Mountainhead, the timely new film on HBO/Max by Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, is a somewhat satisfying if deeply unsettling sendup of tech-bro oligarchy and the convoluted-logic-as-wisdom rhetoric of their podcasts. And it also manages to draw a strange parallel between these bros and the recently publicly exposed mini-cult — if we can call it that — the Zizians.

Bear with me for a second. First off, Mountainhead is neither a fantastic watch nor an entirely painful one. It is a solid directorial debut for Armstrong, who also wrote it — and this was apparently pitched and all pulled together, complete with a location shoot in a modern mountaintop manse near Park City, Utah, in the last six months. There are a handful of hearty laughs skewering the sheer arrogance an absurdity of these self-anointed masters of the universe, and it all gets taken to a fairly extreme, absurd place [spoilers to follow!].

The film brings with it some of the love-to-hate-them energy of Succession, though with less time for an audience to find anything to be endeared by or relate to in these four tech capitalists — three multi-billionaires and a lowly friend they call "Souperman" or "Soup Kitchen," played by Jason Schwartzman, a "lifestyle app" founder who is merely worth $521 million. And it very much feels like it could have been adapted from a stage play, with just four main actors and shot almost entirely in this one house.

Cory Michael Smith, who recently had a star turn on Saturday Night playing an arrogant and self-satisfied young Chevy Chase, is well cast as the energetic, seemingly sociopathic Venis (looks like "penis," pronounced like "menace"). He can be described as a Mark Zuckerberg type, founder and CEO of a major social media platform called Traam, but more attractive, more blindly confident and maybe more charismatic, and less cautious.

One of Venis's signature lines, as they watch the world burn on their phones: "Nothing means anything, and everything is funny and cool."

Steve Carell plays Randall, whom the other "Brewsters," as the cohort calls itself, refer to as "Papa Bear," and who also gets called "Dark Money Gandalf" at one point. Randall feels like an amalgam of multiple real-life founders and venture capitalists who enjoy philosophizing to anyone who'll listen, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and maybe like a less scrupulous Warren Buffett.

And Ramy Youssef plays Jeff, the youngest of the group and the newest multi-billionaire, whose AI model appears to be the key to solving the deep-fake nightmare that a newly released tool on Venis's platform is causing worldwide.

The four men look on and comment glibly about a rapidly unfolding global crisis that appears — improbably but maybe not! — to stem largely from mobs being motivated by this social media platform, and some hyper-realistic deep-fake videos being created by bad actors. A consequent financial crisis in multiple countries prompts them to begin imagining which countries to summarily take over for their own playthings, starting with Argentina.

In the way of many stageplays, things take a dark and climactic turn after Randall — who, by the way, is eager for a transhuman new world order, aided by AI, because he has some terminal disease — realizes both that Jeff disrespects him as being the first one in the group likely to die, and that Jeff is "anti-progress" because he won't roll over and sell Venis his AI model. Randall immediately begins discussing a plan with the other two Brewsters to kill Jeff and somehow dispose of his body and use their wealth to skirt any consequences, in order to make sure the AI deal goes through.

And here's where the Zizian parallels come in. The group throws around plenty of ideas that would be familiar to the Rationalist movement, which came to be among tech workers in the Bay Area and which spawned this Zizian offshoot, as we've referred to it. Jack "Ziz" LaSota espouses the idea of bifurcated brains, the two hemispheres being able to function independently of one another — sometimes with two different gender identities — and the Brewsters discuss something similar as well.

There's also a complete lack of true morality to their thought processes — Venis even proposes the debatable (to him) notion that other people are real — because of the urgency of addressing some coming change. And at one point, when Randall's undertanding of categorical morality as defined by Emmanuel Kant is questioned, he replies, "I take Kant really fucking seriously!"

In the case of the Zizians, it's the coming singularity and the urgency of protecting humanity that seems to trump any ideas of day-to-day morality — though, admittedly, Ziz is no Kant, and I'm not completely read-up on all her thinking. There is the idea that some brains are inherently bad, and we can see in some of the online evidence left behind by Ziz and others in the group that there's a general callousness toward intellectual weakness and toward people having mental health struggles — which appears to have led, indirectly or not, to a couple of suicides.

As Carell's character blithely quips in Mountainhead, speaking to Venis, "You’re always going to get some people dead."

The Chronicle today delves a bit into the unsolved killings of group member Michelle Zajko's parents on New Year's Eve 2022, in a suburb of Philadelphia. Zajko has written in an open letter from jail that she did not kill her parents, but police consider her a person of interest — and earlier reporting suggests that a former girlfriend of Zajko's left the country after learning that Ziz had allegedly instructed Zajko to kill her.

The group also appears to be more concerned with the morality of killing animals and encouraging everyone to become vegan than they do with individual human lives (maybe to set an example for our robot overlords?) — though only two individuals directly involved with Ziz, Somni Leathem and Suri Dao, so far face murder charges. (21-year-old Teresa Youngblut remains in police custody in Vermont for the January killing of a Border Patrol agent, and the consequent killing of her friend Ophelia Bauckholt, but she only faces illegal gun charges so far. And 22-year-old Maximilian Snyder faces a murder charge for the January killing of Curtis Lind in Vallejo, though he has so far publicly disowned his connection to Ziz.)

