proposed to him. Yet The Audacity also wants us to remember that humans still walk among these self-proclaimed gods. Xander may never interact with his intended audience, but Tess’ response to seeing a dejected, Stanford-rejected Jamison shuffling toward the train tracks suggests he never had to. The rot in this place is widespread, but some remain untouched by it. Showing this in such a touching, satisfying fashion is a mark in The Audacity’s favor.
This first season had its faults, but there’s enough that works—the jokes, the world-building, the confidence in its voice and critiques—to suggest that the show could level up in season two. (The same thing happened to the two shows whose DNA would show up in The Audacity’s Myxy results, Succession and Halt And Catch Fire.) The attempts to find shades of gray within a black-and-white satirical outlook are admirable, and all over “Granfalloon”: After talking Duncan to his villainous extreme, the show offers gutting evidence that he still has a heart, and it can be broken. It is possible to pull off something that tender within a story this committed to comedic irony; the author who gave the finale its name—a term for “a proud and meaningless collection of human beings” Kurt Vonnegut coined in Cat’s Cradle—did it all the time. The tragedy of Tom Ruffage isn’t exactly in Vonnegut’s league, but suggesting that it could be is just one of the many ways The Audacity earns its title in season one.
Stray observation
- • Renaming Xander to Xandar isn’t exactly a Torment Nexus situation, though there is a G.I. Joe villain with the phonetically similar name Zandar.
- • I’m really glad that Orson so quickly disabuses Gary of the notion that JoAnne and Duncan are sleeping together. Drawing stepfather and stepson deeper into shared secrets is a good move on the show’s part—Paul Adelstein and Everett Blunck make an amusing odd couple.
- • The Audacity not really knowing what to do with Harper gets turned into a self-aware joke in the finale, with Duncan forgetting their last name onstage.
- • Lucy Punch didn’t always get the best material this season, but she does let off a couple of withering bangers in “Granfalloon”: First Lili says of her daughter “She’s a genuinely mid person.” Later, after accepting a spot of coffee and comfort from Thelma, she takes a big swig and mutters “That is oat. I said cashew” to herself.
- • Lili is also the recipient of the finale’s best visual gag. Mere minutes after the Park-Hoffsteader marriage suffers a fatal blow, she has to stand next to a cake in the shape of the Las Altas stadium, with its new name—after Lili ponies up the money Pippa Tang is no longer donating—written in icing: Hoffsteader Park.
- • Almost as funny: Duncan, stewing at Hamish’s house, pulling his phone out only to realize that he’s not going to get any reception.
- • That does it for The A.V. Club’s coverage of The Audacity’s first season. How do y’all feel about how the season wrapped up? Thanks for reading and commenting along; see you again sometime in the future for The Audacity 2.0!
Erik Adams is The A.V. Club‘s senior TV editor.
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