There are two scenes in \u201cValley Of Heart\u2019s Delight\u201d that feel like they\u2019re about to change the whole character of The Audacity. The people onscreen seem to connect on a deeper emotional level than ever before, lowering their defenses and holstering their insults to flash some vulnerability and humanity. In the first, Anushka puts all tough talking aside to get earnest about the real, potentially world-changing promise that she now sees in her husband\u2019s pet project. In the other, JoAnne takes a phone call\u2014one of practically dozens she gets across the episode\u2014and appears to receive some difficult news about Orson\u2019s health. Both had me thinking: Is this a softness that was hiding behind the bite of the first two episodes?<\/p>\n
By the end of each scene, however, that question was put to rest. The Audacity might allow us momentary glimpses of compassion and pain for its Silicon Valley gargoyles, but this show remains a nasty piece of work. Anushka pours her heart out about the wonders she just saw Xander work for a PTSD-triggered Tom and gives Martin a teensy bit of a sales pitch within her soliloquy about helping tech reclaim its soul. But Martin isn\u2019t buying it, and he can recite (with crushing nonchalance from Simon Helberg) the many, baroque ways in which his wife has belittled his digital Pinocchio. She\u2019s forgotten all of this, but he, devastatingly and hilariously, remembers specific digs and when they were made. (\u201cIn February of last year, you told me Xander looked like if a jellybean had delusions of grandeur.\u201d)<\/p>\n
More bitterly funny is the conclusion to JoAnne\u2019s phone call, when we find she\u2019s been moved to tears not by a bad prognosis for Orson and his troublesome guts but by learning the stool sample she schlepped across an entire hospital campus\u2014in a, frankly, strangely calibrated sequence\u2014came from the family dog. Her kid may be full of shit about how he\u2019s been spending his days, but none of it was extruded ahead of this appointment.<\/p>\n
This all feels right for an episode where Duncan forms a Tony Soprano-and-the-ducks-style relationship with a resilient spider in his and Lili\u2019s fashionably spartan ensuite\u2014only for Thelma to unceremoniously put the meaningful arachnid out of its misery. Against a backdrop of wild fires and ominously orange skies, \u201cValley Of Heart\u2019s Delight\u201d caustically illustrates what little soul (or dignity) there is to save in The Audacity\u2019s Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n
Carl stabs Duncan in the hand with a fork, and later his security detail pummels the Hypergnosis CEO. But Dunacn\u2019s so shameless that he\u2019ll risk further bodily harm from Mother Nature to make his pitch one more time. Maybe he fancies himself the spider, but the guy who\u2019s \u201cnot perfect\u201d but \u201cimpossible to ignore\u201d (in Anushka\u2019s words) is coming off a little more cockroach-like considering the circumstances.<\/p>\n
So long as its main character remains more pathetic than sympathetic, comedy will remain The Audacity\u2019s strongest suit. There\u2019s a great deal of surprise in this episode\u2019s physical gags. Zach Galifianakis\u2019 momentary restraint is a great misdirection in the stabbing scene, and the security guys coming out of nowhere to tackle Duncan makes that laugh hit hard. There\u2019s a lot of catharsis in seeing a tech titan like him get tossed around like a rag doll, but Billy Magnussen puts in the work to make this particular tech titan a particularly funny target. Duncan has, as they say, a very punchable face, and the actor playing him gets that across in both the smug, self-satisfied smiles of his final address to Carl and the barely-holding-it-together, speaking-through-gritted teeth grins he puts on when he\u2019s at wit\u2019s end or trying to save face.<\/p>\n
And there continues to be a genuine spark and tartness to the punchlines. The reveal that Orson\u2019s middle name is, improbably, Barack is a well-played peek into the mindset his parents were in when he was born as well as some primo, well-meaning white-liberal nonsense. (It\u2019s not for nothing that it shares an inspiration with the most meme\u2019d line from Get Out<\/a>.) Magnussen adds a couple of zingers to The Quotable Duncan Park in \u201cValley Of Heart\u2019s Delight\u201d: \u201cTypical? That sounds like a slur\u201d he says when Gary delivers the results of last week<\/a>\u2019s neuropsych exam. With Carl in his sights, he says with utmost confidence, \u201cI feel like Jane Goodall about to shoot a gorilla.