Getting back to Mountainhead, it will no doubt be considered among a growing genre of satires about the tech industry in general, which includes the hilarious HBO series Silicon Valley. It also joins another recent genre, as Vulture points out, concerned with "eating the rich," which includes White Lotus, The Triangle of Sadness, and The Menu, as well as Succession.

But, those are all "comedies that assure us the elite are miserable, whether they get what’s coming to them or not; they also allow us to enjoy secondhand experiences of the luxuries they bask in and the terribleness with which they treat other people," Vulture writes. Mountainhead, by contrast, offers no such pleasures, and can feel "like nails on a chalkboard ... because it’s so unrelenting."

Related: New HBO Film From 'Succession' Creator Premieres Next Week Depicting Tech Billionaires During a Financial Crisis

A new, standalone feature film from Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, called Mountainhead, depicts four arrogant, fictional tech entrepreneurs cut from the same cloth as Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, et al, having a boys' weekend at a lavish mountain retreat while the world experiences a financial meltdown.

Armstrong, who after winning multiple Emmys for his writing and producing work on Succession, is making his directorial debut with Mountainhead, which premieres on HBO and HBO Max — yes, we're calling it that again! — on May 31.

After finishing the final season Succession, Armstrong tells Vulture that he went down a rabbit hole of listening to tech and venture-capital podcasts, and reading books by and about tech founders — inspired partly by Michael Lewis’s Going Infinite, about convicted crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. He says he found that most of these (mostly) men shared "a straight-up arrogance, which is both scary and comic. You know, being unaware is a key reason why people are funny, and arrogance is a good way of being unaware. And then there’s a whole intellectual framework, which, broadly speaking, the Silicon Valley tech world brings."

Given the power being wielded these days by these American oligarchs, especially since the second election of Donald Trump, Armstrong saw the germ of timely story, which was rushed into production to make it on the air while this current chaotic period we're living in is still unfolding.

In real life, President Trump may have pulled us back from the brink of a worldwide financial crisis when he teased and then softened on some radically out-of-scale tariffs, but many are still set to take effect soon and we are hardly out of the woods.

In Mountainhead, four friends, three of whom are billionaires, watch from a luxury aerie as the world slips into a political and financial crisis — spurred in part by the release of a generative AI model by one of those in the room, Venis (pronounced like Dennis), played by Cory Michael Smith. The crisis prompts the president of the United States to seek out the help of the quartet, and they begin spitballing solutions.

"We are the smartest men in America," says Carrell's character in the trailer. "We literally have the resourcs to take over the world."

Carrell plays Randall, a venture capitalist whom Vulture says could be seen as a cross between Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Warren Buffett, and who the others call "Papa Bear." Ramy Yousseff plays Jeff, whose company has created a filter to ward against hyperrealistic generative-AI images, while Smith's character is like a more nefarious Zuckerberg, who owns a major social media platform that is being overrun by AI-faked videos and images. Jason Schwarzman plays Hugo Van Yalk, the only non-billionaire, who nonetheless owns the massive house in the mountains where they are all staying.

As for the crazy speed of production — it was greenlit in December, cast and written in January and February, and shot over five weeks in March and April, with editing probably still being done — Carrell says, "It feels like he called me on a Tuesday, we shot it on a Thursday, and then it’s coming out, like, the next Friday! It’s the most compact production process I’ve ever experienced."

We'll see what our local billionaires have to tweet about it, assuming they haven't received advance copies, after it comes out.

In a major announcement and landmark moment in the streaming wars, Warner Bros. Pictures announced Thursday that all of its slate of film releases for 2021 will be released simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max.

The group of movies, as the Associated Press reports, includes the much-anticipated fourth installment of The Matrix, which was filming on location earlier this year in the Bay Area (pre-pandemic).

HBO Max has been off to a rocky start since its launch in May, with HBO now owned by AT&T and the messaging around the new streaming app — which isn't available on Amazon or Roku yet, and which is different than the HBO Now app and which replaces the former HBO Go — completely bungled. The app's value proposition is a good one — you get all of HBO's content catalog along with a bunch of Warner Bros., DC Universe, and Cartoon Network titles all for $15/month. But people still don't understand why new HBO shows like The Flight Attendant are getting released on Max but not on Now, or on HBO itself.

And in a year when literally everyone is sitting at home looking for new shows to stream, AT&T really fucked up this rollout.

As TechCrunch reported in October, AT&T has been touting an increasing number of "activations" for HBO Max — with a total of 28.7 million customers who were "eligible" to view HBO Max content as of the third quarter of 2020. But this is a misleading figure, given that a lot of these are just regular HBO subscribers who get HBO Max bundled with their subscription through Comcast or whatever provider, and they may not have signed in to the app yet or even figured out that it exists. So it's not really clear how many people are watching HBO Max, or know that there's a Kaley Cuoco series on there that you can't see anywhere else, including HBO.

