I’ve officially met the end of the road for another world renouned comedy. It’s been a long time coming, but Silicon Valley has finally become a part of my life and I am happier for it! Seriously, this show produced a lot of laughs and I really couldn’t have asked for anything more.
Let’s jump into the fifth season, which sees the abscence of TJ Miller as Erlich Bachman. At first I thought his abscence was going to be obvious and glaring, but they added enough chaos and strong supporting characters that the fact that he’s not there basically goes unnoticed. Anyway, the season starts with the Pied Piper team in a decent spot. They’ve got a nice, new space and a large group of coders. However, getting those coders and keeping them proves to be very difficult because Gavin makes it his mission to ruin Richard’s life forever. He ends up stealing all of the best coders that Dinesh and Gilfoyle were too petty to hire in order to build the next version of the Hooli box. Eventually, the coders realize they’ll be better off at Pied Piper, but they still don’t really believe in or respect Richard.
Meanwhile, Jian-Yang has managed to convince the appropriate parties that Erlich is dead in order to inherit his estate, but it’s found out that Erlich and Bighead’s partnership never got dissolved, so Bighead is actually Erlich’s next of kin. Obviously, Bighead is easily manipulated, so Jian-Yang is somewhat free to do what he wants…which is to screw over Pied Piper. He’s ends up making a version that he’s going to sell to China, but a man named Yao dupes Gavin and strong-arms the code over to himself. Frustrated with how funding is working out, Gilfoyle suggests they create “PiedPiperCoin,” and ask Monica to join the team as the CFO. She agrees, which Laurie doesn’t seem too bent out of shape about because she’s going to team up with Yao. In the final episode, Yao and Gavin briefly team up to overtake Pied Piper, but Richard succeeds in fooling Gavin while Gilfoyle and Dinesh lock them both out of the system. At the end of the season, they are able to generate enough PiedPiperCoin to purchase several floors in an old Hooli building.
At the start of the final season, we see the Pied Piper offices in full swing. Everyone is working tirelessly to get PiperNet up and running and into the hands of everyone so that there is a free internet. But this is Silicon Valley, so nothing is going to go right for this lot. First up to bowl them over is Colin undermining Richard who tells Congress that PiperNet will not mine data from users. He can’t fire Colin because his game is what’s getting the app users. The next issue they run into is Richard turning down and 1 billion dollar investment from a shady Chilean figure. That ends up biting them in the butt when Colin decides to get bought by him instead. They now don’t have enough users to keep going, but decided to buy a severely damaged Hooli out from under Gavin.
Gavin almost gets the last laugh when he gets an injunction thrown onto Hooli at a “tethics” launch. Richard and the rest of Pied Piper are about to give up when Russ Hanneman shows up and tells them he wants PiperNet at “RussFest.” Richard agrees to this even though the entire infrastructure hasn’t been properly tested yet. Obviously, this means there are some crazy glitches at the festival until in a last-ditch effort, Richard makes tweaks to Gilfoyle’s AI. This causes PiperNet to be an immediate success. Finally, at the height of their accomplishment and a multi-billion dollar deal with AT&T, the group realize that the AI will eventually cause worldwide destruction if it goes live. The final episode is spent as an interview of everyone in present day looking back on the events of them destroying Pied Piper.
Overall, I thought they really stuck the landing in the finale episode. True to form, nothing can go right for this group no matter how hard they try, so it’s only right that the thing they set out to create and make the world a better place would in fact destroy it. I also loved seeing where they all ended up! Big Head becoming the president of Stanford pretty much sums up his luck throughout this show’s run, while it seems inevitable that Gilfoyle and Dinesh would stay together in some capacity (they’re even neighbors!). It is also fitting that Jian-Yang committed identity theft and is now living as “Errich Bachman” overseas, Jared is working in a nursing home, and Laurie is in prison. Perhaps the most fun future was Gavin Belson becoming a romance novelist. I was least impressed by Monica and Richard. Not because what they’re doing now is uncool, it’s just sort of meh. Either way though, loved this show and am happy it got a great ending.