‘Silicon Valley’ season 3, episode 5 review: Richard’s PR nightmare
After a few stumbles through season 3 (and one very good episode), we feel like “Silicon Valley” is now officially back on track.
For one, the best thing that we can say is that the experiment seems to now be over. Richard Hendricks has firmly established himself once more as Pied Piper CEO after what was a series of one disaster after the next. After becoming obsessed with some negative claims about his company, he ended up demanding to speak to a reporter behind a particularly scathing article. His misunderstanding of Laurie’s actions in looking for a new CEO, including reaching out to Big Head of all people, led to his ego spiraling and him accidentally spilling the beans on his feelings to the reporter rather than the PR person at Raviga he was meant to be speaking to instead.
Ultimately, these problems could’ve all been avoided by speaking and/or listening. Why didn’t Laurie tell Richard in advance that she intended to hire him back as CEO all along? We suppose it was because she needed her due diligence and was afraid that he would mess up the process … and judging from this, he probably would have. Were it not for Big Head dropping the exclusive on the reporter about Gavin Belson having his team wiping all bad mentions of Nucleus offline, Richard would have been destroyed … and the same could go for his company.
All of this proved to be entertaining stuff, largely because all of our main characters were involved in one way or another. Big Head even had his most significant work in weeks, especially since he and Erlich finalized an agreement, even if the latter was obviously taking advantage of the former. Then again, should Big Head care? Erlich does seem to stumble his way to success, and he’s fine with doing a little more work than Big Head, who is content to have a full-time job of sitting out on a roof.
We also had a small subplot in here about Dinesh accidentally leaving some data on a hard drive they sold when clearing out the old office that provided a few laughs, even if it was inconsequential.
The biggest thing that Sunday’s episode gave us was humor, and plenty of it. It was vintage “Silicon Valley” fun that got us back to an equilibrium, and also showed us an underdog solution to the problem of Richard getting the code together: Outsourcing from all over the world. We’re now set up for a tremendous rest of the season. Grade: A-.
If you are interested in having some additional TV news on all we cover, sent right to your email inbox, sign up now for our CarterMatt Newsletter. (Photo: HBO.)