The Warner Bros. announcement should boost the fate of the app, which also may soon show up on Roku once the stalled negotiations over this finally move forward. (For now, there's a work-around involving AirPlay 2.)

As CNet reports, the first of the Warner releases to show up on HBO Max will be Wonder Woman 1984 on Christmas Day. Then next year you will see the Dune remake, Godzilla vs. Kong, and a film adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda's first big Broadway hit, In the Heights, all getting theatrical releases alongside HBO Max releases.

A highly anticipated Friends reunion special, set to stream exclusively on HBO Max, remains on hold.

Part of the reason that HBO's Silicon Valley — which just had its fourth season finale on Sunday — has such a short, rapid-fire opening title sequence is that creator Mike Judge didn't really want to have a title sequence at all. But, as the YouTube show Shots Fired explains, HBO has a reputation to uphold for acclaimed title sequences, so they hooked him up with LA-based design firm yU+Co to conceive the quick, 10-second animation that charts the ever-changing landscape of the Valley's most notable companies, some large and some not so large.

With each new season, they've revised the sequence to depict the way companies have merged or made headlines — for instance, the overshadowing of Yahoo's sign with Alibaba's, and the growth of the Alphabet sign over Google's headquarters.

There are also, as Shots Fired shows by pausing and scanning across the complicated moving image, MANY little hidden jokes that we've all likely missed unless we took the time to obsessively pause and examine the thing. For instance: A couple of Soylent trucks with a bunch of porta-potties next to them, and several FBI vehicles pulling up outside of Theranos, referring to recent PR and legal disasters at both companies. And did you catch the little Snapchat ghost hovering over/haunting Facebook?

With the debut of last season's sequence, in 2016, as Wired noted at the time, there's a mostly hidden, obscure reference to an incident in which housing/gentrification protesters vomited on a purple Yahoo commuter shuttle bus.

For comparison, check out the Season 1 sequence below. Remember Myspace?

[h/t: Laughing Squid]

Related: No!!! T.J. Miller Announces He's Leaving HBO's 'Silicon Valley'

Truly one of the comic delights of the four seasons of Silicon Valley thus far, T.J. Miller's arrogant stoner character Erlich Bachman will be getting written off the show come Season Five — and the renewal of the series was just announced by HBO Thursday, along with Miller's departure. As Vulture reports, rumors of Miller leaving the show had been swirling for weeks, though the reasons for the decision aren't clear.

HBO's official statement:

The producers of Silicon Valley and T.J. Miller have mutually agreed that T.J. will not return for season five. In Erlich Bachman, T.J. has brought to life an unforgettable character, and while his presence on the show will be missed, we appreciate his contribution and look forward to future collaborations.

The show has two Emmys under its belt and has been a critical hit in its first three seasons, and it's now halfway through Season Four, in which the show's ensemble has had to divide into sometimes cross purposes as fictional startup Pied Piper pivots once again.

The Hollywood Reporter surmises that the reason for Miller's departure may simply have to do with his own rising fame, and hectic film schedule. Miller will reprise his role in the Deadpool sequel, due out next year, and he's also set to appear in Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One adaptation, the Western film Walden, the Kristen Stewart thriller Underwater, and as a voice in How to Train Your Dragon 3.

Related: TJ Miller Mansplains Mainsplaining In Full 'Silicon Valley' Season 4 Trailer
'Not Hotdog' App From HBO's 'Silicon Valley' Now Available For Download

Sunday night's episode of Silicon Valley was another winner for the continuously hilarious series, and one that had some of the series' characteristic comic twists involving the sometimes absurd pivots that tech companies must make as they chase venture capital [spoilers ahead!]. In this case, Jian Yang and Erlich's SeeFood startup, originally spun as "the Shazam for food," turns out only to be capable of identifying hot dogs and distinguishing everything else as "not hot dog." Via a funny moment in which Erlich uses the app to snap of a pic of his own genitals, one of the VCs at Raviga Capital — which, by the way, has its own fictitious website — Monica's rival Ed Chen, decides to pitch the app to Periscope as a bot that can filter out images of penises, and it's immediately sold for a major profit.

Now the crew has created, clearly with the help of some of their real-life engineer technical consultants, a downloadable version of the Not Hotdog app, which is live now in the Apple App Store, and according to The Verge, the thing seems to marginally work when it comes to identifying hot dogs and things that are not hot dogs — however in my own test for SFist, that was not the case.

While I did not have any actual hot dogs in my fridge, I did grab an item off the shelf to see if the app would be fooled, and I tricked it on the first try — so, IRL, Jian Yang's code may not be worth the millions that Twitter/Periscope paid for it on the show.

Observe:

Consumerist notes that this is just the latest in a series of working apps connected to TV comedies, dreamed up by their marketing teams.

Real versions of fictional apps have happened before: Netflix developed an official version of the FakeBlock app from Arrested Development. The woodblock simulator is longer available, but there are unofficial alternatives still on various app stores.

A storyline on the Fox comedy Brooklyn Nine-Nine involved cops addicted to a Candy Crush-type game called Kwazy Cupcakes, which is still available, and surprisingly playable.

Go ahead, try to fake-out Not Hotdog for yourself!

