The Audacity Recap: Bribe To Be

The Audacity
The Lamplighters
Season 1 Episode 5
Editor’s Rating ★★★
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“The Lamplighters” is now available on AMC+ ahead of its 9 p.m. ET broadcast next Sunday.

Everyone experiences moments of existential despair, when one bad day or cataclysmic event sends you into a headspace that’s some combination of panic and self-reflection. Yet the world-conquering Silicon Valley freaks who populate The Audacity take it to another level, because they understand themselves to be the most important people on the planet and thus associate their misfortune with the downfall of humanity. This leads them to absurd extremes, like moving to an island compound and avoiding human contact to cure a supposed dopamine addiction or wondering if they should use their limited time on earth to be epic philanthropists or the next Dr. Evil. Honestly, they could use a good therapist to help them find some perspective, but the one they have is barely paying attention when she’s not quietly pumping them for inside information.

Shifting gears confidently into the second half of the season, this week’s episode has a more cohesive feel than the show has been able to manage so far, turning a series of interrelated crises into a Magnolia-esque montage of desperation from most of the major characters. Even poor Xander, Martin’s AI chatbot, has gotten so in his feelings that he’s bruised his head from banging it against a wall (“My fault, my fault, my fault, my fault…”) and generated a virtual couch for him to hide behind. There’s no clear reason yet why Xander has reverted to sulking and peeing himself, but given that Martin is always working to train him, it stands to reason that he’s picking up on the bad vibes that seem to permeate every space we visit in this hour. People are unhappy on a grand scale.

The trouble starts where it always does, with Duncan tripping over his own fevered idiocy. From the opening scenes of the series, we’ve known that Duncan used a lot of smoke-and-mirrors to inflate the value of Hypergnosis around a deal with Cupertino that never came to fruition, and lately he’s been trying to pin Carl Bardolph down on a $300 million commitment to fluff up his floundering data enterprise. But in a behind-the-scenes move on Anushka’s part to rescue her reputation at Cupertino, she anonymously informed Nena Marx that her company was not buying Hypergnosis and that Duncan had leaked this false deal to the press. He realizes as soon as the story drops that his company and his reputation are in tatters, and he amusingly orders Harper to “turn off the internet,” as if there’s some gigantic plug that can be yanked like the runway lights in Airplane!. But this isn’t the age of dial-up modems and his fate is sealed instantly.

Last week, I complained about the wheel-spinning that had started to plague the plotting of The Audacity, but there’s no such issue with this eventful episode, which put Duncan, JoAnne, and several other characters in scramble mode. The timing of Duncan’s public humiliation comes right at the moment when he’s trying to pin Carl and his assistant Stan down on the $300 million investment, which had proven difficult to do, because Carl understandably wanted a look under the hood before he paid the tech equivalent of a pit-stained used car salesman. When the bad news breaks, Carl and Stan’s position improves so much that their money could buy them control of the whole company.

After an extended period where he decamps to Hamish’s internet-free “dumb house” to lose his mind in private, Duncan strikes out via helicopter to visit Gabe (Randall Park), his and Hamish’s former partner at Fahfa, who has a valuable stake in Hypergnosis, too, and might help bail him out. It becomes obvious right away why Duncan hasn’t stayed in touch with Gabe, whose reclusive life on a private island has led to weird obsessions like “dopamine fasting,” armed guards on the compound, and memories of a past enterprise called “GambleSluts.” His mumbling about societal collapse makes him look like a true moonbat until Carl and Stan swoop down on the island and easily snap up his stake in Hypergnosis, continuing their quest to box Duncan out of his own company. Gabe is another bridge Duncan has burned. 

Meanwhile, JoAnne’s sudden housing crisis has led her to consider a humiliatingly rustic A-frame home listed at $2.5 million, shown to her by a former college friend who gave up therapy for real estate. The two still get along famously, though, and there’s a lovely “touch grass” moment when they smoke weed in the house’s small, unkempt backyard and consider the paths each of them chose to take. JoAnne’s friend is happy not to listen to “tech bros whine about their third homes,” and she’s convincing enough to prompt JoAnne to drive Gary and Orson out to the country, where they can build a new life together. To her surprise, Gary loves the idea of getting away from their terrible clients and neighbors, but Orson, who’s lately taken a sharp-right turn to the manosphere, is having none of it. He lets his mom know he’s aware she’s done something illegal and now he’s blackmailing right along with Duncan. She’ll have to remain tied to the tracks of Palo Alto. 

Storytelling hasn’t been a great strong suit for The Audacity all season. Duncan and JoAnne’s misfortunes dovetail neatly into a scene where they’re finally seeing eye to eye. Though Hypergnosis boasts an all-seeing algorithm, Carl doesn’t know that the true source of Duncan’s insight on Smote isn’t coming from inside Hypergnosis but through JoAnne’s session with a Smote board member. JoAnne isn’t happy to see Duncan when he essentially breaks into her office, but he gets her to lower her new handgun long enough to see a $1.2 million payout that she’s entitled to claim at a time when she’s in dire financial straits. Her reaction leads him to get down on his knees and make a proposal: “I should have never blackmailed you. It should have always been a bribe. Will you be my bribe?”

The dramatic new alliances in the cast don’t end there, however. Over at Hypergnosis, Carl has taken an interest in Anushka, whose fake-sounding position as an “ethicist” at Cupertino has been souring of late. Given what we’ve glimpsed in the past from Carl’s anguished sessions with JoAnne, he’s been a burnt-out billionaire whose great innovation was to monetize spam. Now that he’s back in the game, Carl waxes philosophical about the Valley’s super-elite and how their wealth gets utilized. To his mind, they all face the same question: “Do we want humanitarian legacy or do we want planetary reach? Do we want to save the world or control it?” He seems to feel a partnership with Anushka might appeal to his better angels. But in the world of The Audacity, angels are in short supply.

Pixels

• “Why does your desk have a patina of crumbs and disrespect?” It’s funny that Duncan is so concerned with appearances when welcoming Carl Bardolph, whose beard looks like it might hold as many crumbs as his poor employee’s workspace. 

• Founder fantasies, via Carl: “I could be on board a giga yacht right now sipping a 300-year-old cognac with an android Beverly D’Angelo.” 

• Lili may not have her husband’s CEO status, but she’s knocked off her perch atop the private school board for a neighborhood post, accusing a mega-donor of being a narcissist who burned down her house. Duncan seems to sense her emotional vulnerability in the episode’s final scene, but rather than a cuddle, he gets asked for a divorce instead. 

• JoAnne’s realtor is stunned that she’s living with their former teacher and feels comfortable enough with JoAnne to ask a pertinent question: “What’s Professor Felder’s dick like?” 

• In the past, a mom might catch her teenage son masturbating, but JoAnne has discovered the modern horror of catching her son watching manosphere videos aimed at incel losers. Orson never seemed fascist-curious enough to consider jaw exercises to “open up the sutures of your skull,” but he’s awfully lonely these days. 

• JoAnne looking out at a lovely spot in the country: “I always wanted to watch the sun rise over fields of wildflowers. I just always thought it would be from the veranda of our architecturally significant second home.” 

• When you’re as rich as Gabe, you not only have time to obsess over dopamine addiction, but you can also work on “perineum sunning” to increase testosterone production and root chakra optimization. The wellness sector truly is a menace.