Silicon Valley Season 4 Episode 4: Teambuilding Exercise Review

If you would like to read my review of the last episode, click here.

Synopsis: When Richard reaches out to an unlikely ally, Jared worries about the company he’s keeping. Gilfoyle gets tough on security in the wake of Dinesh’s latest dalliance; later, he considers whether to put his pride aside for a job. Concerned about Jian-Yang’s commitment to his app, Erlich takes matters into his own hands.  (HBO)

Writer: Meghan Pleticha 

Director: Jamie Babbit

Rating: TV-MA

Running Time: 29mins

The last episode ended with Richard going to Belson’s house for help and the start of this episode showed us how that meeting went. Belson wasn’t exactly happy to see him since Richard was responsible for his downfall. Belson thought Richard was there just to play with him. He didn’t believe in Richard’s idea but when he proved Belson wrong, he was onboard with Richard accidentally setting Belson’s couch on fire.

From that point on, Belson and Richard were working together on a new company. The rest of the guys were skeptical of this new step. They did not want to work for Belson so he and Richard hired a recruiter to replace them. The rest of the guys were watching on the sidelines. Jared was jealous, nervous and overprotective while Gilfoyle didn’t care. In the best scene of the episode, Jared approached Richard to offer his services. He was willing to do anything for him, absolutely anything but he wouldn’t deny stabbing people for him by laughing maniacally.

The next big thing was Gilfoyle going through Richard’s list of potential recruits and insulting them in a way that only he can. Jared believed it to be a call for attention. Gilfoyle didn’t want to work for them but he believed that he just wanted to be wanted so they managed to woe him to their side.

Jian-Yang tested Seefood which seemed promising with hot dogs but that was the only thing that it could detect, classifying things as hot dogs and not hot dogs. To finish the app, someone had to scrape the internet to find pictures of food to add to the classifier. Since Erlich was more interested in spending their money on himself than hiring people to do this, he was forcing Jian-Yang to do this before Erlich took a picture of his genitals. He didn’t want to do this stupid work so he was looking for a job elsewhere. He had to work until they ran out of their financing so Jian-Yang bought a Corvette.

In the last episode, Big Head became a guest lecturer at Stanford but we learned here that all he did was show movies to his class. Needing some grunt work, Erlich took over his class and tasked his students to scrape the internet for pictures for Seefood. Once they figured out who he was, they had their own idea which was to do their own competing “Seefood” app.

With their financing gone, Erlich cashed out of Seefood but little did he know, when Jian-Yang showed Periscope his tech during a job interview, his tech was better than theirs so they gave him an acquisition offer. The problem for Erlich and Monica was that Ed Chen got all the recognition at Raviga and Erlich couldn’t cash in on the Periscope deal. Since Dinesh was still working at Seefood, he had now had to look at dick pics, much to the delight of Gilfoyle.

Dinesh and Mia were still together and while Mia wasn’t in the episode, she still made her presence known, or at least that’s what Gilfoyle wanted him to think. She was a hacker so a running gag was that he was pretending to be concerned about Dinesh’s security.

Overall, this was another good episode that saw the characters go in different directions but each subplot worked with Gilfoyle and Jared being the standouts. It was nice to see the episode not have a singular focus, giving these great actors and the writing a chance to shine.

Score: 8.5/10

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Keith Noakes

The EIC of the coincidentally-named keithlovesmovies.com. A Canadian who prefers to get out of the cold and into the warmth of a movie theatre.