Related: TJ Miller Mansplains Mainsplaining In Full 'Silicon Valley' Season 4 Trailer

Silicon Valley, the HBO Comedy from Mike Judge that skewers, roasts, and generally devours the world of tech and startups, is back on April 23rd for its 4th Season, which has got me like.

For a refresher on where we last left Pied Piper, here's a recap of the Season 3 series finale. Also, for further insight into TJ Miller's latest facial hair mistake as Erlich Bachman, here's a shot from Amanda Crew (Monica)

Related: 'Silicon Valley' Star TJ Miller Arrested Following Altercation With Uber Driver Over Trump

Some celebrities can hide behind a large pair of sunglasses and pass unbothered through Los Angeles, but it's considerably harder to blend in when your'e Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and San Franciscans are somewhat less discrete than Angelenos when a bona fide movie star waltzes through town. So, as the Rock was on Nob Hill to film the HBO show Ballers, which is about a high-profile sports agent and which I haven't watched but feel safe in assuming is like Jerry Maguire meets Entourage meets WrestleMania, tourists and local fans have been going a little nuts.

Sadly, you've missed the open casting call for the show, and today is the last day of local filming according to Hoodline, with a shoot to take place at Pine and Leavenworth.

And earlier this week, atop Nob Hill for filming at the Fairmont Hotel, the Rock recorded a greeting with one fan with his usual dramatic flare on Instagram.

Had a 30min break from set, so instead of going back to my hotel, I posted up in the back of my SUV and just worked from my phone. All the fans we're cleared out from the streets because they thought I left. I look up and this one dude was just standing on the church steps looking around at our set. He didn't have tons of memorabilia for me to sign, didn't have kids & toys, didn't have his phone out. He was just kinda standing there, with his hands in his pockets, excited and looking around. He had no idea I was in the SUV right in front of him. Well after about 20min of me trying to get work done and every time I look up, he's still there looking around. He can't see me, but I can see him and now my conscience starts f*cking with me! I can't get my work done if I know someone is standing there hoping to see me. Dammit. So I have my guy @billsinla go over and tell him I want to meet him. If you watch the vid closely you can see the man make the 🙏🏾 sign when my guy tells him the news. Time for me to be an asshole.

A video posted by therock (@therock) on Feb 2, 2017 at 7:38am PST

A photo posted by therock (@therock) on Feb 2, 2017 at 8:05am PST

"Well, I tried to be an asshole but as you see from his caption below it didn't go quite as planned," writes Johnson, who is probably just constitutionally not an asshole. "After this pic, he was so happy, he skipped away. Literally, skipped away. Probably the coolest part of my day. I' grateful to have the greatest fans in the world. Good to meet you Lucas. Thanks for being such a cool fan. #SkipGameStrong"

HBO's Ballers returns in July.

related: Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson Is Kicking It With Mark Zuckerberg

Chalk it up to coincidence feeding Twitter chatter, but even my ears perked up when Hillary Clinton dropped the phrase "middle out" during Wednesday night's presidential debate. Clinton was referring to her economic and job-creation plan, and in contrast to "Trumped-up trickle-down economics," she was saying that her plan would focus on the middle class. "So what I am proposing is that we invest the middle out and the ground up," she said, cuing a chorus of Silicon Valley fans on social media to go "hrm"?

Of course it's unlikely that Hillary would know the reference, but maybe her debate coaches and speech writers did? CNet doesn't presume so, but quips, "You might even say it was a master stroke."

"Middle out" on the TV show referred to Pied Piper's innovative compression technology — abstractly, it's a method compress a large file starting from the middle rather than going from end to end. In Silicon Valley's second season, the breakthrough about this is explained via masturbation, and what they referred to as D2F, or dick-to-floor.

The HBO featurette below discusses how the show's creators and consultants tried to make the concept as realistic as possible based on the trajectory of compression technology, even though in real life there is no such technology yet.

Related: Video: The Sweet Sweet Romance Of Dinesh And Gilfoyle

Though there are likely to be future decisions that limit the ramifications of this one, a three-judge panel on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals last week ruled that without specific authorization from a company, sharing personal passwords that access that company's information is now a federal crime. The case, United States v. Nosal, which as Fusion says has "been bouncing around the courts for almost a decade," goes back to the prosecution of a former employee of the Korn/Ferry International research firm who with a couple of other co-conspirators launched his own executive search firm by illegally accessing his former company's database using a current employee's credentials. Civil liberties advocates have leapt on the case over the years as one that directly criminalizing password sharing, though the circumstances here appear to have more to do with an employer's right to keep private data secure from all but authorized users.

At issue is the case's use of the much maligned "hacker law," the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), which the New Yorker referred to in 2013 as the "worst law in technology" because of the ways in which it's been invoked to prosecute people who are not hackers.

In writing the majority opinion in this appeal, as Motherboard points out, Judge Margaret McKeown says, "This appeal is not about password sharing," focusing on how defendant David Nosal was no longer authorized to access his employer's system, so he gained access through another employee's password.

The question remains, if he was given authorization by that employee, this makes both of them culpable, and more broadly, anyone who shares a password with anyone else without a content provider's permission.

