Silicon Valley 4.07. The Patent Troll - Review:
Directed by Jamie Babbit & Andrew Law
With no new episode of sister-show Veep airing this week, Silicon Valley's The Patent Troll tackled an interesting subject, or more specifically, a troll who leeched off copyright laws to make a fortune. Richard, Jared and Dinesh are celebrating the success of their app having cracked the top 500 users chart for their related subject on the Hooli app store, however this in turn lures them into a trap from the titular Patent troll, a lawyer named Stuart Burke who makes a living off suing people which has put his son through College and earned him two homes. He's sued Stevie Wonder and made millions of some song lyrics. However, none as there's less and less value in song lyrics he has instead turned to raking in money from the royalties earned off patent trolling. Burke himself offers Richard a licensing fee of around $20,000 that he apparently owes for storing media files on a network. This puts Richard in a difficult position, but Richard being Richard, is too stubborn to accept the fee anyway and comes up with an ingenious new way to attempt to thwart Burke, because even though the law itself isn't exactly super strict on this, it would still cost far more to establish a court case.
Richard's alternative is to present an idea to the team of various app-makers around Pied Piper's place on the appstore. This initially appears to be successful until he learns that he's essentially been screwed over by the other companies, who have reached out to Burke and offered to settle the fee at a discount, meaning that Burke now has a more concrete case against Richard and rather than just wanting $20,000, he now wants to charge them for much more money than what they originally offered, coming in at $300,000. This would have been devastating for the team and puts them in a very difficult position indeed financially, and they're seemingly out of options. The backs to the wall situation however has happened so many times before in Silicon Valley you knew it was inevitable that they would find a way out, and it came in Richard's old notes from when he was younger, the old Pied Piper app and an algorithm that apparently found a flaw in Burke's claims and that the song Burke had rights to was actually not the original.
It's all a scam of course, but Richard relies on the lack of Burke's technical knowledge to put him in his place. Triumphant at getting Burke to sign over the details of the copyright, Richard returns home successful to the group. But of course, just as you know that the team will find their way out of something at the last minute, you also know that they'll wind up in a situation that screws them over even further. And it turns out that the inevitable bad news that was coming as soon as Richard's premature celebration finished, where it was revealed that the cost to bring the companies together to talk about fighting Burke was actually more expensive than fighting Burke, and although Richard kept his dignity, it would have saved him around $2,000 to take the settlement in the first place. It turns out that standing up to crime doesn't always pay.
In other news, Erlich's story continues this week. You've got to wonder with Erlich how the show will wrap up his storyline with just three episodes left, and what will happen with T.J Miller's character with him departing the show. Will Erlich leave town or will something worse happen to him? Hopefully they keep the door open for his potential return, because right now, he seems caught in the middle between two companies. Eventually getting to work with Laurie and Monica after begging (and effectively mansplaining mansplaining to them), he gets invited to a basketball game with Ed Chen. Despite knowing nothing about basketball and hating the sport, Erlich decides to go anyway, only to be shocked that rather than watching a game with Ed, he's actually meant to be playing. He ends up escaping this by having an incident with his leg, breaking it while installing a hoop on the roof of the garage door, that leaves him forced to update the scoreboard, spending his time in true Erlich fashion bragging to the supervisor that he's "man enough" to work at a company run by two women. His basketball knowledge isn't helping him however as he struggles with the concept of the basketball points system. For my money Erlich still remains one of the best characters on the show, and it's going to be really interesting to see how the writers handle next season without him being there, as his missed presence will most certainly be felt even if in large part, his ventures haven't closely been tied to the main team themselves.
Another interesting little tidbits that happened this week included Jian Yang's purchase of a $14,000-worth fridge, which is fully automated, complete with sending app updates to your phone to let you know what your food looks like while in the fridge, as well as keeping track of shopping list and coming in-built with a password so people can't steal food from the fridge. The fridge, coupled with Jian-Yang's bragging about it, causes Gilfoyle to resort to drastic measures, going so far as to temporarily cut the lights to the house in order to bypass into the fridge using Pied Piper's former mainframe, Anton - to get reconfigure the system so the hack can be completed, much to Jian-Yang's irritation at his name being misspelled. It shows that pissing off Gilfoyle is a bad thing to do, and maybe next time Jian-Yang - it's probably not a good idea to buy such an expensive fridge just because you can.
So on the whole, another fun episode of Silicon Valley that was over far too quickly for my liking. But there was plenty of good content here to digest, and it'll be interesting to see what happens when Silicon Valley returns on Sunday. I'll leave you with a few questions to ponder during the wait for next week's episode - Will you miss Erlich/T.J. Miller when he leaves at the end of the season? How do you think the writers are going to handle his exit? And also, the big one...
What did you think of this week's episode of Silicon Valley? Let me know in the comments section below and be sure to check out the next episode this Sunday at 9pm on HBO.
