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Thursday, July 6, 2017

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com ARTS

TV REVIEW

HBO

‘Silicon Valley’ ended its fourth season this past Sunday
‘Silicon’ Season Four finale 
bids goodbye to Bachman

Finale pleases with comedy, disappoints in goodbye to Miller

The success of any “Silicon 

Valley” episode has always started 
and ended with its characters. When 
the characters are connecting, the 
show’s jokes seem to build off of each 
other and produce a constant stream 
of laughs, à la the earlier Season Four 
episode 
“Intellectual 
Property.” 

Conversely, when the characters are 
out of sync, the show’s gags struggle 
to land, as shown in another Season 
Four episode, “The Patent Troll.”

Fortunately for “Silicon Valley,” 

it has an outstanding cast that 
almost always appears to be in 
concert with one another to create 
on-screen hilarity, and the show’s 
Season Four finale “Server Error” is 
no exception. The episode fittingly 
concludes the series’s exceptional 
fourth season that featured an 
effective balance between low-brow 
humor and critical character and 
plot progressions.

One of “Silicon Valley”’s more 

shocking developments this season 
has been the extent of Richard 
Hendricks’s (Thomas Middleditch, 
“The Final Girls”) transition to a 
shrewd entrepreneur at the expense 
of his moral code. Over the course 
of the season, Hendricks has turned 
from a somewhat naïve executive 
of a fledgling video chat company 
to the visionary CEO of a bold 
start-up seeking to revolutionize 
the internet. Hendricks’s turn has 
been characterized by deceitful 
and cutthroat business maneuvers, 
which are highlighted in “Server 

Error” when Hendricks coldly 
rejects Gavin Belsam’s (Matt Ross, 
“American Psycho”) partnership 
proposal by telling Belsam, “I 
think basically you’re just a server 
company now, and we intend to 
make servers obsolete, so… in the 
end, I’ll be the one devouring you.”

“Silicon Valley”’s stunning finale 

also sees Hendricks’s affair with Dan 
Melcher’s (Jake Broder, “In a Day”) 
wife come to light. The series has 
teased a revelation of Hendricks’s 
short-lived sex romp with Liz 
(Leisha Haley, “The L Word”) in 
previous episodes, so its emergence 

in the finale isn’t unexpected. Rather, 
what was unexpected was the affair 
itself, which always seemed to be 
too outrageous for Hendricks, to the 
point it infringed on believability of 
the affair. Instead, the real function 
of Hendricks’s cuckoldry was to 
serve as a barometer of his personal 
transformation to an unscrupulous 
entrepreneur.

Hendricks’s newfound persona 

takes center stage in “Server Error” 
and figures to be a significant piece 
of the show’s storyline next season, 
too. However, “Silicon Valley”’s 
fifth season will test the series, as 
it tries to recover from the exit of 
Erlich Bachman (T.J. Miller, “Office 
Christmas 
Party”), 
which 
was 

bungled in “Server Error.”

As 
the 
crass, 
pot-smoking 

landlord of Pied Piper, Bachman has 
become the source of much of the 
series’s ridiculous style of humor. 
His constant schemes against Jian 
Yang (Jimmy O. Yang, “Patriot’s 
Day”) throughout Season Four 
provided 
“Silicon 
Valley” 
with 

utterly hilarious scenes, including 
Yang’s 
hilarious 
impression 
of 

Bachman in “Intellectual Property.” 
Despite 
being 
such 
a 
crucial 

character, 
Bachman’s 
exit 
was 

rushed and poorly executed even 
in the little amount of time it was 
given. While it was funny to watch 
Belsam negotiate for Bachman to 
smoke opium in Tibet for five years, 
it was an underwhelming finish for 
such an integral character on the 
show.

