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Managing editor & film and television critic with a Bachelor's of Arts in English Literature with a Writing Minor from the University of Guam. Currently in graduate school completing a Master's in English Literature.
Get rich or die trying. HBO’s hit comedy series Silicon Valley returns with its final season. The last time we saw our young businessmen, the #PiedPiper team moved into a much larger office with even more space than before.
In this article, we review the final season premiere of the show.
As a warning, there may be spoilers, so stay alert.
Pied Piper’s Richard Hendricks speaks to a board to convince the economic world that his company is different from other successful businesses. Unlike Facebook, Richard aims to make his program democratic, but this goes wrong when a developer does otherwise.
Silicon Valley‘s sixth and final season started with a bang, remaining constant with its jokes and the plot continuing where the previous season left off. The season begins with one of the best jokes in the episode so far: Richard looking like a “child in a custody hearing,” and this description perfectly fits who the character is in the show. There is no better way to put it than that.
Kumail Nanjiani and Martin Starr’s characters Dinesh and Gilfoyle once again reign as the best dynamic of the series next to Middleditch and Woods’s Richard and Jared. Another character that sticks out in this episode is Jared, with his arbitrary transition from the derivation of the term “companion” to his confession that he “can no longer digest bread.”
The episode critiques multibillion-dollar companies that practically run the world as if operating as their own government, namedropping Facebook and Amazon. Although, with a new decade of film and television rolling in, we might as well throw Disney into the mix. Our activity is recorded and monitored by someone, and Richard’s goal is to avoid this from happening with his program.
The final season premiere also pokes fun at the artificial intelligence concept when Dinesh discovers the Gilfoyle he is chatting with online is not really his actual real-life co-worker but instead an AI. Gilfoyle poses an interesting question:
Is your shadow you?
The answer could be, of course, yes, but it’s more likely no. What Gilfoyle does is create a near-facsimile of himself, a self that knows how to respond to other people, in this case, Dinesh. This is why we must be careful (albeit with a grain of paranoid) of whom we speak to on the Internet. The digital virtual world is full of bots, and Twitter and Instagram have proven this. Have you ever been added to a chat full of strange profiles? Are these users real? We can’t know for sure.
Overall, Silicon Valley‘s final season begins with a promising episode that could perhaps foreshadow hopeful closure to the series. Technology can either overthrow us, or we can take control of the way things are run.
What do you think? Have you been a fan of Silicon Valley? If not, do you plan to? Let us know! For more HBO-related news and reviews follow The Cinema Spot on Twitter (@TheCinemaSpot) and Instagram (@thecinemaspot_).
Silicon Valley is out on HBO now!
Managing editor & film and television critic with a Bachelor's of Arts in English Literature with a Writing Minor from the University of Guam. Currently in graduate school completing a Master's in English Literature.
