‘The Audacity’ Episode 3 Recap – Along Came A Spider

“Fly” is the most famously divisive episode of Breaking Bad, a budget-saving bottle hour in which Walter White and, eventually, Jesse become dangerously obsessed with a housefly. Depending on who you are, it’s either a great sign or a bit of an alarm bell that “Valley of Heart’s Delight” reminded me quite a bit of “Fly” in how it uses a protagonist’s unhealthy obsession with a tiny critter to do a lot of developmental heavy lifting. Some might argue that The Audacity hasn’t done enough yet – we’re only on Episode 3, after all – for an outing like this to work, but the spider, which becomes the object of Duncan’s obsession and a symbol of his neurotypical empathy, doesn’t have the same amount of focus as the fly in “Fly” gets. It clambers in and out of the story as needed, while Duncan’s fervent efforts to better his circumstances continue to backfire. Until they finally don’t, anyway.

Initially, the spider is an annoyance. Duncan is told that he isn’t neurodivergent on account of – among other things – his empathy, so he tries to prove his lack of the same by flushing the spider away. It keeps coming back, though. Eventually, its resilience inspires Duncan to keep going in the face of near-constant rejection. Climactically, its loss, flattened between the heels of a housekeeper’s slip-ons, nearly breaks him, leading to inevitable questions of his own suitability to the position he finds himself in and, ultimately, a renewed ambition that finally, seemingly works.

Early efforts are not fruitful, though. Led to Carl Bardolph by JoAnne, who later reveals that she did so knowing Carl would be hostile and hopefully get Duncan off her back, Duncan’s initial pitch for investing in Hypergnosis is met with a fork through his palm. Some things to note about Carl: He’s so rich and protected that he feels totally comfortable both stabbing a stranger with a fork and eating a banana with fries. That’s real wealth.

In short, it’s a no. Still licking his wounds, sometimes quite literally, Duncan races to the Hypergnosis HQ to discover that Anushka never properly dissuaded Ruffage and Jeffery, so they think a deal with the VA is still on the table. Inclined to take any win he can get, Duncan smells money in the mention of all the private data that might be gleaned from the VA’s expansive archives, so he decides to invite Ruffage’s boss, the Secretary of the VA – dubbed SecVa in every subsequent mention – to a performatively patriotic rooftop party festooned with Stars and Stripes bunting and including a spit-roasted hog. On account of the worsening wildfires, SecVa is delayed and forced to attend only one of her planned appointments. She elects for a meeting at the headquarters of Spookle, the VA’s social media partner. Duncan takes this about as well as you might imagine.

I hate to admit it, but Episode 3 of The Audacity made me like Duncan a bit. He’s clearly a maniac on multiple levels, but he’s also fundamentally lost. We’re talking, here, about a guy who wants to be neurodivergent because he thinks that jives best with his idealistic vision of exceptionalism, an essential quality of the kind of high-power CEO he wants to be. He has clearly never quite admitted to himself that his late business partner Hamish, who took his own life, was the brains behind Fahfa and the architect of Duncan’s success. Now alone, he’s having to reckon with the idea that he might not be brilliant after all. He might just be normal, his only friend a spider he can’t kill, no matter how hard he tries. This has fundamentally destroyed his human relationships – just look at how callously he treats Lili when their Napa home burns down in the wildfires – but not the humanity that underpins them, since he’s genuinely devastated about the spider when it gets thwacked. Succession might be the most obvious point of comparison for The Audacity, but the fundamental difference thus far is that its characters aren’t totally immoral, self-serving monsters – they’re just trying (and failing) to be.

It’s the same with JoAnne, sort of. Her efforts to try and submit Orson’s stool sample to a lab in “Valley of Heart’s Delight” are the closest we’ve seen her be to a loving mother. She’s still often cruel to Orson, but that determination to wade through wildfire ash and navigate asinine office protocol – such as not accepting samples at lunch, even if someone is sitting there to receive them – speaks to that innate desire to go above and beyond. I noticed that she reflexively corrects Duncan on the phone when he calls Orson “Orwell”. Later that night, after his treatment, she makes Orson his favourite ramen, which apparently his father never does. She’s definitely trying. But the extent to which all that progress is undone when she discovers that Orson’s stool sample had been collected from their dog, Zeus, shows that she still has quite a way to go.

If there’s a real theme in The Audacity, is that idea of trying, getting close, and then ultimately failing. You see it everywhere, even in seemingly minor subplots like Anushka’s wavering interest in Martin’s AI pal, Alexander. She has relentlessly mocked and discredited the idea, but the second she sees its potential power as a therapeutic tool when Martin introduces Xander to Ruffage, she’s suddenly interested. Martin, though, isn’t buying it. The put-upon nerd whose wife was playing away with a rich idiot is clearly the show’s most emotionally intelligent character, the only one for whom the work is more important than the money and prestige it might provide. Martin hasn’t had a great deal to do yet and has largely been a point of mockery, but his rejection of Anushka’s efforts endears him to the audience. I hope, in some way, he turns out to be the hero.

But things end up going better for Duncan, so you never know. Inspired by his late spider, he braves the inclement weather to pitch Carl again, this time recounting a story about how Linus Po, a musician who has recently died and whom everyone in Silicon Valley seems to have been obsessed with, once performed at his house. He didn’t want to, of course – Duncan, in his pomp, offered him $4.5 million, and Linus reluctantly accepted, making his displeasure clear by flipping Duncan off at the end of the performance, embarrassing him in front of his friends and family. But it was Duncan who got the last laugh, since Linus took the money. He was made an offer he couldn’t refuse, enough to betray his own principles. That’s the kind of sociopathic sentiment even Carl can get behind. It seems like Hypergnosis has a new investor.