Writing his dissent, Judge Stephen Reinhardt argues:

This case is about password sharing. People frequently share their passwords, notwithstanding the fact that websites and employers have policies prohibiting it. In my view, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”) does not make the millions of people who engage in this ubiquitous, useful, and generally harmless conduct into unwitting federal criminals.

Unfortunately, the language of the CFAA, written in 1996, is open to wide interpretation when it comes to accessing a "protected computer" system "without authorization," and the law itself is an amendment to a law that originally written in 1986, and which previously only made it an offense to hack into a "federal interest computer."

Reinhardt writes that we must reign in "the government’s boundless interpretation of the CFAA," saying that as it stands, "There simply is no limiting principle in the majority’s world of lawful and unlawful password sharing." And he says this case should have more appropriately been tried in civil court, not in a criminal one.

Netflix, for their part, has maintained a pretty consumer-friendly view on password sharing, however, as TechCrunch reminds us by way of stopping this new panic. Though CEO Reed Hastings has mostly only spoken of parents sharing passwords with children who then leave home and open accounts of their own, he made statements earlier this year suggesting that sharing passwords was seen by the company as more of a marketing tool than anything.

That position, of course, could change, now that a crackdown could come with the warning that what you're doing when you let your roommate catch up on House of Cards while on vacation is now officially a crime.

Previously: Vandal Tags Netflix HQ Sign With 'And Chill' Graffiti

Silicon Valley's first season ends with big success: A huge win for Pied Piper at TechCrunch Disrupt. Its second season ends with serious failure: Richard Hendricks is ousted from his position as CEO at the company he founded. But last night's season three finale lay somewhere in between, putting the team on a more independent track and with a more accidental — but all the more promising — vision for their company as they proceed.

To recall where we're at: While installs of Pied Piper's platform have been great, daily users were severely lacking, and with money running out and a potentially high profile failure on their hands, Jared desperately purchased users from a Bangladeshi click farm. The ruse doesn't get dragged out: Richard immediately reveals that he knows about the fake users and that it won't matter anyway, because the company is going to fold regardless. However, here's the twist: A newly reinvigorated Erlich is coming into his own as a PR head. He explains, in a brilliant, fast-paced speech, that he's played a bunch of venture capitalists off one another to convince them, based on the uptick in fake users, to provide a Series B round of funding to Pied Piper. A sample of his language: "I was at the Rosewood for lunch — I mean it was the lunch hour, I was there, I wasn't eating, the usual..." Anyway, after name dropping everyone from Marc Andreessen to Vinod Khosla, Erlich announces that Coleman Blair Partners would like to offer Pied Piper a $6 million round at a $60 million valuation, putting them back in business.

Naturally, that leaves Richard and Jared in an ethical bind: It would be fraudulent to represent the company as growing based on daily active users. But as Richard justifies matters "It's not we're lying about it like fucking Theranos." Quick to discover the duplicity are Dinesh and Gilfoyle, who in a lovely wink and nudge routine explain that they've helped cover the fake users' tracks but don't want to be implicated in any way. "Whatever you did or didn't do," says Dinesh, "that was some serial killer level shit." Adds Gilfoyle: "I think I finally respect you as a CEO."

Returning to Hooli, a reinstated Gavin Belson is paying the piper for his most recent live animal display, an ongoing gag that hasn't really made much plot sense, until, debatably, now. The elephant, an endangered species, keeled over and died on Hooli property: We're told it was rescued from the circus but actually very depressed because it loved performing. "You always said that here at Hooli, in order to achieve greatness, we must first achieve goodness," Belson's subordinate tells him. "I was a bridesmaid at Sean Parker's wedding when he handed out live bunnies as plush toys. That wasn't goodness. That was badness. So's this." Of course, Belson fires her and has the elephant's body lifted by helicopter and dumped in the Bay. The spurned subordinate reports the behavior to that blogger, CJ, who's publication, Coderag, is now owned by Erlich and Bighead. CJ confronts Belson with the story, and he does exactly what Erich did: Buys the blog, this time out from under Erlich, to kill the story.

Laurie Bream and Raviga, Monica included, are already furious that Richard and Erlich are shopping around by the time the Pied Piper CEO and PR head swing over to the meewith Coleman Blair. It gets worse from there. Richard can't keep up the lie up and confesses that the daily active users are fake, infuriating Erlich, who had no idea. This is the maddest we've ever seen him, and it's the end, it seems of their friendship. Word gets out quickly about the fake users, and soon Erlich and Richard are at a board meeting with Raviga where Laurie is ready to put the company up for sale.

The highest bidder? We assume, based on a previous scene picturing an encounter with Laurie, Belson, and Jack Barker, that it's Hooli. Belson's offered to pay $1 million for it — an incredible, insulting steal that will mean Hooli won the compression war after losing every battle. The scene in the Raviga board room is bizarre and fast-paced: Monica refuses to agree to the sale, and so, for that matter, does a totally random other Raviga dude because, he claims, he's in love with Monica. It's high drama and hilarious because who the fuck is this guy, but anyway, it doesn't matter at all because Laurie is going to get her way and Richard is totally defeated and basically plays dead.

