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The Audacity<\/a><\/p>\n Granfalloon<\/p>\n \n Season 1<\/p>\n Episode 8\n <\/p>\n \n Editor\u2019s Rating<\/p>\n 2 stars<\/p>\n **\n <\/p>\n \n Photo: Ed Araquel\/AMC\n <\/p>\n \u201cGranfalloon\u201d is now available on AMC+ ahead of its 9 p.m. ET broadcast next Sunday.<\/p>\n There\u2019s one good pungent little joke toward the end of the woefully misjudged finale of The Audacity, and it\u2019s worth noting up front because its placement in the story is a large part of what makes it so effective. It\u2019s 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\u2019s estranged friend has stayed with her overnight. Her longtime housemaid\u2013uncredited third parent, Thelma, brings her a nice cup of coffee.<\/p>\n Lili takes a sip and frowns. \u201cThis is oat,\u201d she mutters. \u201cI said cashew.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n The wrenching seriousness of the finale is apparent from the opening sequence, in which poor Tom Ruffage is driven out to Carl\u2019s 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\u2019t considered the trauma Tom may feel in a situation like that or he simply doesn\u2019t care. Back at the estate over cognac, Carl muses about how the money he\u2019s spent on war games has gained him perspective: \u201cI just bought the Western Front in 4-D, and it was far from quiet. If that wasn\u2019t what war felt like, I don\u2019t want to know.\u201d Because the fate of his entire VA data project rests in Carl\u2019s 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\u2019re wrong.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s enough to send Tom over the edge, screaming at his boss about how his obscene hobby doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019s view, are the sociopaths.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s installation of Anushka as CEO at Hypergnosis wasn\u2019t a vote of confidence in her as a leader in ethical technology but a means to access her husband\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s suffering, Xander (now renamed Xandar) could take some of the responsibility off their hands. As Carl tells Tom by way of cold consolation, \u201cThink about this. When you were attacking those fleeing unarmed Iraqi soldiers, Xandar could have spared you your moral injury.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s all enough to send a guy in front of a moving train.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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\u2019t want their dirty secrets exposed, they know whom to pay off.<\/p>\n But here\u2019s where the plotting turns ridiculously tidy. All season, the teenagers on The Audacity have been set up as troubled, neglected afterthoughts to their parents\u2019 indulgences and machinations, and the show finally pulls the trigger on Chekhov\u2019s gun. Sort of. Orson steals that pink handgun from his mother\u2019s 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\u2019s stolen tungsten cube in the same place. Jamie gets suspended for the day, overhears her mother calling her a \u201cblack sheep\u201d who bungled her future, and then gets notice from Stanford that she has been rejected for early admission.<\/p>\n It\u2019s all enough to send a girl in front of a moving train.<\/p>\n 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\u2019re meant to understand Tom\u2019s death as his final sacrifice as a soldier, putting himself one more time in harm\u2019s way to save a fellow American. But it\u2019s a ridiculous turn of events, even if the script does put both characters in a place where they feel that desperate and alone.<\/p>\n The bigger problem is that The Audacity hasn\u2019t 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\u2019t escaped the show\u2019s 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 \u201ca genuinely mid person\u201d in this very episode. Their fates aren\u2019t nearly as resonant as the episode expects them to be because not enough work has been devoted to sketching them out over the season.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> before the first started airing). Question marks also loom over Duncan and Carl\u2019s partnership and the state of Duncan and Lili\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u2022 Finally, a payoff for Orson calling Gary a \u201ccuck\u201d relentlessly, though he may wish his wife\u2019s betrayal were a more garden-variety affair. Weaning Orson off the tincture drops will go a long way toward making that character more tolerable.<\/p>\n \u2022 More harsh words from Lili about her daughter: \u201cThis kid grew up with every possible advantage \u2014 task force, tutors, the internship at Wimbledon, the altruism cruise. None of it took. She still bungled it.\u201d (\u201cAltruism cruise\u201d is an incredible phrase, and such ventures apparently exist, though usually under the portmanteau \u201cvoluntourism.\u201d A luxurious form of giving back!)<\/p>\n \u2022 Duncan is unfazed by Gary calling him a \u201cfucking sociopath.\u201d He tells Harper, \u201cHe doesn\u2019t know VCs love sociopaths. I\u2019m going to crush this interview. I\u2019m going to stick my dick in God Mountain.\u201d And he turns out to be correct.<\/p>\n \u2022 Friday the 13th fans may chuckle at a Department of Defense official who goes by the name General Voorhees.<\/p>\n \u2022 With Carl\u2019s knife still in Tom\u2019s back, Anushka\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u2022 Duncan\u2019s interview at the forum gives the show another opportunity to editorialize, but nothing here seems wrong: \u201cSilicon Valley uses people\u2019s 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\u2019s private lives, if privacy was a right and not a polite suggestion, I\u2019m sorry, this entire industry would fall on its collective dick.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2022 Duncan using his new DNA tech to discover, in the most public way imaginable, that Jamie is Hamish\u2019s child, not his, is a perfect example of the \u201cMe sowing, Me reaping\u201d meme<\/a>.<\/p>\n Sign Up for the Vulture Newsletter<\/p>\n Entertainment news, for the pop-culture obsessed.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n