HBO’s Silicon Valley just wrapped up its fourth season last night, concluding yet another chapter in the ongoing humiliation and revitalization of young programmer Richard Hendricks. Throughout its run, however, there’s been another story being told in the show’s kaleidoscopic opening credits, one that offers a bigger picture of the tech industry as it exists in the real world.
In the scant 10 seconds of the show’s credit sequence, dozens of narratives and in-jokes unfold that depict the various successes, failures, feuds, and embarrassments of Silicon Valley. So much happens in so little time that you’d be forgiven for not being able to discern each one, let alone how they’ve subtly changed from season to season.
Here to help is the YouTube account Shots Fired, who prepared a handy primer on the show’s opening credits that pinpoints and outlines each detail, no matter how deeply it’s embedded in the sequence’s kaleidoscopic milieu.
Sure, we’ve all discerned the bouncing balloons of Uber and Lyft as a metaphor asking which one will pop first, but did you ever notice the Facebook logo eating up Oculus and WhatsApp, both of which it recently acquired? Or the tiny FBI trucks outside Theranos, the wildly successful healthcare technology company that’s been ravaged by allegations of fraud? Elsewhere, a giant Airbnb logo sits atop a tiny hotel, an Amazon Prime Air drone delivers pizza, and rumbling RVs nod toward those in the industry unable to afford the area’s ever-rising rent and property taxes.
And that’s only scratching the surface. This thing is a veritable treasure trove of Easter eggs. Fingers crossed the Juicero makes a cameo next season.