S03.E03: Meinertzhagen's Haversack

[ElectricBoogaloo]

Richard searches for a way around Jack; Gilfoyle opens himself up to recruiters; Dinesh draws unwanted attention from a recent purchase.

Promo:

[Muffyn]

Another Julia Roberts movie shout out from Jared.   That man knows his JR movies.

I loved the absolute stupidity of the Ocean's Eleven type plotting.  I wish they did not have Richard drop the folder with the info in the office.  I want our team to succeed. 

[RabbitEars]

I at least wanted them to get through a few days of their plotting before being discovered.

...but this was hilarious up to the last scene. 

[pivot]

It's getting frustrating watching them constantly lose. They needed a win tonight and it was annoying to see it yanked away again.

[chocolatine]

Ugh! It was *almost* back to old form, but the last scene ruined it. The guys ribbing Dinesh about the gold chain (I LOL-ed at "Cypress Halal"), Gilfoyle getting all that swag from companies trying to hire him (totally realistic, BTW), the pizza/weed all-nighter culminating in drinking bourbon at 7:30am, only to have Richard bring printouts of their stealth plan to the office?!?!?! I know the show already has the token idiot in Big Head, but I'm starting to believe that Richard is an idiot savant, and the only smart thing he's ever done or will ever do is come up with the compression algorithm.

[henripootel]

I thought this episode sucked a bit.  Again we're seeing smart people accept a ridiculous premise, namely that actions which would get them fired (ignoring their instructions and doing what they want) will actually work out great for them when these actions are exposed.  They have literally everything riding on the notion that Jack will reward them (for his own reasons) when he discovers he's been outmaneuvered, and not, say, take their platform work and fire them.

Plus, didn't they just get a huge infusion of capital?  Who says they have to work on one project at a time to the exclusion of other applications?  Hooli put together like 50 applications with their stolen version of the compression algorithm - they can't hire a few extra guys to help build everything at once? 

And why in the world would a backup be the first thing you do?  From what it sounds like, they just want to use super-compression to back-up data.  Doesn't everyone do that already?  Sure it saves space 5:1 but isn't memory super-cheap at the moment?  I understand why Richard thinks this is a huge waste of time and can't imagine why Jack wasn't fired for thinking this was the best use of this technology.  What's an improved backup technology against royalties from every single company on earth who transmits data around the internet?  You'd save the porn industry alone shit-tons of money, not to mention Netflix.  

I think it's a bad sign when I get to focus on picking nits instead of enjoying what's there, just makes me think there wasn't much to really hold my attention.  Even Gilfoyle's digs at Dinesh seemed kinda half-assed.  Not pleased by the direction they're taking here.  

[hincandenza]

Reading this forum first, sounds like I don't exactly have to rush out and watch this one, then. :)  Richard and the gang doing something stupid, ill-conceived, and ultimately unsuccessful, for reasons no one watching can understand?  What a twist!

[scrb]

I don't buy that an appliance for the data center would generate more buzz and valuation for a startup than a consumer platform which has been described as having instant, fast cloud storage on mobile devices.

Cloud and mobile are the big things today.  If PP tech could make mobile devices access unlimited cloud storage much faster than today, while using a fraction of the data, that would generate way more hype around PP.

Hell you figure Apple or more likely Google or Facebook would scoop them up before they even finish the platform.  They'd probably cater to Richard in every way, since he's the only guy who knows every bit of his code (Dinesh and Gilfoyle couldn't follow all of it).

Richard isn't ruthless like Zuckerberg so it's conceivable that the VC would replace him as CEO.  But without him, there is no PP tech so you would think they'd go along with his strategy anyways.

[Accidental Martyr]

Pretty good episode until the terrible ending.

[Pallas]

For now I'm going to imagine that Richard's accident wasn't, that it was part of a Meinertzhagen Hackensack within a Meinertzhagen Hackensack.

[Curio]

Did Richard seriously not consider burning the papers? Paper shredders are expensive, fire is free. 

[qtpye]

I totally bought that the Oceans 11 thing was going to be the main plot for this season.  I was even expecting that the guy who was helping Richard after he tripped, would not look at the papers and just hand them back.

It was kind of funny that after the usual set up of brilliant and balls out planning, the scheme failed even before it began,  Good Lord, Richard bringing the papers to the office instead of springing for a shredder from Office Max is mind blowing (they are all making good salaries, hence the gold chain buying).  I guess they were way overestimating their skills at subterfuge?

The bourbon they were drinking is $500 a bottle.

Gilfoyle is awesome.  Heck, I would just lie about my linked in status to get all that swag.

6 hours ago, Pallas said:

For now I'm going to imagine that Richard's accident wasn't, that it was part of a Meinertzhagen Hackensack within a Meinertzhagen Hackensack.

This would be pretty brilliant.  The audience thinks it's all screwed, but they are actually still building the platform.

Edited May 9, 2016 by qtpye

[candall]

Am I totally cross-indexing SilVal and Veep or did Jack show some warning signs of dementia in past episodes?  I thought that would be the serendipity that saved the nudniks from the latest disaster of their own making.