Except: Twist again: The sale is not to Hooli for $1 million but to a higher bid (by one dollar) from "Bachmanity," the VC firm of Erlich and Big Head's creation that, with the $2 million sale of Coderag, is back in action. This turn of events unites pretty much everyone, even bringing Big Head and possibly Monica, who may have been fired, back into the fold. While Erlich gives Richard a stern talking to about how he'll have to earn back his trust, but then we cut to the team celebrating together.

So, what's next? In its final moments, the episode gestures at a number of possible changes like a pivot to Dinesh's video chat, which has organically been picking up followers, inspiring Big Head and Erlich to buy Pied Piper in the first place. Mostly, what's next is more to look forward to: This was such a weird, fun, intricate episode, one tying together seemingly mundane elements from the whole season. Even Jian Yang has a funny line to cap things off, prank calling Erlich "from the future." What's really ahead? Sadly, we have a long wait to find out.

Previously: Silicon Valley Ep. 3.9: 'Pipey'

In a New Yorker article about Silicon Valley published last week, readers learned that TJ Miller, who plays incubator owner and eccentric bong collector Erlich Bachmann, once met Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, more) and didn't know who he was. It was, according to Miller, an aggravating encounter for Musk.

Apropos of this week's Silicon Valley episode, the anecdote is maybe even more interesting. Erlich, whose personal spending spree has left him in debt, was forced to sell his shares of Pied Piper just before the company's product launch. Like Musk, Bachmann is motivated by a need to be recognized, and taken seriously — not to mention a deep fear of obscurity, or worse, infamy. In an entreaty to Richard (where he's wearing the above costume, no less), Erlich invokes Ron Wayne, an Apple investor who sold his shares and, according to Erlich, became the laughing stock of the Valley.

Erlich's sellout is also a problem for Richard and the Pied Piper team. In part, it's why Erlich hides it from him for ten days (and the first half of the episode). We start out on Bloomberg TV live from Pier 3, where Erlich appears as the company's "Chief Visionary" beside Richard, pronouncing "Embarcadero" with a hard, Spanish-inflected "C." That might be a better showing than Richard's: Of Pied Piper's 100,000 installs so far, Richard says it's nice to be the "belles of the balls."

Eventually, and in the middle of a bevy of press coverage leading up to a Vanity Fair event, Richard learns, through a possible head of PR, that someone — unclear who — is selling their 5 percent stake. This could, the PR person explains, lead the public to believe something is wrong with the company, screwing them in terms of more fundraising and bad word of mouth.

At first, Richard assumes the culprit is Monica. "Monica fucked us," he says, adding troublingly that, "she pulled down our pants and fucked us in front of our parents," leading Jared to go into crisis counselor mode. However, when Richard confronts Monica, she reveals it's Erlich who sold. At last, after so many failures, he's getting no sympathy, only comeuppance, for his general bullshit.

Here, Richard has to make a very real choice between personal relationships and business prospects. "My dignity is in your hands," Erlich tells Richard sadly and soberly. "Do with it what you will." Thus, Richard drafts a press release to explain away the sale. "I think it reads well, I think it's all in there," says Jared. "This will definitely set the record straight. Then again, you're basically lighting Erlich on fire." Richard will wait to release until he's sure that the rumor is really out there, but he's made up his mind about Erlich's involvement with Pied Piper. "From this point forward you will have nothing to do with this company going forward." Jared will serve on the board, Richard declares, leading Jared to hilariously undergo a series of conflicting emotional responses.

But what about the Vanity Fair event, Erlich says, mentioning Meinertzhagen's Haversack, a callback to episode three. "What do you think would happen if i didn't show up to this Vanity Fair event?" He doesn't want people to speculate and adds that he's "already RSVPd and given them a list of phony dietary restrictions to cause a scene." Indeed, Erlich will only eat fish who eat other fish, or so he's said, making him a pesca-pescatarian.

Over at Hooli, where we're taken briefly, the board is finally fed up with Gavin Belson (Pied Piper is a hit and Endframe/Nucleus a mess) revealing to him that he's out as CEO. Like Erlich, Belson is pissed, and somewhat scared. "I built his company with my bare hands in my fucking garage," he rages. In need of a "walk," Belson prepares to fly on his private jet to Jackson Hole, and whom should he run into on the tarmac but Jack Barker, the erstwhile Pied Piper CEO. Get this: Barker is also headed to the Jackson Hole! "There's this great little hiking trail near my lodge in J-hole," says Barker (I love this line the most I think). This little set piece is so great because, while you expect the two billionaires to hop on the same flight, they don't even consider it, instead just complimenting each others' jets. "Really is a small world," says Jack. "It's crazy," Belson agrees, neither acknowledging the tiny circle to which they belong.

Meanwhile, in another side plot, Jared gets the team a prototype of a ridiculous Pied Piper varsity-style jacket, complete with rats in rows on the sleeves. One of these garments is too many, says Dinesh, as in, too many in the whole world. Gilfoyle is willing to borrow Jared's prototype in order to torture Dinesh by wearing it near him at a Philz coffee shop. But that backfires, sort of: Strangers recognize the Pied Piper name and logo, having downloaded the hot new app, and ask to take a picture with a dumbstruck Gilfoyle. The tech celeb theme continues!

