Richard confronts the board, being mainly made up of Monica and Laurie.
This gives the viewers their first “Will They, Won’t They” Monica/Richard tiff of the season.
Once the “bambot” has risen to it’s cybernetic hooves, Erlich takes out his anger and frustration on it, giving it one hard kick after another, mirroring the real life video from the “Destined To Kill Us All” Boston Dynamics company.įollowing the opening credits we join Erlich and Richard, now with Ron Laflamme in tow, as they arrive at Raviga where Monica, outed as a cigarette smoker last season, is burning down a butt waiting for them. There are fears that they’ve killed the “bambot” but it manages to slowly get up while Erlich loudly complains about the group, identifying them as Stanford Robotics. As Richard and Erlich spill out of the car to inspect the robotic deer body, a group of (presumably) students join them.
It’s a technique endorsed by TV Comedy God, Graham Linehan who’s spoken out about this exact method of TV writing before and you can see it at play particularly well in his The IT Crowd. One thing Silicon Valley does quite well is merge real world news items with their fictional world. While flipping out in his own inimitable Hendricks way, Richard (now driving Erlich’s “Aviato” SUV) crashes into a robotic deer crossing the street. Fair play to the producers, there’s a lot going on in this episode and there clearly wasn’t room for a “Jared stumbles about stoned” subplot.
Erlich decides to tag along right before giving Jared his own set of instructions, specifically to clear the bong chamber that Erlich has left behind because if not it will “damage the device.” Jared obliges (because of course he would) with adorable, tiny puffs and I had hoped this would be the beginning of a series of unfortunate stoned Jared misadventures, but alas it isn’t mentioned again. Richard decides to head to Raviga, telling Jared to call Ron Laflamme (one of the best characters on the show who is crying out for a Better Call Saul style spin-off). Richard Hendricks, founder and CEO of Pied Piper had just been informed that he was no longer the little-CEO-that-could and right before the credits closed on Season 2 Erlich Bachman had the most Erlich-style response to Richard’s revelation of job loss, “What about me?” Like I said, not really a cliffhanger, so much as a joke, I doubt that many viewers wrestled with the worries that Erlich was going to be let go as well, still it served as a fine enough departure point for last year and it’s right at that exact moment that we rejoin our plucky, young-ish heroes. Burns?” cliffhanger but it did spell major changes for the upcoming/now airing season.
It’s been 10 months since we last checked in with the Silicon Valley gang, with Season 2 ending on a cliffhanger of sorts.