In last night's Silicon Valley, the gang comes to San Francisco for the TechCrunch Disrupt conference and many jokes are made about how few women there are in tech. Also, Erlich proves himself to be an irresistible alpha male among all these dweebs, and many jokes get made about the use of the phrase, "making the world a better place" with regard to every app in existence.
There's some last-minute tension around a few things that Richard still has to code for their demo, and he's coding in the bathroom while pooping, and coding in the car on the way up to S.F. Following a pointless, gratuitous shot of the Golden Gate Bridge, we're taken inside the conference San Franciscans will recognize the location as the Concourse Pavillion, where many a low-rent conference (and Beer Week!) takes place. And they shot this at the actual Disrupt in SF last September.
There's also tension around Monica being way more on top of organizing things and getting everyone ready for the conference and competition than Jarred who of course had to make his way back from that robot-inhabited island from last week's episode, and he still seems a bit shaken. Monica explains that they need to present Pied Piper and get it through a preliminary round of judging so that it can make it to the final round on Friday and it's clear that the final episode of the season will also be taking place at the conference.
Sidebar: Peter Gregory, Monica's boss, is once again missing from this episode and we're told that he's "on safari with Lorne Michaels and Kanye West." We only heard him for a moment on the phone with Monica in last week's episode, and this is because the actor who played him, Christopher Welch, became too ill to complete shooting last year he died after a four-year battle with lung cancer, at age 48, in December. You can read more about his career in this piece from New York Magazine, and about how he landed the role right before finding out that the cancer had spread to his brain.
Monica warns the guys not to get too distracted by the sudden influx of females around them. "Normally the tech world is 2% women. These next three days: 15%," she says, and Gilfoyle responds, "It's a goddamn meat market." Gilfoyle immediately gets roped into writing some Java for a cute blonde and her Cupcakety app, and then the same blonde works over Dinesh, setting up another love triangle like we (almost) had with them last week. This time, the joke is that Dinesh falls for this girl after seeing her elegant Java code, before finding out that Gilfoyle wrote it all for her. Which leads to much amusement on Gilfoyle's part ("You're gay for my code. You're code-gay.") and much anguish on Dinesh's part after the code actually gives him a boner.
Richard also gets distracted after seeing a girl he went to school with, Sherry Caldwell, whom he was allegedly obsessed with, leading to further obsession and some Instagram stalking, all while he needs to be finishing the demo. He tries confronting her at the hotel, And then Sherry overhears Jarred talking about how he's devoted every moment of his life to Richard, his partner, and she leaps to the conclusion that they're gay.
We get a bunch of hilarious fictitious startups described via the conference, including HumanHeater (which microwaves people to keep them warm) and another brief cameo by BitFlenser, which was mentioned in the pilot. And the writers may have made up MicroDrone.com, the annoying, insect-like mini-drone that harasses Jarred and that Gilfoyle swats away in one of the episode's funniest moments, but it appears someone is doing something with that URL.
Erlich reveals that he slept with the wife of one of the judges in the Startup Battlefield competition, a guy named Dan Melcher, and he goes about trying to figure out if Melcher knows that this happened three years before. He finds that he's remarried, so this might be water under the bridge, but he meets Melcher's new, very attractive wife Madeline and ends up screwing her too. Things conclude with Erlich doing his Steve Jobs best with six spotlights on him and a black turtleneck, and with Melcher tackling him on the stage and screaming, "You son of a bitch!"
This leads us to see that Richard will have to do the presentation for the final round, as shown in the preview for next week, because somehow they make it through without being eliminated? In any event, the season finale's next week, and if Mike Judge and his team have shown us anything, it's that they know how to write a hilarious kicker. It should be good.
Swat!
