There's no right thing without the wrong reasons in Silicon Valley

“I actually don’t know what to do when things are going well,” Richard says breathlessly to Monica early in “Tethics” after a meeting with an AT&T executive that promises PiperNet’s access extended to hundreds of millions of consumers. And that’s an ethos that permeates most of Silicon Valley, a show that thrives on making things as hard for its main cast as possible. In six seasons every indignity that can be dumped on Richard Hendricks and company has been dumped, a series of personal and professional humiliations that have kept him from being the golden goose of Santa Clara Valley for more than a week at a time.

Those beats are often frustrating for the way they’ve kept the show at a static level between seasons, but Silicon Valley deserves credit for the fact that when these beats happen they do so organically. Mike Judge, Alec Berg, and their team never need to introduce a curve ball out of nowhere, as when the company fails it’s always a combination of the same proven factors. It’s an industry whose standards and favor mutate frequently. They have vindictive enemies who know how to play the game better than they do. And at their core, Richard and his team tend to let the uglier sides of their personalities get in the way of making smart decisions. It’s a combination of all three that leads to the latest hurdle in “Tethics,” a sturdy rebound from the lower points of last week.

The highest point of last week was Gavin’s search for meaning after his Hooli ouster, and somehow falling upward from self-published author to anti-tech evangelist. Now he’s taken that mentality one step further to establish his own code of conduct, a pledge for technology ethics—the erstwhile “Tethics”—that he’s pitching to the heads of industry. It understandably gets under Richard’s skin from the first interview he witnesses, and he takes to Twitter to rant about Gavin’s hypocrisy in circulating the pledge. And unfortunately, he does so in between his meeting with the AT&T executive and said executive signing the pledge, making Richard’s refusal to play Gavin’s game a series impediment to this game-changing deal. Best line of the episode goes to the AT&T executive assistant, urging Richard to swallow his pride: “We all have to fall in line, or we’ll be in PR hell. Or worse! We’ll face government regulation.”

It could feel excessive to draw the Richard/Gavin feud out past Richard’s victory in “Hooli Smokes!” but writer Pete Chatmon makes it work by adhering to the reasons why both the men in question want to drag this out. Introduced with the empty ethos of “making the world a better place” Gavin has absolutely no shame about claiming lofty ideals to sate his ego, and is deeply attuned to how the industry will jump on any trend if it makes them look or feel better. And as much as Richard genuinely believes in those ideals, his innate pettiness won’t let his arch-rival take public credit for them, and he can’t do the bigger or even smarter thing and just keep his mouth shut. (Another poor character trait of Richard’s, he gets pissy whenever people don’t think he’s funny. His irritation at no one laughing at “thumbass” is a clever runner through the episode.)

The importance of the AT&T deal also reverberates through the episode’s subplot, which renews a promising pairing from last season. Tracy is determined to drive up Pied Piper’s profile for the AT&T bigwigs, and part of that is providing strong employee satisfaction ratings. Unsurprisingly, Gilfoyle’s interpersonal numbers are dead last—but more surprisingly, Monica’s aren’t that far away. (Monica quick to blame Priyanka’s “witches’ nest” at Foxhole for that, furthering last week’s theory that the writers know she’s poorly suited to inspire women in the tech industry.) The two decide to enter into a competition for best scores, leading to some sturdy cringe comedy as Monica tries and fails to endear herself to the programmers fails on several occasions, up to and including a Princess Leia haircut that delivers the episode’s biggest laugh.

It’s a good expansion of the late-series discovery that Monica and Gilfoyle have a connection, furthering the good work done in in last season’s “Fifty-One Percent.” There’s nothing romantic or even all that friendly about it, it’s a pragmatic pairing since they both hate everyone else at Pied Piper and want to be left alone to do their jobs. And once Gilfoyle admits he’s just telling them what they want to hear so he can discover their passwords, it’s Monica who suggests they sink Tracy’s scores in retaliation and get the program killed entirely. It’s a coin-flip as to whether or not this is another of Tracy’s employee manipulation games until the end, but the win it gives to the two of them is ultimately more rewarding in the long run, down to a highly satisfying clinking of mugs.

Similarly satisfying is the way that Richard finds a way out of bending the knee to Gavin Belson. Jared starts reading through the Tethics language and Richard realizes that a lot of its platitudes are more than just generic. With as little regard as Gavin has for other people, it’s no surprise that not only has he plagiarized the entire Tethics mission statement, he’s been plagiarizing it from takeout menus. It’s about as scathing an indictment of the industry’s commitment to change as you can get, where no one cares enough about doing the right thing to double-check if Applebee’s did it first.