At the Vanity Fair event at the Nob Hill Fairmont, though I'm pretty sure — feel free to fact check me on this — that they filmed in a different lobby/interior, Richard runs into Russ Hanneman, the blowhard former Pied Piper investor of last season, a character molded in the Marc Cuban/Sean Parker vein. Or, put it this way: The guy with the car with the doors that go like this. Russ is, unsurprisingly, still blowing hard, and the encounter does a bit of exposition work, too. It turns out Erlich tried to sell Russ half his shares for $5 million, which would have gotten him out of debt but kept him involved with the company, but the deal didn't work out because Laurie Bream/Raviga killed it.

From Laurie, Richard learns the details: She has to approve any sale of Erlich's shares, and she would only approve a sale to herself. Harsher still, she paid Erlich just what he owed in debt — exactly $713,000. Basically, Richard learns that Erlich is penniless at the moment he was about to disgrace him. Plus, Erlich is a no-show at dinner, although his pesca-pescatarian order creates a buzz and soon everyone is ordering it (including Dick Costolo, the former Twitter CEO who is a consultant on the show, and has a cameo here).

Feeling bad for Erlich, Richard returns home to find that he won't need to issue that press release. After receiving a call from CJ, the reporter at the blog Coderag which he heedlessly bought, Erlich delivered a self-deprecating and even masochistic tell-all explaining his personal failures. (CJ said she received three reports of something ugly going on at Pied Piper, forcing his hand).

Richard finds Erlich smoking a distinguished Sherlock Holmesian bong in the back yard, defeated but somehow noble. Richard recognizes what Erlich has done for him and takes pity. In the interview with Coderag, Richard recalls, Erlich said his head was so far up his own ass that he he "can see the future." Maybe this will come in handy, Richard tells Erlich encouragingly, "if we need a precog..." he trails off, and offers Erlich a job, for which he'll actually have to do something for once, as the company's PR.

Erlich suggests his title be "Chief Evangelism Officer" calling CJ to deliver his first release and telling her to "feel free to abbreviate that." Last, in a final note of irony, CJ thanks Erlich for the story, revealing a misunderstanding. "Three different people told me that Pied Piper had the ugliest jackets," she tells him: She was going to write an article about "swag fail."

Returning to that New Yorker article, one thing I've been thinking about is how the show's verisimilitude is the product of pretty serious, thoughtful research. Jonathan Dotan, an entrepreneur, now serves as the show’s lead technical consultant, and he oversees ***more than two hundred other consultants*** from technical researchers who consulted on middle-out compression to, yep, Dick Costolo. All of that shows in this weeks' episode, and furthermore, as these characters make realer, harder decisions — as Erlich and Richard do — the show's effect is realer than ever.

Previously: Silicon Valley Ep. 3.7: 'Betas'

After a secret plan to divert their efforts was discovered at the end of last episode, Dinesh, Gilfoyle, and Richard are being forced to deliver on a decidedly un-thrilling box project. And yet, the trio finds humor and encouragement in the uninspiring task, and so, for that matter, does the show's writing team. For example, this perfect little joke: "Fuck this," says Gilfoyle, "I've been writing quick, bullshit, subpar code for 48 hours and I want to kill myself. How do you do it every day, Dinesh?"

"What a coincidence?" Dinesh fires back. "I've also been writing bullshit code for 48 hours and want you to kill yourself."

Really, Dinesh, Gilfoyle, and Richard are lucky to have their jobs at all, since their mutinous behavior was uncovered. It was Richard who managed to cut a deal with CEO Jack Barker to save them: "If we're gone I don't think you're ever gonna get your box," he says, playing hardball in a rare moment of confidence. His ultimatum: "The second we write code that satisfies the basic minimum requirement of the deal, we are off the box and onto the platform." But, as Jared puts it, the team is like Audrey Hepburn — they can't help but be elegant. "Just cause making the box sucks doesn't mean we have to suck at making the box," Dinesh decides for the group, and they manage to make its central compression algorithm impressive. Here, the show revels in the idea of the team's real technical prowess, and clear, if accidental, delight in their work. Their work has so often been foiled, and so its refreshing to see a little success from the group. Even the design of the box, which Richard initially shrugs off when a designer shows him seemingly random nature images so they can "develop a shared aesthetic vocabulary," becomes important to the team.

But before Pied Piper can sell their device to a buyer, "Maleant Data Systems Solutions," the board needs to sign off on the deal. Raviga Capital's Monica, who owes Richard a favor, notices that, in the terms of the deal, Maleant would be entitled to all the technology in the box — the increasingly powerful compression algorithm. That's a nonstarter, but Jack wants to take the deal anyway, and since Laurie Bream,can't put a price on the value of the platform, she's willing to go along with the deal in hand.