\u201d And when the writing isn\u2019t up to those standards, there\u2019s a whole cast of top-notch line readers to rely on. I was really tickled by the mustard Sarah Goldberg puts on \u201cAnd were you planning on spending all of ninth grade jacking it off back here?\u201d<\/p>\n If only the higher, cataclysmic register of \u201cValley Of Heart\u2019s Delight\u201d worked as well for everyone else\u2019s stories as it does for Duncan\u2019s. Between his cowboy outfit for the abandoned barbecue with Tom\u2019s boss and the climactic showdown with Carl, he\u2019s got a whole \u201clone gunslinger of the wasteland\u201d thing going for him this week. But try as the frantic camerawork, editing, and score might, JoAnne\u2019s race to deliver Orson\u2019s stool sample in time fails to reach similar heights. The sense of absurdity is in the right place, and yet, with everything else going on in her life, would timely poop delivery really feel this life-or-death for her? The way that sequence drags on, we have a lot of time to ponder that question. There\u2019s also the matter of why someone who\u2019s trying so hard to bury some damaging secrets would leave one of the keys to those secrets in the hands of a doped-up teenager. You could say that external factors are keeping her from thinking straight, but she managed to be pretty on the ball under the threat of exposure in episode two.<\/p>\n The end-times vibe of \u201cValley Of Heart\u2019s Delight\u201d gets a major boost from a runner about the death and music of invented singer-songwriter Linus Po. His sorta Leonard Cohen, sorta Nick Cave songs unite characters across the show: JoAnne credits the aptly named Po with getting her through high school, while Lili, already neck deep in gloom thanks to the fires, reminds Duncan that Po headlined the first concert they saw together. It\u2019s a neat addition to the world of The Audacity, and I\u2019m eager to learn who\u2019s providing the musician\u2019s vocals. But like other attempts to humanize the characters in \u201cValley Of Heart\u2019s Delight,\u201d I find this one more intriguing than 100-percent successful.<\/p>\n Whatever Po meant to the people in Duncan\u2019s orbit, the musician is just one more data point for the unraveling founder to harvest and manipulate to his advantage. His connection to Po is one of clout and domination: Having capitalized on and drained the man\u2019s credibility with a performance at a company party years back, Duncan then uses his not-yet-cold corpse as a ventriloquist dummy, celebrating his newly forged alliance with Carl with a bespoke, AI-generated song in the style of Po.\u00a0<\/p>\n As he rides into the blotted-out sunset on the high of a victory he earned through foolhardy obstinance and a grave-robbing musical tribute he has not earned, The Audacity bares its teeth once more. In Lili\u2019s doomscrolling and Tom\u2019s Gulf War flashbacks, \u201cValley Of Heart\u2019s Delight\u201d shows us there are characters on this show whose fear and pain run deeper than an IPO belly flop. But notice how Tom\u2019s breakthrough with Xander plays out onscreen. He\u2019s behind the glass wall of a conference room, being observed like some exotic, emotional species by Anushka, Martin, and Harp. Martin even describes what he\u2019s watching as \u201can experiment.\u201d The true creatures of the Valley are still a few recovered shards shy of repairing their shattered souls.<\/p>\n Stray observations<\/p>\n \u2022 Fun fact: The episode\u2019s title comes from the nickname that people used for the Santa Clara Valley before they called it Silicon Valley. Erik Adams is a contributor to The A.V. Club.\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There are two scenes in \u201cValley Of Heart\u2019s Delight\u201d that feel like they\u2019re about to change the whole…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":631308,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[49,48,75,348],"class_list":{"0":"post-631307","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=631307"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631307\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/631308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=631307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=631307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=631307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n\u2022 Great, understated bit of physical comedy from Galifianakis: the weird, arm wrist-flapping way Carl runs to grab that frisbee from JoAnne\u2019s yard.\u00a0<\/p>\n