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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: June 14, 2015
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Silicon Valley, “Two Days of the Condor” (Season 2, Episode 10) [Stream on HBO GO]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: In its current fourth season, the cyclical nature of Silicon Valley‘s plotting has become fairly apparent. The Pied Piper guys create something awesome, see the very tip of the iceberg of success, have that success snatched away from them in some way, might have to lose the company, might have to sell the company, do sell the company, find a way to create something awesome within the new company, fight their way out of that new company’s straight jacket, see the very tip of the iceberg of success, and the cycle continues. This doesn’t make Silicon Valley a bad show — it still boasts a phenomenal cast and continually sends up corporate culture better than almost any other show on TV — but it does tend to make following along with/caring about the plot a little bit like running up to kick the football that Lucy Van Pelt is holding out for you.
But we didn’t always know this, and with naiveté comes some perks, including being able to enjoy some things that foreknowledge wouldn’t allow. One such perk was the second-season finale episode, “Two Days of the Condor,” which might represent Silicon Valley at its most triumphant, plot-wise. The culmination of a two-season arc that saw our heroes build the Pied Piper compression algorithm, only to have the reprehensible Gavin Belson (Matt Ross) claim it as Hooli intellectual property and attempt to sue it out from under Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) and his pals.
In the s2 finale, Richard is about to face the verdict in Gavin’s arbitration case (i.e. they’re certain to lose Pied Piper), while at the same time an injured mountain climber is live-streaming his life-threatening crisis over the Pied Piper livestream, an event that is both a showcase to the world of what the technology can do and yet at the same time a threat to overload the system. It’s a perfect Silicon Valley story in that it wrings comedy from the idea that in this world, success and failure are separated by a razor-thin line, and one can turn incredibly quickly into the other. (It’s also
This episode also includes perhaps my favorite scene from the series, where Jared (Zach Woods) tries to convince Erlich (T.J. Miller) that he won’t sell his home because the value of the work they’ve done in it is priceless.
The episode ramps up to a conclusion that I think you could fully call thrilling, as Richard gets a verdict he was not expecting, then has to race against time in order to rescind the order to kill the whole program. There’s a momentum to the episode that puts it on a higher plane and feels significant in a way that comedy finales often can’t seem to pull off. For thirty minutes there, Silicon Valley got to be Game of Thrones.
