Silicon Valley Finale Recap: Can Pied Piper Survive a Hostile Takeover?
It’s another Silicon Valley season finale, which means Richard is once again in danger of losing everything. But the man does grow a nifty beard, doesn’t he?
Richard celebrates the launch of his decentralized PiperNet by donning a truly dorktastic Peter Pan costume and tooting away on a flute. But just two months later, the office is a ghost town; the “new Internet,” it turns out, was a miserable failure. (Richard and Dinesh have even grown depression beards.) Dinesh has some good news, though: Their user numbers have suddenly spiked, and they’ve reached the inflection point where they can survive. They rejoice, and Richard is feeling high and mighty enough to tell K-Hole Games’ Colin — who ditched PiperNet, only to have Laurie turn around and fire him — to, um, “kiss my piss” when Colin tries to come crawling back with promises of a new game and pre-sold users. (Richard says “kiss my piss” a lot, actually. And dances.)
While Gilfoyle is sipping some very expensive Pappy Van Winkle bourbon, Monica alerts him that even though their user numbers are up, their coin hasn’t increased in value. They stay up all night and discover the horrible truth: The new users are coming from outside their developer base… which means someone stole their software. They confront Jian-Yang, who admits Gavin Belson tried to buy his bootleg PiperNet, but then that Chinese manufacturer Yao swooped in with a better price. Yao teamed up with Laurie, and now they’re attempting a “51 percent attack” on PiperNet, signing up thousands of fake users to take majority control of the network and then delete everything on it to eliminate it as competition.
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Gilfoyle scrambles to create a patch that would allow him to kick Yao’s users off the network, but he might not finish before they hit the 51 percent threshold. Richard tries to grovel to Colin, hoping his new game will bring the users they need, but Colin went off the grid to sulk in the wilderness for a few days. (Dinesh borrows a co-worker’s Tesla — hey, he’s paying for it — and zips off to the woods with Jared to track down Colin.) Meanwhile, Richard realizes what he needs now is a real prick… so he turns to Gavin. Knowing that Hooli is about to be acquired by Amazon and Gavin will be out, Richard offers Gavin a chance to screw Yao right back: “I need you to attack me.”
They strike a deal where Gavin gives Richard access to Hooli’s many Boxes so he can add more users to PiperNet, diluting the user base so Yao can’t reach 51 percent. (Side effect: This also pushes the original developers’ stake below half, so Gilfoyle can’t implement his patch.) Gavin, though, turns right around and stabs Richard in the back, offering to help Yao and Laurie delete PiperNet if they give him a 20 percent stake in his new venture. (He is a prick, after all.) Richard is so distraught, he offers to sign all of Pied Piper over to Gavin if he walks away from Yao and Laurie’s deal: “I’d rather give it away than watch it die.”
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He even signs a piece of paper cementing the deal, and Gavin accepts in triumph. Only when he looks at the paper, it just says (you guessed it), “Kiss my piss.” Richard was just buying time so Dinesh could zip Colin back to civilization — using the Tesla’s Ludicrous Mode — and Colin could add his gamers to PiperNet, giving the 51 percent edge back to Gilfoyle and the good guys. Gilfoyle implements the patch, deleting all of Laurie and Yao’s users. Richard dances in Gavin’s face and walks out enjoying some of Gavin’s hand-churned ice cream. Gilfoyle shares some of his pricey bourbon with Monica. All is right with the world.
At the very end, Monica gives Richard and the Pied Piper crew a tour of their new offices: a huge, empty warehouse space with room for hundreds of engineers and staffers. It has three more floors. The NSA is already asking questions about this “new Internet.” Pied Piper has officially hit the big time. And Richard, of course, promptly vomits.
What’d you think of the Silicon Valley finale? Grade it in our poll below, then hit the comments to share your thoughts on Season 5.
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