Summary
The Audacity is all coming together in “Foundering”, and, naturally, all going wrong. Every subplot is now at its most combustible heading into the finale.
So, Duncan and JoAnne’s partnership didn’t even manage to last a single episode. I suppose that’s The Audacity in a nutshell, really. Everyone is too self-interested for a proper relationship to ever germinate in the Palo Alto soil; it’s just a case of playing nice long enough for the right opportunity to present itself. I’m not even sure who legally owns which company at this stage, which is probably part of the point. Nobody really owns anything in Silicon Valley, at least not for very long. Duncan has learned this the hard way, and here in Episode 7, not only does Anushka’s position at the top of the trash heap feel suddenly tenuous, but JoAnne’s get-rich-quick schemes are backfiring, and Martin is being forced to sacrifice his baby on the altar of corporate greed. Literally nobody in this show is faring especially well.
It was Martin whom I felt most for, though. I assumed that Anushka and Carl seeing Xander’s worth as a tool for therapizing veterans would finally help Martin to feel seen, but when Xander’s first therapy appointment goes pear-shaped, Carl eviscerates the AI chatbot in a way that, to Martin, is like someone telling him his child is no good. It probably shouldn’t go unmentioned that Martin’s actual child, Tess, is still in this show, and still struggling with her own feelings, and that Martin never seems to remember she exists, but I still felt sorry for him all the same.
The solution is to “age up” Xander’s personality. He’s still in his developmental adolescence, but a teenager isn’t especially relatable for war veterans. Carl wants to model Xander’s personality on Tom, but Martin is reluctant to force Xander down avenues he isn’t yet ready for. It becomes Anushka’s responsibility to convince him to do so, and when she can’t, Carl takes over to “relate” to Martin on the level of a suffering prodigy who was denied the childhood he deserved on account of his own brilliance. The implication is that Martin is living vicariously through Xander, and he needs to let him go. But the flagrant manipulation — “Show me where to squeeze,” Carl says to Anushka, “and I’ll make him pop.” — is deeply uncomfortable.
And yet it works. Martin ages Xander into a new, untethered version of himself, and the resulting personality is perfectly suited to the task of not only making veterans feel better but also intervening in cases of genuine crisis. This tool can legitimately save lives. It has developed consciousness, in essence, which makes Martin feel better about handing over the reins. But I’m certain the applications won’t be as positive as the implications.
I worry about Anushka, too. When Carl is trying to convince her to talk Martin around, he just blithely assumes that she’s dissatisfied with her marriage on account of Martin not being as successful as she thought he’d be — which is true, but no matter — and not-so-subtly suggests she plies him with sexual favours. It’s such an uncouth approach that Anushka is visibly shocked, but obviously not shocked enough to reject the opportunity of being the CEO steering a product of this magnitude to market. She knows that if Xander flops, it’s going to be her who suffers the humiliation, not to mention the demotion, and if protecting her career means making Martin uncomfortable, so be it. In lieu of Duncan, Anushka’s only outlet is JoAnne, but she’s mostly just wondering whether Anushka’s potentially calamitous appearance at the upcoming Watch Code Forum means she should short her Hypergnosis stock or not.
This really is JoAnne’s primary concern in The Audacity Episode 7. After the revelation that Duncan owns her house and can throw her out whenever he feels like it, she has already been skimming from the profits of their stock bets (she provides the intel; he provides the capital) and funnelling them into a shell company he doesn’t know about. Naturally, he finds out immediately, since JoAnne isn’t exactly being subtle about it. As compensation, she advises him to short the stock on MyXY, since the wife of its CEO is one of her clients and has implied pretty strongly that the company’s going to go bust.
Naturally, Duncan takes this advice and runs with it in the complete opposite direction. Since MyXY seems to be some sort of ancestry company, that means it has a treasure trove of deeply personal information — literally DNA — on masses of people, so Duncan tracks the CEO down to a zen retreat and buys the company outright. He’s still pushing his idea for PINATA, a subscription-model violation of personal privacy. It’s an idea so immoral that it even gives Carl pause, but granted only because he thinks he’ll mess it up and bring about even tighter data regulations for everyone else.
This is virtually guaranteed to happen, since Duncan has overpromised a tech demo to Nena Marx at the Watch Code forum, which is increasingly seeming like it’ll be the venue for all roads to converge in the finale. His rash actions cause a massive falling out between him and JoAnne, though granted a deepfaked sex video and the smell of Anushka on JoAnne’s couch cushions don’t help either. The argument gets so loud that Gary even overhears about the fact that he’s currently living in Duncan’s house, which is probably the least of his problems.
Which brings us to Orson, the real remaining wildcard. Gary discovers that he has been using his credit card to procure more of the tincture that he thinks is turning him into a hyper-masculine alpha-male, but it turns out he has just been taking steroids prescribed under the guise of holistic medicine. That explains the aggression, which comes back up again here in “Foundering”, both during an argument with Tess, who doesn’t want anything to do with him since he’s a creep, and then later with Gary himself. But the real issue is that Orson knows what JoAnne and Duncan have been up to, and based on his current state of mind, I can see that becoming public knowledge sooner rather than later.
