Granfalloon
Season 1
Episode 8
Editor’s Rating
2 stars
**
Photo: Ed Araquel/AMC
“Granfalloon” is now available on AMC+ ahead of its 9 p.m. ET broadcast next Sunday.
There’s one good pungent little joke toward the end of the woefully misjudged finale of The Audacity, and it’s worth noting up front because its placement in the story is a large part of what makes it so effective. It’s the morning after a fateful evening for all the attendees of the WatchCode Forum and the Las Altas gala, which, for dramatic convenience, happen to take place on different floors of the same venue. Lili is out on the porch, reeling from the turbulence that has shaken the foundations of her marriage and family and taking some solace from the news that her daughter’s estranged friend has stayed with her overnight. Her longtime housemaid–uncredited third parent, Thelma, brings her a nice cup of coffee.
Lili takes a sip and frowns. “This is oat,” she mutters. “I said cashew.”
For Lili in her darkest hour to summon a little petty annoyance over the wrong milk substitute for her coffee is a satirical grace note in an episode conspicuously short on laughs. Without the spiky bits of black comedy that tend to keep the average episode of The Audacity afloat, creator-writer Jonathan Glatzer leans into the show’s long-standing weaknesses in plotting and characterization as well as a blinding contempt for Silicon Valley that is righteous yet dramatically limiting. Over the course of an hour-plus, the most despicable people do the most despicable things, and the least despicable people pay the price. Such is the way of the world as Glatzer has chosen to depict it.
The wrenching seriousness of the finale is apparent from the opening sequence, in which poor Tom Ruffage is driven out to Carl’s military playground for a hyperrealistic reenactment of a World War I skirmish in the trenches. Carl loves the idea of having a real-life veteran like Tom add to the verisimilitude, but either he hasn’t considered the trauma Tom may feel in a situation like that or he simply doesn’t care. Back at the estate over cognac, Carl muses about how the money he’s spent on war games has gained him perspective: “I just bought the Western Front in 4-D, and it was far from quiet. If that wasn’t what war felt like, I don’t want to know.” Because the fate of his entire VA data project rests in Carl’s hands, Tom has to bite his tongue, which is generally how billionaires like Carl turn into monsters because no one is incentivized to tell them they’re wrong.
Yet even Tom has his limits. When Carl takes him to a room filled with historical battle souvenirs and models, he points Tom to a display of his battlefield exploits at Medina Ridge during the Gulf War, with a miniature young Tom standing atop an M1 Abrams tank. That’s enough to send Tom over the edge, screaming at his boss about how his obscene hobby doesn’t give him any idea what war is really like. Later in the episode, when Carl orchestrates a massive betrayal of Tom and everyone else on the restructured Hypergnosis team, it feels like a response to Tom speaking his mind, but it isn’t the case. Carl was going to hang Tom out to dry and feel no remorse about it, just as he brought Tom back to his 4-D WWI battlefield without giving a thought to his PTSD. The real winners in Silicon Valley, in the show’s view, are the sociopaths.
The big plot twists around the WatchCode Forum are mostly well orchestrated, mainly because they bring Carl and Duncan, two supposed rivals, into the ultimate in evil-tech-bro partnership. It turns out that Carl’s installation of Anushka as CEO at Hypergnosis wasn’t a vote of confidence in her as a leader in ethical technology but a means to access her husband’s sophisticated AI chatbot, which he could then turn around and sell to the highest bidder. All that business about Xander acting as a therapy bot for veterans turned out, in retrospect, to be Carl’s personal beta testing for the much more lucrative application of assisting future veterans in bombing targets from the air. To the extent that it might help ease an airman’s suffering, Xander (now renamed Xandar) could take some of the responsibility off their hands. As Carl tells Tom by way of cold consolation, “Think about this. When you were attacking those fleeing unarmed Iraqi soldiers, Xandar could have spared you your moral injury.”
It’s all enough to send a guy in front of a moving train.
