The Audacity may as well take place on a foreign planet sometimes—one where autonomous vehicles are just part of the scenery, and the residents speak a language indecipherable to most humans. But an episode like “Vanitas” can bring things back to Earth, showing that just as the tremors that begin in Silicon Valley wind up shaking the entire world, the reality the other 99.9% of us live in still shapes the one Duncan Park calls home.
And try as the Valley natives might to wall themselves off from the hoi polloi, people who weren’t born and raised in the shadow of the dot com bubble and the Web 2.0 gold rush continue to flock there. Not all of them by choice: “Vanitas” advances the storylines of The Audacity’s insiders, but it also gives a wider berth to the outsiders—more than any other episode to date. Through Dr. Webb, Orson, and Tom, we witness the seductive, destructive pull of living near all this power, money, and influence. And through JoAnne and Gary—relative outsiders who’ve been here much longer than the other three—we get a glimpse at the panic that sets in when even the teensiest taste of insiderdom is threatened.
Cleverly, this facet of the episode sets in in a space and within dynamics that are readily recognizable to the average viewer: a high school. The kids give their stomping ground over to the adults for a portion of “Vanitas,” and like so many aspects of contemporary American life (derogatory), their conflicts, jealousies, anxieties, and ruses feel right at home in the classrooms and hallways of Las Altas. Hot popular kids Duncan and Anushka have a quickie in an unused classroom, not knowing that the quiet loner from the robotics team, Martin, is spying on them. When JoAnne gives Duncan the heads up about an imminent ouster at the AI firm Smote, she may as well pass it to him on a folded-up piece of paper. And everyone’s curious and confused about what the new kid, Dr. Webb, did at her old school.
Las Altas’ principal is the one character who really carries this material with her through the end of the episode. Her trip to Napa to visit a mega-donor with Lili morphs—over the course of a canceled appointment, a trip to the spa, and a boozy dinner—into a slumber party between burgeoning BFFs. (Complete with prank calls!) This in spite of Lili providing an explanation for that puzzled look Dr. Webb gave to her introduction in the premiere, as well as her inability to recall some Harvard haunts earlier in “Vanitas.” Turns out Mrs. Park-Hoffsteader meant to offer the Las Altas principal job to a different Black, female educator who spoke at that Aspen conference.
That racist oopsie could’ve been cause for Dr. Webb to say, “Thanks, but no thanks,” but it’s more complicated than that. Her daughter’s enrolled at Las Altas, and that gives her a big leg up for her future admission to Stanford. And so Dr. Webb’s going to have to roll Lili’s drunken mistake into a big fib about not earning all of her degrees at the (highly respected, if not as prestigious) University Of Wisconsin. And to the advantage of The Audacity’s growing web of ruinous secrets, it gives each of them leverage over their newfound friend.
And even with all the subterfuge and potential for backstabbing this storyline creates, it is a refreshing change of pace to watch Rukiya Bernard and Lucy Punch yuk it up over that dinner while their characters bond over shared experiences that are only tangentially related to tech. It just goes to show you that even the most genuine connections in this world are slightly compromised; it’s also a sign of the Valley sinking its claws into Dr. Webb. The pampering, the free-flowing wine, the camaraderie—that all makes up for hiding her true credentials (which, again, are sterling!) and putting up with pushy parents like Anushka, right? Or, at least, that’s plausibly something that a character in a satire like The Audacity would try to justify to themselves.
Likewise, whatever morally gray decisions JoAnne will have to make to find the $7 million she needs to buy her home from her late landlord’s daughter. There’s just so much packed into this particular turn: It cranks up the heat on JoAnne, who’s fielding voice mails from Duncan at all hours of the night and just lost a major client after missing Carl’s session last week. (So the “Orson’s stool sample” subplot was worth something in the end.) It also adds a new wrinkle to the themes expressed in Dr. Webb’s storyline, showing the outcome and consequences of giving oneself over too fully to the Silicon Valley fantasy. (And Duncan’s actions with Gnodin this week really emphasize the importance of fantasy and magical thinking to these people.)
