It’s counter-intuitive to think of the smartest person in the room as the underdog, but that’s the situation Richard Hendricks finds himself in at the start of Silicon Valley. “For thousands of years we’ve gotten the shit kicked out of us,” he says in the show’s pilot, referring to himself and his fellow programmers as nerdy guys who finish last.
Over four seasons, the HBO comedy has tracked Richard’s rise and fall and rise again while contrasting him and his friends against a trio of rich a-holes: the malevolent billionaire Gavin Belson, the dumb-luck billionaire Russ Hanneman, and the bumbling billionaire Jack Barker. Rather than resort to backchannels to get ahead—he abhors the idea of turning his company, Pied Piper, into a “soulless corporation” like Gavin’s tech behemoth, Hooli—Richard has stayed on the straight-and-narrow path, repeating “my tech will speak for itself” as a sort of mantra.
At least, he did until Season 4—when Richard went Walter White on the tech world. He willingly uses covert hacker methods to get his company off the ground in the season’s penultimate episode, “Hooli-Con”—and by the end of the finale, it’s clear that he’s completely broken bad.
“I think his back is against the wall. Even though [Silicon Valley] is a comedy, the writers are still keen to twist and prod the characters into very uncomfortable situations—which as an actor is very fun to play,” Thomas Middleditch, who plays Richard, says.
With increasingly desperate motivation, Richard takes an ends-justify-the-means approach for the first time at Hooli-Con. In the finale, the result of the hacking is disastrous, then forgiving, then disastrous again. Season 4’s last episode, “Server Error,” depicts Richard in survival mode as Jared, the team’s earnest C.F.O., resigns, and Richard makes a last-ditch effort to covertly transfer data from Pied Piper’s server to the servers at Stanford—jeopardizing Richard’s friend Bighead’s job in the process. Pied Piper employees Dinesh and Gilfoyle—in a rare moment of like-mindedness—dismiss Richard for his deception, but Richard re-ups and calls his friends “hypocrites” for urging him to lie on so many previous occasions.
“What’s great about it,” Middleditch says, “and what Richard calls his friends out on, is that the entire time he’s been encouraged to, as Gilfoyle says, walk the lefthand path. He’s denied it at every turn, and when he finally does it, his friends take the moral high ground. Richard truly can’t win.”
But just as Richard seems to hit rock bottom in the finale, an improbable yet serendipitous plot twist puts Pied Piper back on the upswing. For Middleditch, the reversal in no way lets Richard off the hook. “We’ve got a whole additional season to explore the fallout of his actions, not only for Pied Piper, but for his friends . . . most notably, poor, sweet, wounded Jared.”
The sweetest moment this season for Pied Piper fans arrives in the episode’s final scene, when Gavin Belson offers to buy out Richard’s company, mirroring a scene from Season 1. This time, Richard is unflinching as he turns down the offer without even checking how much Gavin is offering. In return, Gavin promises nothing less than to devour Pied Piper, to which Richard replies, “Here’s what I think, Gavin. I think my decentralized Internet threatens Hooli’s box-business model. I think basically you’re just a server company now, and we intend to make servers obsolete. I think perhaps in the end I’ll be the one devouring you.” It’s the Richard Hendricks version of Walter White’s iconic “I am the danger” speech.
“To be honest,” Middleditch says, “I’m hoping that this is a setup for more Breaking Bad moments for Richard in the future. It would be great that by the end of Season 5 you actually dislike him, and Season 6 is about getting back together. This is not a spoiler; this is just me daring to dream.”