Though Martin is devastated to see his passion project ripped away from him, he and Anushka at least have a billion-dollar payout to cushion the fall. As for Tom, he’s blindsided by Carl and his former partner arranging the deal with the Department of Defense and even more deeply bruised by handing over precious VA personal data to men who spend their days dreaming up cynical ways to exploit it for profit. Meanwhile, Duncan takes the stage at WatchCode to the boos he fully anticipates and welcomes as the cost of doing business. He knows the idea of PINATA is nakedly evil and unworkable as a premium subscription product, but he can use it as a corporate blackmail device, threatening his competitors in much the same way he has been threatening JoAnne all season. If they don’t want their dirty secrets exposed, they know whom to pay off.
But here’s where the plotting turns ridiculously tidy. All season, the teenagers on The Audacity have been set up as troubled, neglected afterthoughts to their parents’ indulgences and machinations, and the show finally pulls the trigger on Chekhov’s gun. Sort of. Orson steals that pink handgun from his mother’s desk and places it in the trophy case for Tess to find, but the principal finds it first and blames poor Jamie, who was thought (also wrongly) to have placed her dad’s stolen tungsten cube in the same place. Jamie gets suspended for the day, overhears her mother calling her a “black sheep” who bungled her future, and then gets notice from Stanford that she has been rejected for early admission.
It’s all enough to send a girl in front of a moving train.
The coincidence of Tom and Jamie attempting to commit suicide simultaneously, on the same set of tracks, is a twist too absurd to abide. To stretch credulity even further beyond the breaking point, Jamie has to walk an untold distance from her house to the area around the venue in order to put her in alignment with Tom. Perhaps we’re meant to understand Tom’s death as his final sacrifice as a soldier, putting himself one more time in harm’s way to save a fellow American. But it’s a ridiculous turn of events, even if the script does put both characters in a place where they feel that desperate and alone.
The bigger problem is that The Audacity hasn’t seemed to care that much until now. The abrupt shift into a more dramatic finale assumes an emotional connection to characters who may not be as outrageously vile as Duncan or Carl but who haven’t escaped the show’s jaundiced eye either. At his worst moments, Tom was a needy, pitiful figure who longed to be treated like a VIP, and Jamie acted like a mopey trust-fund baby, what her mother calls “a genuinely mid person” in this very episode. Their fates aren’t nearly as resonant as the episode expects them to be because not enough work has been devoted to sketching them out over the season.
The finale also moves JoAnne, a more major character, to the back burner. While Gary discovers through Orson that Duncan has been blackmailing his wife for reasons unknown, her future is mostly teased as a to-be-continued thread for the second season (which AMC renewed before the first started airing). Question marks also loom over Duncan and Carl’s partnership and the state of Duncan and Lili’s marriage, which has inched away from the divorce Lili threatened. No doubt the real Silicon Valley will offer fresh horror for the show to satirize next season, but The Audacity is still searching for its groove.
• Finally, a payoff for Orson calling Gary a “cuck” relentlessly, though he may wish his wife’s betrayal were a more garden-variety affair. Weaning Orson off the tincture drops will go a long way toward making that character more tolerable.
• More harsh words from Lili about her daughter: “This kid grew up with every possible advantage — task force, tutors, the internship at Wimbledon, the altruism cruise. None of it took. She still bungled it.” (“Altruism cruise” is an incredible phrase, and such ventures apparently exist, though usually under the portmanteau “voluntourism.” A luxurious form of giving back!)
• Duncan is unfazed by Gary calling him a “fucking sociopath.” He tells Harper, “He doesn’t know VCs love sociopaths. I’m going to crush this interview. I’m going to stick my dick in God Mountain.” And he turns out to be correct.
• Friday the 13th fans may chuckle at a Department of Defense official who goes by the name General Voorhees.
• With Carl’s knife still in Tom’s back, Anushka’s wan offer of $5 million to seed a veterans foundation for Tom to lead is a nasty little twist. The quick math: 60 million veterans. Five million dollars. 30 cents per vet. He has been fooled into selling them out for less than a pack of gum.
• Duncan’s interview at the forum gives the show another opportunity to editorialize, but nothing here seems wrong: “Silicon Valley uses people’s private data the way the computers in The Matrix used humans as batteries. If Congress passed a law barring companies from collecting millions of data points on people’s private lives, if privacy was a right and not a polite suggestion, I’m sorry, this entire industry would fall on its collective dick.”
• Duncan using his new DNA tech to discover, in the most public way imaginable, that Jamie is Hamish’s child, not his, is a perfect example of the “Me sowing, Me reaping” meme.
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