Not Monica. "Richard," she says, "You know how I voted to fire you a couple months ago, and I said that I did it so that I could stay in the game so that maybe in the future I could do something to help?" Her "no" vote saves the technology, for the moment: As Jared puts it: "What you did took incredible guts. The fact that it probably won't make a difference makes it all the more meaningful. I saw this nature documentary where a bison fought a lion to protect the rest of the herd. And it was so moving. It didn't work. The lion tore into the bison and laid waste to the herd. But what courage!"

Interspersed with the main drama of this episode is a side plot that's also about competition. Erlich can't score new tenants for his incubator because of a new rival: that's Big Head, Richard's former pal and the onetime "Co-Head Dreamer" at Hooli's Nucleus Project. Big Head has a pool at a brand new house he's renting out as an incubator, courtesy of his severance package from Hooli.

Meanwhile, Jared is still stuck at Erlich's spot: The Airbnb guest who's squatting in his apartment is now Airbning it himself. And he's scaring away possible tenants: "It's funny we're named Pied Piper, but we're beset with rats," Jared declares after noting that there were "fresh droppings" in the garage space where he lives. "Little rascals!... I was thinking maybe we could just pick a day and just drench it in hawk urine, because the scent of a predator can keep rodents at bay.”

After Erlich barges in on Big Head's incubator, he concocts a plan of the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" variety. "What are we doing here?" he says. "Why are we fighting like this" I'm going to steal your guys, you're going to steal my guys, we'll both wield the heft of our considerable fortunes until each of us have nearly nothing left. Is that what you want?" Obviously, Erlich is somewhat impecunious while Big Head is flush with cash. But Big Head might be stupid enough to partner up. "I'm big enough, are you big enough, Big Head?" They shake on a vague deal.

Over at Hooli, Gavin's spiritual leader, who has not conferred with the CEO in months, goads him into fighting back against the perceived threat of Pied Piper. At a board meeting, Gavin cites a bulldog as the ultimate example of dangerous inbreeding, explaining that Nucleus would have been successful if it had looked beyond current Hooli employees. So, ironically, Gavin hires the "outside" help of Endframe, the middle-out compression rival who just scooped up all of Hooli's outgoing Nucleus team. In fact, the CEO doesn't even recognize his former employees when he rehires them, buying Endframe for $250 million.

Gavin calls Richard to taunt him with the news, but Erlich, in the middle of a bong-induced coughing fit, realizes that Hooli has unintentionally saved Pied Piper. By putting a price on a similar company, he's justified their work, giving Laurie Bream a figure that Pied Piper's platform might be worth. When the team arrives at the Pied Piper offices the next day, "Action Jack" Barker is out. The CEO's chair will remain empty, Bream tells them, but "you are all at liberty to commence work upon the platform."

Silicon Valley's fourth episode reminds us, as did episode three, how fun it can be to see the Pied Piper team confidently work on a project. While the show is reflexively barbed when it comes to its background — the industry of technology and innovation — it can also be gently optimistic about a group of people working together on something, whatever that thing may be.

While "middle-out" compression is just a symbol for advancement, for a group of people coming up with something new and exciting, it's one we can readily believe in, especially when the characters we trust do so. Now that the countervailing idea to middle-out's platform — a nothing box — is out the window, there's further room for the team, and the show, to innovate. Dreamers, dream away.

Previously: Silicon Valley Ep. 3.3: 'Shawshank Redemption'

HBO's Silicon Valley premiered its third season on Monday, and accompanying it was a long interview with one of the show's stars. T.J. Miller plays the blustery Erlich Bachmann on the show — a character that both buys into and mocks the excesses of the Valley. In discussion with Esquire, it turns out that Miller has one part of that equation down pat. I'll let you guess which one.

"This is the reason we're making fun of you: because you don't get it," Miller said of the tech industry. "You don't have a sense of humor about yourselves. You're all these pretentious rich assholes who do this fake hero-worship of the guy who thought of the idea for Uber."

Indeed, the show excels in skewering both the self-seriousness and obliviousness of the tech industry. And while it's not all condescension on Miller's part (he's a fan of Elon Musk, for example), that is the overall sense one is left with after reading the interview.

"Elon Musk certainly gets the joke," he said of the show's humor. "There are others who not only don't get the joke, but they're calling me out for saying the word 'bitch' on stage and they have pending sexual harassment and assault cases — the hypocrisy is lost on most of those people. I'd say most of them don't get the joke, and that's why they like the show."

Perhaps the best part of the interview is when he recalls an experience he had as host of the 2015 Crunchies.

At the Crunchies everyone was like, "That's Travis Kalanick's girlfriend." I was like, "Who is that?" And they were like, "What!? The guy from Uber!" They're all kind of walking around with too much money, but [they have] great ideas sometimes. But Uber is a horrible company. They're horrible to their drivers. And because it's a new frontier, they can play by their own rules. They just squeeze the drivers for everything. They're just increasing the IPO so Travis Kalanick can jack off to it at night, I guess?

Miller has some choice thoughts when it comes to San Francisco as well, observing that we "live in a really expensive, foggy place that's good for walking with artisan meats and breads." Which, yeah, those are just a few of the many wonderful things about our great city — thank you for noticing.

Related: Silicon Valley Ep. 3.1: 'Decacorn'