But I think it’s some good clockwork plotting, too. The landlord’s death isn’t an outcome of JoAnne’s insider trading and testy arrangement with Duncan, but it is a complication that could drive her deeper into her deal with the devil. And when the secrets she’s feeding him are being passed off as “information with insight” generated by Gnodin (a delicious twisting of JoAnne’s “information isn’t insight” line), it just entwines their fates further. On top of all that: Somebody has to find a way to pay for Orson’s gut tincture once that dubious four-figure bill comes through.
Here’s hoping the remedy works, because I think the show has gone as far as it can with “has irritable bowels and is painfully shy” as the defining traits of Orson’s character and arc. It at least seems like it’s ready to give Everett Blunck a little more to do: In another fine example of one storyline’s progression impacting another’s, Duncan swiping his missing tungsten cube from the Las Altas trophy case during parent-teacher night lends new urgency to the indirect flirtation between Orson and Tess. Sure, they’re still not speaking to one another yet—outside of Thailey Roberge’s funny reading of “Hey, are you like Gary Jr.?” after Tess spots Orson on the way out of her session—but they’ve established their own style of conversation. It’s hard to call anything on The Audacity “sweet,” but the image of Gary’s pilfered Freud bust on display in the hallway, coupled with the music of The Divine Comedy, is touching in a cockeyed way that suits the show.
That’s where Orson’s medical issues ring false for me. Something as ambitious as The Audacity ought to temper its highbrow humor with some lowbrow gags, but the kid getting so nervous about being confronted by his crush that he shits his pants? It’s a shade of juvenile that clashes with the rest of the show—even with all the emotionally stunted giant babies with money running around. Ditto the office-supply fight club where Duncan tracks down Carl and bad-news Smote CEO Lee Orlando, who JoAnne conveniently forgot to mention is a Bardolph protege. (No information nor insight going into that Gnodin demo.) We’re in a heightened reality here, but computer mouse nunchucks and a wrist rest cudgel temporarily take “Vanitas” to cartoonish heights that aren’t particularly funny or keeping in the more grounded spirit of the world that’s been built around them.
Maybe it’s a signal of absurd escalations on the horizon; Anushka contending with the tubing and wiring choking the Bhattachera-Phister garage is a gag rooted in similar silliness. But that one lands because it’s one of the show’s most levelheaded characters dealing with the bizarre inconveniences of her life. That’s even more pronounced in Tom’s big scene this week, where he righteously rejects Duncan’s data-mining plans for the VA contract. It’s been a rough extended stay for the deputy undersecretary, but this naked display of cynicism from the guy who has a playground slide in his office is the final straw. Jeffrey hangs back in a futile effort to salvage the deal, but Tom’s silent exit from Hypergnosis HQ says it all. He’s sincere in his desire to help people. He can’t do that beside Duncan, someone who’s trying to disprove the test results that labeled him an empathetic person.
This is a Bizarro World, its topsy-turvy rules, law, and etiquette entirely flummoxing to everyday people like Tom. A government contract isn’t a way to create change—it’s a way to make money turn into more money. A grieving daughter’s top priority is selling a house out from under its current residents. Dishonesty is rewarded at every turn, whether it’s Duncan passing off the Orlando gossip he got from JoAnne as something Gnodin predicted, or it’s Dr. Webb lying about where she went to school.
The cruel irony of “Vanitas” is that, when you lay it all out like that, the world of The Audacity doesn’t feel all that dissimilar to our own.
Stray observations
- • A little bit more on Duncan’s Gnodin deception: It’s some clever art-imitating-life material. Just consider how many supposedly autonomous or AI-assisted innovations have turned out to be propped up by human input: Contractors feeding a Waymo the information it needs to stay on the road or remotely reviewing purchases made with Amazon’s checkout-disrupting, grab-and-go Just Walk Out technology.
- • Duncan mistakes a bit of therapy wisdom from JoAnne for advice on workplace productivity: “Toxic men succeed because the fear they create produces…” “What? What what what?”
- • The dirt Gnodin has on Jamison isn’t useful to Duncan: “Looks like she used to torrent Sailor Moon.” “I don’t want to know about sex stuff.”
- • “It’s Schroeder’s cat.” “It’s Schrodinger’s, you dunce.” Now, to be fair to Duncan, Charles Schulz was a longtime resident of the Bay Area.
- • Maybe Anushka’s real beef with Xander is that he pronounces her name like “anus hookah.”
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