It’s one week until The Audacity’s first season finale (or the week of the finale, if you’re watching on AMC+), and look at how far things have come. HyperGnosis has a new boss and a new mission, and a different earth-shattering technology hidden away in its little programming cave.
Carl is fully back in the game, riding herd on the revamped HyperG and buying up his favorite restaurant so he can dictate who they do and do not serve. Among the latter: Duncan has cobbled together a whole new company and is poised to become the new face of radical data transparency—not that anyone else wants that.
Duncan’s bribe has supercharged JoAnne’s shady investing, and with every move she’s made to cover her tracks, she’s acting more and more like one of her clients.
Orson and Tom are now fully integrated into their surroundings and reflections of the world those surroundings have built—with Orson’s transformation so repulsive that it drove Tess to renounce teenage rebellion and embrace her life as a child of extreme wealth and privilege.
Character arcs all significantly advanced from where they started—and, truth be told, where they left off in episode six. Life moves at a quicker pace in Silicon Valley—one that’s fast and prone to breaking things, as the old startup chestnut goes—but in order to fit the amount of story in season one into eight episodes, The Audacity really has to put the pedal to the metal this week. And while the jump to hyperspeed at least preserves the season’s feeling of perpetual motion and endless surprise, it can also feel like “Foundering” is skipping some essential steps to get everything in position for the season finale.
Once more, I’m prone to seeing The Audacity’s methods in it contents: The episode where the show takes some narrative shortcuts is also the one where Duncan tries to optimize labyrinth walking—why does the Myxy CEO not simply cross the path to the center of the labyrinth? It’s also the one where Martin, after six episodes (and who knows how many years) of diligent tinkering, makes a major Xander breakthrough with a few keystrokes and a night of computing. Granted, he’s only able to do so with HyperGnosis’ full backing (and Anushka and Carl’s goading), but it still feels somewhat convenient, no?
Before all that, and after the disastrous trial run that prompts Xander’s evolution, “Foundering” finds some artful ways of showing how long it’s been since “Sandbox.” After a spectacular flameout where the adolescent bot asks a vet who’s lost her leg what it’s like to even have a leg, Tom exits the room and whips out his phone, which tells him it’s been 34 days since his last drink. And now we know: In a little more than a month, HyperGnosis has brought both the MUMP programmers and Xander under its roof, given Martin’s pet project the eye of Gnodin, and prepared to ingest pallet after pallet of VA paperwork.
This is the kind of material a time jump is made for—was anyone particularly itching to see HyperGnosis rebuilt hire by hire and server by server? “Foundering” leaps to the most interesting part of that process, and then uses Tom’s sobriety app to define the passage of time hinted at by all the small changes around the office. Tom is kind of the ideal character for this type of storytelling, too. The changes he’s made within this short window of time are communicated through wardrobe and performance as well as the script, with Rob Corddry projecting a renewed confidence through what his character is wearing and the way he carries himself. No more hiding beneath the Desert Storm cap for this seemingly acclimated creature of the valley!
It’s easier to pull this off with a character who’s less important to the narrative—considering the way Tom came and went in the middle stretches of the season, it’s to be expected that he’d go through some major changes offscreen. The same goes for Orson, who’s Tom’s photo negative in “Foundering”: He’s feeling a lot more self-assured, and showing it through his behavior and personal styling. But it’s decidedly Not A Good Thing, and at least partially because of something he’s putting in his body, rather than abstaining from: A urine test reveals that the gut tincture’s secret ingredient is steroids—lots and lots of steroids. It turns out Orson has been emulating his manosphere idols in ways he wasn’t even aware of.
Work your way to the top of the call sheet, though, and the acceleration in “Foundering” starts to feel less effective. The Audacity has made a fine sport out of setting Billy Magnussen loose on Duncan’s increasingly unhinged pronouncements, and it’s abundantly clear at this point that what the character excels at most is overpromising and underdelivering—a bullshit artist of the highest magnitude. What feels murkier is why, exactly, PINATA is rattling Duncan’s peers. Like Carl says, making private data public is neither a new idea nor a proven path to success. But the guy who’s giving it a whirl now has a less-than-sterling track record and faceplanted out of the last company he co-founded. The greater fear, which Carl expresses but The Audacity hasn’t really had the time to convey, is that the latest development from the twisted mind of Duncan Park is one that will prove so unpopular, it’ll finally bring the regulation hammer down on the valley.
I admire that The Audacity isn’t spoonfeeding all of these conclusions to us. And I think “Foundering” finds a clever way to plant the idea of PINATA’s unintended consequences: Harper’s mention of forum chuds drooling over this new opportunity for privacy violation says all you need to know about how bad it could be. Yet in other places, there’s the inescapable feeling of the show moving from point A to point C without being able to fully or satisfyingly explain how it got there.
Where this gets most frustrating is in the Duncan-JoAnne material. Last week’s twist and the puppet master monologue that preceded it were fulfilling on a narrative and character level; this week, there’s a delicious callback to Duncan’s speech when it’s revealed that he bought JoAnne and Gary’s house under the name Puppeteer Real Estate Holdings. But the interpersonal fallout from that session feels like more of the same. They bicker during appointments. Duncan mutters unsettling things to JoAnne at a Las Altas function. JoAnne tries to reason with Duncan, but Duncan won’t listen to reason.
The wheels are spinning here, and I have to think it’s because Duncan’s done so much and had so much happen to him over seven episodes, while JoAnne has stayed relatively static. She’s still dealing with the same problem she had in the premiere, the only difference is she’s insider trading with significantly more money. And though the situation with Duncan has escalated considerably, the scenes between them, as mentioned above, haven’t changed.
Sara Goldberg’s giving it her all, but she’s giving it to an underwritten character. But where in the span of these first seven episodes could JoAnne have gained more dimension? More scenes like the one where she tours the crappy house with the big price tag in “Lamplighters,” probably. But there hasn’t been a ton of room for scenes like that one, or Lili and Dr. Webb’s getaway to the mudbaths. That’s part of the problem with a season this short on a show with an ensemble as deep as The Audacity—particularly when the storytelling is hastening the way it does in “Foundering.” The chances to catch your breath and give your characters a little shading pretty much evaporate—that’s why the highlight of this week just might be the light spot of commiseration between Martin and Carl where they connect on leap-frogging over their peers into a college experience they weren’t equipped to handle.
And now it’s full steam ahead toward a finale where Duncan is due to blow up the entire valley’s spot at an event that I don’t think we’ve heard about before this week, in conversation with a character who’s been treated largely as an unseen boogeyman. The mentions of reporter Nana Marks in “Foundering,” like the sight of Dr. Webb walking past one of the locker memorials at Las Altas, serve as reminders of the world-building that The Audacity has had limited time to cultivate. Not saying that these are things that needed to be part of the landscape in every single episode. But when the show whizzes past them, it would be nice not to think “Oh yeah, I forgot that was there!”
Stray observations
- • With its brassy pep and depiction of complicated work getting done, the “Foundering” cold open feels right at home in an AMC show.
- • The real heartbreak of Xander’s upgrade from artificial teenager to artificial adult: It’s so clear that before Martin lost the thread, he built the AI as an attempt to connect with Tess.
- • Your boneheaded Duncan quote of the week comes from his desperation to find a true partner in his new endeavor: “If Hindenburg would’ve had a buddy while flying across the Atlantic, nobody would’ve heard of him.”
- • Duncan’s reinvention has no use for “foundercore” performance vests: “Too hot for indoors, not warm enough for outdoors, but I’m telling you—instant credibility.”
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