“Lamplighters” makes an interesting companion to last week’s “Vanitas.” After showing off the rotting floorboards and cracked foundation of Silicon Valley, The Audacity daydreams about skipping town and getting away from it all. It just requires its main character to lose everything first.
Well, not quite everything: Duncan’s marriage is still intact when he beats feet to Hamish’s off-the-grid glass-and-steel bunker. But like his control of HyperGnosis, the Park-Hoffsteader union doesn’t survive “Lamplighters”—itself a victim of someone trying to find a way out, i.e., Lili, who is reeling from the humiliation of Nana’s reporting on Duncan, a dismissal from the Las Altas board, and her husband’s week-long disappearing act. In between these two bits of bad news for The Man With The Punchable Face (and those aren’t my words this time—they’re Carl’s), The Audacity entertains the fantasy of escape through the extremely privileged example of Gabe’s island stronghold, JoAnne and Gary’s dream of settling among the garlic fields of Gilroy, and Anushka’s path out from under Big Tim’s thumb and into the CEO chair that’s still warm from Duncan melting down in it.
Having illuminated several reasons why its characters might want to pull up stakes in “Vanitas,” The Audacity is free to use “Lamplighters” to show why they can’t. It’s an eclectic variety appropriate to the ensemble nature of the show—some plot-based, some character-based. The one that works best for me arises in the driveway of the farmhouse that won’t become the new home base for JoAnne and Gary’s practices: With a feeling that he’s finally getting his young life under control in Palo Alto, Orson can’t stomach (figuratively or anatomically) moving out to the sticks. And it doesn’t take any of the strategies he’s picked up from the looksmaxxing internet weirdos feeding him garbage about how to manipulate “female humans”—he just has to remind his mom that he overheard some pretty damning talk about her investment portfolio. And just like that, the dream of picking apples and watching the sunset over fields of wildflowers is dead.
There is the teensiest trace of Surf Dracula syndrome in this and the later scene between JoAnne and Duncan. For three episodes and change, The Audacity has been stringing the insider-trading, JoAnne-as-Wall-Street-whisperer thread along, hesitating to make too much out of the fragile, SEC-flouting alliance she made with Duncan. And while I’m not exactly ready to declare that the vampires are finally hanging ten after Duncan presents JoAnne with (some of) the money he made by betting Jamison’s college fund on Smote’s stock market valleys and peaks, what once appeared to be The Audacity’s core relationship—only for it to retreat into the background—now feels a little more central to the story. And it’s nice to get a line like, “I should have never blackmailed you. It should have always been a bribe. Will you be my bribe?” out of it, too.
The money solves JoAnne’s most pressing problem, and it also acts as a lure back into the belly of the beast. It’s nothing new for the show, but even a dopamine-detoxing Colonel Kurtz like Gabe (Randall Park) is powerless to resist the call of the Valley. The third Fah-Fah founder’s digs mark a new escalation in The Audacity’s game of ludicrous real estate holdings: When we’re dealing with armed guards and a brutalist fortress reachable only by helicopter, we can take the “looks like” out of “looks like a supervillain’s lair.” The character trades well off of Parks’ innate affability, burying the clean-cut look of that persona in patchy facial hair and grubby promo Ts. Pronouncements about societal collapse, and perineum sunning sound all the stranger in the cheery voice that once sold Wild West steak specials to the citizens of Orlando on Fresh Off The Boat.
As weird as the proprietor of Gamblesluts (mind the pluralization: “Gambleslut is an accusation. Sluts is an invitation.”) has grown in isolation, he’s not immune to spite, either. Jonathan Glatzer and Charlotte Ahlin’s “Lamplighter” script is dotted with little background details (JoAnne’s tour of a Palo Alto fixer-upper reveals that Gary was once her instructor, for example), none more devastating than Duncan costing Gabe and Hamish beaucoup bucks over his refusal to cash out of Fah-Fah. And so he’s happy to sell his HyperGnosis stake to aid Carl’s campaign against Duncan, just as Anushka is willing to take the CEO offer to stick it to Cupertino.
The quiet of that latter scene and the way it’s staged is intriguing to me. It’s not quite the unexpected explosion of pathos that occurs when Lili enters Hamish’s untouched basement bedroom, but Carl and Anushka sidling up side-by-side against that shared desk is still shot through with a sort of sympathy and understanding. There’s an intimation of the billionaire and the rising exec being on equal footing in that moment, but the whole thing is really Carl demonstrating his power: The way he uses it to make Anushka feel flattered is just a variation on how he humiliates Duncan at the beginning of the episode. (Both acts even require little flourishes of hypeman backup from his right hand man, Stan). In reality, spite is the only thing Carl and Anushka share in that moment.
The symphony of the stuff Carl conducts at the beginning of the episode accelerates the story in ways that are a little hard to buy—could Duncan’s entire Kingdom really come tumbling down that quickly? Nonetheless, it’s an electrifyingly directed display of what everybody’s really trying to escape from in “Lamplighters”: Duncan Park and everything about Silicon Valley that he represents. One of the guy’s two best friends tried to put a bunch of nautical miles between them; to say Hamish’s is suicide had similar motivations is a deeply grim reading of that plot point, but I can’t deny that the thought occurred to me. And based on what he’s expressed in his most private moments, there’s a sense that Duncan would like to get away from himself, too. For now though, he’s all he has—the guy on his own metaphorical island. The acts of spite he’s planning out there can’t be good for anyone—Duncan included.
Stray observations
- • Harper’s still hanging in the background, but their calculating ingenuity keeps surfacing in in clever ways, as with the tracking assignment they turn into a salary negotiation with Carl.
- • Things Carl is missing out on in order to meet with Duncan at HyperGnosis HQ: A gigayacht, a 300-year-old cognac, and an android Beverly D’Angelo.
- • Orson’s “do your own research” phase clearly doesn’t apply to sound arguments: “It’s not fascist to know anatomy.” “Yes, it is. That’s their whole thing!”
- • The rift between Martin and Anushka is only going to grow wider if she keeps talking about Xander like this: “How could he wee himself? He’s pixels!” “You care about the Tamigotchi’s feelings but not mine!”
- • Duncan’s misquotation of the week: Thinking the “Attica! Attica!” chant from Dog Day Afternoon is “Gattaca! Gattaca!”
- • There’s no disputing Orson’s improved condition, but Gary can quibble with the substance and the woman responsible for it: “I can’t really recommend something unregulated from someone who spells ‘science’ with a ‘y’”
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