But Jack was very savvy thIs week with his "if you shoot the king, be sure you kill him."  So much so that I expected their Reservoir Dog stroll into the office to end with some roadblock engineered by Jack already in place.  Which, if I do say so myself, would have been better than fumblenuts stumbling over a vacuum cleaner cord and spilling documents labeled HERE BE SKUNKWORKS.

 

I love crazy-hair pragmatic woman programmer.  In the event of a zombie apocalypse, I want her to take me in.

[hincandenza]

6 hours ago, Pallas said:

For now I'm going to imagine that Richard's accident wasn't, that it was part of a Meinertzhagen Hackensack within a Meinertzhagen Hackensack.

It's reaaaally funny you say that: I ended up watching this episode while getting ready for work this morning, and chuckled a couple of times- mostly at Jared being off the hook with his funny making- but likewise had a "Ugh, seriously?!?" reaction to the end.  This is both for the seemingly failed Ocean's 11 plot, and because as scrb noted the absurdness of a CEO looking to pump-and-dump his stock before a bubble would think a datacenter appliance, and not a user facing platform, would be the way to go.  Also, that PP box would take engineers all of a week to design: take a generic 2U chassis, throw in some drives, plenty of memory, some higher end GPUs, and a Linux distro, and add in a straightforward v1 API for receiving raw data and returning compressed data and vice versa.  They built a functioning platform for hundreds of thousands of simultaneous users in their garage in the matter of a few days; making a turnkey appliance for a narrow usage shouldn't be that hard.

Now at my desk, I glanced over at the subreddit for r/SiliconValleyHBO- who have been more charitable to this show than we have- and the same Ocean's 12/Haversack/audience misdirection is a popular theory now... and not without merit.

• The original Haversack included as a key part of the ruse a fake agent losing fake papers detailing an entire fake plan- so the enemy would think they'd caught onto the ruse, when in fact they'd only caught on to a fake ruse.  So perhaps for once, Richard's bumbling wasn't stupidity, but cunning?
• While they referenced Ocean's 11, which had plenty of misdirection even on the audience, Ocean's 12- another movie with Julia Roberts and 11 men- has a haversack as the entire plot: even we the audience don't know until the end that the gang had pulled off the caper ages ago, and the rest was just misdirection.
• Erlich makes a conspicuous point of mentioning his growing rapport with the Japanese gardener... who is then there to conveniently "trip" Richard with his hose.  Earlier in the episode, Hiroki (the gardener) was using a watercan, not a hose.
• Richard is visibly wearing knee pads under his jeans in the scene; this is possibly just a production gaff, but it was pointed out he's wearing them in the shots in the elevator, when they wouldn't be needed for the actual fall.
• The trailer for the next episode has Richard getting a nosebleed while in Jack's office just after the last scene of this episode; in the original haversack, the ruse entailed not only fake documents being "recovered" by the enemy, but dousing them with blood to make it look like a wounded courier had been carrying them.
• The entire opening sequence basically speaks of a vast, cavernous place with plenty of rack space, plenty of network capacity, and no oversight, and where a PP engineer would be sadly "stuck" at all hours of the day- a perfect place to quietly spin up the platform away from Jack's eyes (leaving aside that you can't legally just co-locate yourself into someone else's datacenter)
• Gilfoyle's encounter with EndFrame may be a key point.  Either they'll be a key part of the "plan" as some speculate, or are another target along with Jack: can the gang's Ocean's 11 master plan take down both Jack Barker and EndFrame, and leave PP on top of the heap?  One possibility is Gilfoyle fake-defecting, and feeding EndFrame "hush hush" news that PP is lined up for the appliance space, causing EndFrame to pivot to that same direction- leaving PP ready to suddenly jump into the user platform space uncontested.  Heck, those former Hooli employees would probably see another stab at a Nucleus as a disaster waiting to happen!

https://www.reddit.com/r/SiliconValleyHBO/comments/4ihro0/meinertzhagens_haversack_explained_or_why/

I'd love to believe that's true, that Judge & Co. heard the criticisms and decided to give us the ol' one-two, by pretending they were doing another lame retread of last season's manufactured drama and conflict... only to switch it up and show the gang had a genuinely cunning plan that ends in them launching a kick-ass platform and finally achieving real success.  And it would be kind of awesome if the lately-underused Erlich ended up as the hero and CEO by season's end.  

But, while the theory is appealing... I'm still going to take a wait-and-see approach. I've... I've been hurt before by this show. :)

[candall]

Well, color me impressed, hincandenza.  After Google laughed in my face for researching "The Weissman Score," I wasn't about to fall for the ol' Meinertzhagen Hackensack.

[Accidental Martyr]

After reading these posts, I'm going to go along with the apparent gaffe at the end being part of the ruse.

I think it's also possible that Carla may be in on the plan in some way, contrary to what we were led to believe earlier in the episode.

Edited May 10, 2016 by Accidental Martyr

[Traveller519]

That will be so delicious if it is all a bigger ruse, but I won't project too much, I'll just be setting myself up for disappointment.

