Summary
The Audacity feels like it’s really coming together in “Lamplighters”, a funny portrait of outsized dysfunction and spite.
The single best idea of The Audacity is its decision to scale up the breakdown of rich people. Most shows would do the opposite. The argument would be that you can have all the money and privilege in the world, but you remain, fundamentally, a human being. And it’d be right. But it’s funnier to suggest that if you have enough money, even your personal crises are ridiculously indulgent. It’s an idea that gets to the heart of the Palo Alto headspace, and Episode 5, “Lamplighters”, burns it for fuel. If things are going to go wrong, how dramatically can they go wrong? And if money is basically no obstacle, and you feel like being petty, quite how petty can you be?
In other words, everything is going badly wrong this week, basically for everyone, up to and including Martin’s AI chatbot, Xander. Look, I don’t know why it’d suddenly start digitally urinating itself on a technical level, but I can totally understand it otherwise. There is a series of funny novelas by Olivia Waite about a space vessel with an onboard AI deeply influenced by the personality of its primary coder, and I get that feeling here. Martin’s going through it, especially in his marriage, and his internal crises are spilling out into his creation.
Xander’s meltdown is probably the least likely one occurring, but far from the only one, to the extent that “Lamplighters” begins to feel like a patchwork misery, a kind of exaggerated anthology of existential crises. But here’s the point where I felt the narrative strands beginning to satisfyingly twist together. There has always been some overlap, of course, but earlier episodes have often kept things siloed. Like Martin and Xander, though, each calamity is beginning to bleed into the next.
See, for instance, Duncan and Anushka. This is really an outgrowth of a story that has been percolating since the premiere, with Duncan having leaked rumours of a lucrative merger between Hypergnosis and Cupertino to falsely inflate Hypergnosis’s stock price. But doing so damaged Anushka’s professional reputation, so here she anonymously tips off Nena Marx that the whole thing was a ruse, which mires Duncan in scandal right as he’s trying to convince Carl Bardolph to invest $300 million in his magic algorithm, the inner workings of which he’s still refusing to explain.
What’s compelling about all this is that Carl is still intrigued by the way the algorithm works, and Duncan knows he is, but he’s also a financial shark who has been endlessly irritated by Duncan, so the dilemma becomes whether Duncan can use the temptation of the algorithm’s power to stop Carl from ruthlessly seizing a new market opportunity. And he can’t. With the value of Hypergnosis tanking from the reputational leak thanks to Anushka’s anonymous tip, Carl’s money is now enough to buy the company outright.
Duncan’s problem is that he has consistently burned every bridge he built along the way, so most of the people with valuable stakes in Hypergnosis are either dead or hate him. There’s a strong suggestion, reiterated here, that Duncan’s bad business management led to Hamish’s death, and this viewpoint is shared by a third collaborator, Gabe, who now lives on a private island on a “dopamine fast” and is all too eager to sign away his share to Carl and Stan at 15% more than market value. It’s worth it just to spite Duncan.
JoAnne is similarly struggling in The Audacity Episode 5, both with her living situation and her family life. She’s willing to reluctantly downsize – “I always wanted to watch the sun rise over fields of wildflowers,” she says at one point, “I just always thought it would be from the veranda of our architecturally significant second home” – to a rustic spot in the country via the recommendation of a former college pal turned real estate agent, but Orson, thanks largely to JoAnne’s neglect and Gary’s general disinterest, has turned to the manosphere for parenting advice. There’s a funny bit where JoAnne catches him watching Looksmaxxing content like she’d caught him watching an adult video. But the crux of this is that Orson has built enough confidence to stand up to his mother and, like Duncan, blackmail her, since he knows about her little side hustle leveraging therapy patients for insider trading secrets.
What this is all building towards is the very thing that was teased way back in the premiere. JoAnne and Duncan need each other. And based on their respective circumstances, they might just get each other.
