Valley of Heart’s Delight
Season 1
Episode 3
Editor’s Rating
3 stars
***
The tension between Duncan and JoAnne hits a tipping point as they realize they are bound by mutually assured destruction.
Photo: Ed Araquel/AMC
“Valley of Heart’s Delight” is now available on AMC+ ahead of its 9 p.m. ET broadcast next Sunday.
Anyone who’s spent any time on social media has experienced the cognitive dissonance between the myth of the visionary tech billionaire and the reality that they spend most of the day stepping on rakes in public. That men like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are entrusted with businesses of tectonic influence can be difficult to understand, but their cults of personality have been able to survive scrutiny, perhaps because the money itself is too imposing a firewall for their own stupidity to penetrate. This may be why Russ Hanneman, the Mark Cuban-inspired investor on the HBO series Silicon Valley, was constantly worried about his net worth dropping below a billion. Because if it did, he would be exposed as an obvious buffoon.
That’s Duncan’s dilemma from the very beginning of this fitfully hilarious episode of The Audacity. After forcing “Dr. Gary” to give him a neuropsych test last week, he gets back some disturbing news: He is not neurodivergent. In Palo Alto, the thinking goes, only those “on the spectrum” are capable of producing those out-of-the-box ideas that make successful products and give socially awkward types the aura of genius that will seed their prosperity forever. Being diagnosed as “completely typical” is a disaster for him, particularly since he has worked so hard at excusing — or, let’s be honest, nurturing — the most awful behavior associated with neurodivergence. “I have zero sense of humor and zero empathy,” he insists. “I’m an apex predator. I eat empathy for breakfast.”
“Valley of Heart’s Delight” provides a nice narrative mini-arc for Duncan to get a better sense of his true value. It was obvious after his reminiscences last week over his late partner Hamish that the success of Fahfa, which sounds like the vague yet all-consuming Everything App that Musk has been wanting Twitter/X to be, is owed to this poor, awkward soul that he teased out of existence. By contrast, Hypergnosis seems like the unfortunate solo project of a rock star who never realized that he was not the engine of the band that made him famous, like Roger Waters peeling away from Pink Floyd to make some of the worst records of the mid-‘80s. Duncan has perhaps correctly identified that he’s found a potentially lucrative space for his company in the data business, and he’s shameless and unethical enough to raise money and “Viagra,” its questionable value. But he’s given no indication that he knows what his company does.
No matter. For the time being, he’s focused on exploiting his relationship with JoAnne, who’s so put off by the idea of collaborating with him on getting inside information from clients that she mows down the succulents at Orson’s new private school in order to dodge a conversation. Plotting hasn’t been the show’s strong suit so far, but there’s a lot of good tension here between Duncan and JoAnne, who seems compromised but has her own cards to play. After discovering that JoAnne has been taking advantage of her clients on the market, Duncan feels like he has leverage over her, but she reminds him that they’re bound by mutually assured destruction. If he gets her fired, then she will no longer be bound by doctor-patient confidentiality. “I will air all of your weird, skid-marked, filthy laundry,” she tells him. “And I will gladly go down, so long as I take you with me.”
One ace up JoAnne’s sleeve is Carl Bardolph. She knows Carl well enough from the session to recognize him as the ideal candidate to humiliate Duncan, because he’s both rich enough to give Duncan the fat partnership offer he was denied by Cupertino and angry enough to reject him as forcefully (and fork-fully) as possible. When Duncan tracks Carl down at a diner and blows past every sign that the man doesn’t want to be bothered, he ends up getting stabbed in the palm with a fork, which in turn sends Carl into an emotional spiral about his traumatic interaction with this “discount CEO.” The scenario is perfect for JoAnne, who gets to play emergency therapist for Carl on one hand while indirectly rebuffing Duncan on the other. Win-win!
Yet as ridiculous as The Audacity makes Duncan look most of the time, the episode suggests that he possesses “completely typical” strength of being a good, relentless pitchman, like an elevated version of a door-to-door salesperson who won’t take “no” for an answer. That doesn’t sound like something Hamish would have excelled at doing, but it likely allowed Fahfa to gain a foothold and made Duncan the face of the company. After repeated attempts to reach Carl, including one where Carl’s security tackles him outside the restaurant, Duncan finally comes to him with an angle that puts them on equal footing. He tells the story of Linus Po, a recently deceased musician whom he hired to play at his home for $4.5 million after Linus had denied a series of offers at a smaller (but also obscene) number. Duncan recalls Linus playing three songs and throwing him the “double bird,” but after some therapy, he came to the conclusion that Linus was “giving himself the finger” for selling out and that he’d broken him so badly that he never made another record.
It’s that brazen contempt for humanity that seems to speak to Carl and makes him receptive to Duncan’s grand vision for vacuuming up private information on a mass scale. “We’re not just mining data, Carl,” says Duncan. “We’re going the important work of profiling every single human on the planet.” To drive the point home, The Audacity stages this scene at the peak of a California wildfire, when only true iconoclasts like Carl and Duncan feel insulated enough from consequences to believe that real-world dangers don’t apply to them. Though the show doesn’t make any explicit connection between the energy suck of data centers and the acceleration of environmental catastrophe, it certainly creates an appropriate ambiance for this partnership.
Of course, these men will absolutely hate each other again soon, but a $300 million cash infusion is the fistful of viagra that Duncan’s company desperately needs, especially at a time when the cabinet-level VA secretary would rather party with Spookle. Now that JoAnne’s plan has backfired by working in his favor, perhaps she’ll want a cut of the loot. After all, she could say she masterminded it like Duncan did Fahfa.
• Block that metaphor! There’s some significance to Duncan’s relationship to the bathroom spider, but I’m not inclined to give such a clunky device much attention. Apologies for slacking on the job.
• Lili obsessing over the loss of the family’s little-used Napa home is low-hanging fruit for a satire about tech titans divorced from how real people live. It’s also the rare moment when Duncan’s smug indifference sets the proper tone.
• Orson’s days of living within the walls of his private school have ended, alas, but they lead into a subplot about his GI issues that doesn’t go anywhere particularly interesting. The twist of having his mother labor over a sample that turns out to be dog poop gets the thinnest of chuckles from me.
• Duncan talking to his phone about his injury is highly relatable: “Stabbed with fork… tetanus shot… question mark.” (For what it’s worth, an internet search under those terms suggests getting the shot if you haven’t had one within the last five years.)
• Simon Helberg has been a lot of fun so far as Martin, the weirdo who’s obsessed with refining his chatbot companion Xander. His breakthrough this week with the spiraling Tom Ruffage was a timely commentary on how AI can manipulate users into thinking they’re talking to a wise, compassionate, worldly “neurocompanion.”
• The Xander breakthrough also leads to Anushka finally paying respect to her husband, but he rejects her sudden interest in his project. “In February of last year,” he says, “you told me Xander looked like a jelly bean had delusions of grandeur. Then, in June of this year, you asked if I modeled him on a toddler’s chew toy.”
• A rooftop party in the middle of a wildfire was a bad idea even before the VA secretary backed out, but Duncan was determined to make it work: “Tell them the fires will give the meat a smoke flavor. You know, pork charred with old-growth giant sequoia rub.”
• Anushka airing the show’s basic thesis statement on tech: “Did we spread knowledge? No. People used to occasionally agree on the truth. Are we more tolerant of those who are different from ourselves? Please. Absolutely blew it on climate. Data centers emit more greenhouse gas than all of air travel. And have we made the lives of our children better? Probably no.”
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