While 
Bachman’s 
exit 
will 

profoundly disrupt “Silicon Valley,” 
the series has such a stellar cast of 
veteran comedians that it should 
be able to sustain its overwhelming 
success. The show’s main stars — 
Middleditch, Kumail Nanjiani (“The 
Big Sick”), Martin Starr (“Freaks and 
Geeks”), Josh Brener (“In the Loop”) 
and Zach Woods (“The Internship”) 
— continue to shine due to their 
superb chemistry. “Silicon Valley” 
is also boosted by the expanding 
roles occupied by Hoover (Chris 
Williams, “Curb Your Enthusiasm”) 
and Ed Chen (Tim Chiou, “Love Is 
All You Need?”). Williams especially 
emerged in this fourth season 
because of his eccentric blend of 
naïve obedience to Hooli. With more 
scenes of Williams and Chiou on the 
series, “Silicon Valley” will make 
viewers accept, albeit not forget, 
Bachman’s departure.

‘Lake’ is a vivid 
story collection

BOOK REVIEW

With the opening sentence in 

the first of his new collection of 
short stories “The Girl of the Lake,” 
Bill Roorbach catapults us back 
into the world of middle school 
adventures: “Bobby Mullendore 
was sick of sixth grade, especially 
without his best friend Jack B., plus 
it was spring.” In a move as old as 
time, Bobby forges a note and skips 
school for several days in a row. He 
spies on a neighboring estate in his 
spy gear and gets caught. Terrified 
at 
first 
by 
the 
commanding 

personages around Harbinger Hall 
(also the title of the story), Bobby 
meets the old man who owns it; he 
begins giving Bobby lessons on his 
days off from school, starting with 
Russian history but quickly moving 
on to other subjects. In a few pages 
that function as a montage, we 
see Bobby grow up and follow in 
the footsteps, in a way, of that old 
man, but the story ends with a 
simple, elegant twist that leaves 
you questioning what you think 
you know.

The rest of Roorbach’s stories 

operate the same way, sketching 
simple vignettes with refreshing 
clarity. In “Kiva,” a self-admitted 
“omega” boy tries with all his 
might to win the heart of the alpha 
girl; his father tries to help him, 
and explains that he must not 
try to imitate the behavior of the 
alpha males, but rather learn how 
to win her over in other ways (so 
naturally, he tries to learn how to 
do a french braid). His father takes 

the two of them and the girl’s two 
sisters out on a picnic, where more 
than a few people decide to take a 
chance on a sexual encounter, in a 
bizarrely rapid succession.

“Fall” peels back the layers of 

sentiment you can find yourself 
wrapped up in when someone 
dies, and you feel emotions more 
complicated 
than 
just 
grief; 

“Some Should” details the utterly 
unpredictable direction a blind 

date with a priest — a sinner just the 
same — can go in (and this one has a 
shout-out to the Residential College 
at 
the 
University). 
“Princesa” 

shows the ridiculousness of older 
men fawning over younger famous 
ingenues, a story that borders on 
absurdism.

The narrators of these stories 

feel 
like 
stenographers. 
The 

dialogue is pulled straight from 
real life, revealing feelings so 
recognizable that reading the 
stories feels like a heady case of 
déjà vu; it’s bittersweet. They cover 
how quickly things can change 
in the life of the schoolyard, the 
cooling of passion between two 
people who always swore they 
would stay in touch, the kinds 
of inconceivable back stabbings 
that romantic unravelings can 
lead to, the intricate forms that 
betrayal can take in the worlds of 
art curatorship and community 
theater, and what it looks like 
when two people fall in love, if not 
at first sight, then at first rashly 
constructed plan for a future 
together. Roorbach has pushed 
the short story form to its limits, 
somehow molding worlds with 
depth in only a few pages each 
time, making them breathtaking in 
their simplicity.

SOPHIA KAUFMAN
Daily Book Review Editor

“The Girl of 
the Lake”

Bill Roorbach

Algonquin Books of 

Chapel Hill

June 27th, 2017

Roorbach’s recent collection weaves 
stories of intense emotion and simplicity

Reading the 

stories feels like a 
heady case of déjà 
vu; it’s bittersweet

CONNOR GRADY

Daily Arts Writer

“Silicon Valley”

HBO

Season Four Finale