‘The Audacity’ Episode 4 Recap – Harvesting Personal Data Isn’t Evil Enough

It’s easy to forget this, but The Audacity is ostensibly about Duncan and JoAnne. You all remember the premiere, right? You remember how it was about one of them having what the other wants, and the other resorting to blackmail to get it? I ask because Episode 4, “Vanitas”, seems to have forgotten. Duncan and JoAnne barely interact in it. And unless I’m mistaken, this is around the point where they should be occupying most of the focus.

And yet we’ve somehow tripped and fallen into the Duncan and Carl Bardolph show. I’ll grant you that both of these characters are funny and get right to the heart of the searing contempt that The Audacity has for Palo Alto’s tech visionaries. But the disconnect between Duncan and JoAnne means that while the show still works as a comedy and a satire, it’s already running out of steam as a TV drama, which is worrying since it’s competing so directly with shows that famously gave audiences the best of both worlds.

You’d think the focal point would be JoAnne. She’s doing – or has at least done – pretty well for herself by normal person standards, but in Silicon Valley, she’s basically penniless. As of “Vanitas”, this metaphorical distinction may well be on its way to becoming a literal one, since her kindly landlord has died, and his daughter now has control of a $7.5 million property that she may decide needs to be rented at a higher price or sold entirely. Neither of these outcomes is desirable for JoAnne, and her need for cash obviously pushes her closer to Duncan, who wants to use the insider trading tips from her therapy sessions to make some big bucks.

Duncan – the answer to the (presumably unasked) question of what Tony Soprano would look like as a start-up CEO – needs JoAnne’s information, because he has made some big promises that he can’t otherwise keep. Luckily for him, he and JoAnne move in the same circles, so she can’t reliably avoid him. And she’s also not as clever as she thinks, so when Duncan has her cornered, she inadvertently reveals that another of her clients, Smote’s Orlando Lee, is due to be pushed out of his position due to one impropriety or another, and the resultant market fluctuations will make several people very rich – and a not-insignificant amount very poor if they go the wrong way.

With this nugget in his back pocket, Duncan hosts Carl, after the deal they made in the previous episode, at Hypergnosis HQ for an impromptu demonstration of how powerful his privacy-violating data-harvesting algorithm, hilariously dubbed “Gnodin”, really is. As it turns out, it isn’t powerful enough to impress Carl. The best joke of The Audacity Episode 4 is that Gnodin isn’t violating enough for Carl. Who cares about whether or not people use targeted coffee coupons?

This compels Duncan to talk up the algorithm’s abilities by using it to roughly predict Orlando’s ousting and the inevitable market outcomes, not realising that Orlando was once Carl’s protégé and thus he will be inclined to tip him off. If he does that, he’ll rewrite the future, and Duncan won’t ever get to prove his point about how accurate Gnodin can be, so he has to win Carl over by participating in Orlando’s underground IT-themed fight club to prove he’s a fighter. Of that, at least, there can be no doubt.

Some of the best jokes in “Vanitas” are, as ever, away from the main plot. There’s a good one when Orson goes to his dad to address the fact that his antibiotics are making his colon even looser, and Gary recommends a “nutritionist” he knows – clearly one of those Silicon Valley friend-of-a-friend deals – who recommends a tincture costing $1,962 to settle Orson’s “microflora economy”. There’s also a funny bit about Anushka feeling so bitter about Martin rejecting her offer to work with him on Alexander that she reels off her career accolades as she storms out of the house — right into bed with Duncan. Martin clearly knows about the affair and seems to be tormenting Anushka about it via technology, which seems pretty on-brand for him, but I don’t know exactly how all this might connect to the main plot beyond Anushka’s association with Duncan ruining her reputation at work.

I’m likewise pretty unsure about Hypergnosis using the VA database to mine veterans’ data. Tom is completely against this on a fundamental, moral level, but Jeffery seems a bit more inclined. We’ll have to see how all that shakes out, since I doubt any of this would have been introduced to not be used down the line.

Then again, in a show like The Audacity, perhaps it was.