I do enjoy it all at face value, these guys who are all so brilliant at their corner of the world, and have the vision, but can't get past the bureaucracy and really their own incompetence in the social world. I mean if you think of the company as Richard's and everything in the space as the company. Richard literally tripped over his own hose (dick pun) in attempting to kick off this master plan.

[ruby24]

Is it me or has the show become extra wonky this season? It's still funny, but...I feel like I can barely understand what they're talking about anymore. In the past it was always okay, and a lot of the jokes didn't directly relate to all the software/engineering stuff. Or maybe I'm wrong and I'm just more aware of it now for some reason.

[ElectricBoogaloo]

This episode was worth it just for all the jokes about Dinesh's necklace. Sorry, Dinesh's CHAIN. When Jared is cracking on you, you have to know that things are bad! He was doing so well keeping up with Guilfoyle and then that last one he just went off the map.

Loved that after Guilfoyle cracked open his bottle of Pappy, Richard spit his out and Jared poured his back into the bottle. I also cracked up at seeing Jian Yang trying to get a slice of pizza multiple times during the sped up footage.

Never trust a big butt and a smile!

Edited May 10, 2016 by ElectricBoogaloo

[Should Be Working]

I think Drudge and company have been spending way too much time in LA and not enough in Silicon Valley. The S3 episodes are really taking on the quality of bad sitcoms, with convoluted and overly-complicated story lines meant to entertain us rather than expertly skewering life as it really is in the valley.

Some questions to ponder: 

• Would someone as sharp, monetarily invested, and Asperger's-afflicted (sentiment free) as Laurie at Raviga really hesitate to remove Jack Barker as CEO if he was intentionally taking PP down a technological dead-end simply because they'd already demoted Richard? Isn't saving PP and Raviga's investment the primary concern here?
• Why is Richard, the purported genius and heart of this show, so easily inclined to sabotage PP at every opportunity?  A few examples: Emailing a beta of PP's music app with its compression algorithm to those jerks at Hooli who then used it to launch Nucleus? Not hesitating to give those End Frame engineers a nice overview of this compression algorithm (just how far would he have gone had Erlich not intervened)? Suggesting to PP's new sales team (with missed irony) that they should package the compression product into a network-inaccessible box, which is exactly what the sales team and Jack decided to do? Bringing their secret skunkworks schedule to the office and dropping it into the hands of the sales rep, who immediately delivered it to Jack Barker? Erlich got it right in Season 1, when he told Richard he needed to become an hard-hearted asshole. Too bad he's too eager to please and too easily manipulated to have taken his advice.

[RCharter]

6 hours ago, Should Be Working said:

I think Drudge and company have been spending way too much time in LA and not enough in Silicon Valley. The S3 episodes are really taking on the quality of bad sitcoms, with convoluted and overly-complicated story lines meant to entertain us rather than expertly skewering life as it really is in the valley.

Some questions to ponder: 

• Would someone as sharp, monetarily invested, and Asperger's-afflicted (sentiment free) as Laurie at Raviga really hesitate to remove Jack Barker as CEO if he was intentionally taking PP down a technological dead-end simply because they'd already demoted Richard? Isn't saving PP and Raviga's investment the primary concern here?
• Why is Richard, the purported genius and heart of this show, so easily inclined to sabotage PP at every opportunity?  A few examples: Emailing a beta of PP's music app with its compression algorithm to those jerks at Hooli who then used it to launch Nucleus? Not hesitating to give those End Frame engineers a nice overview of this compression algorithm (just how far would he have gone had Erlich not intervened)? Suggesting to PP's new sales team (with missed irony) that they should package the compression product into a network-inaccessible box, which is exactly what the sales team and Jack decided to do? Bringing their secret skunkworks schedule to the office and dropping it into the hands of the sales rep, who immediately delivered it to Jack Barker? Erlich got it right in Season 1, when he told Richard he needed to become an hard-hearted asshole. Too bad he's too eager to please and too easily manipulated to have taken his advice.

I think Laurie understands that she wants to build her investment, and that her job is on the line if she doesn't.  It does look odd to fire 2 CEO's in a limited time span.  Perhaps that other girl (I always forget her name) explained it to her.  If this "box" can be sold at a profit than I would imagine that Raviga's investment would look like a good one.  It sounds like Action Jack is letting her know that the "boxes" will sell, but the platform is uncertain.  Someone like Laurie may want to go for what is the sure money.

I take Richard at face value, he is a guy who doesn't know anything about how slick people work.  The fact that he keeps trying to negotiate with Jack makes me think he just isn't used to people who would seriously steal your ideas.  He probably thinks that whatever he is doing is so amazing that people just want to talk about it.  I don't think he ever even understood that his algorithim was the product at the beginning, he really thought that looking up music or whatever was the product.  And while the humor was a little ham fisted, I understood how Richard...not being a business person, and being an idea/engineering person....would think that what he was talking about was so ridiculous that no one would ever see the logic in making an appliance.

However, I thought it was odd that Richard would take a manila file of secret papers to work to destroy.  Did he think Action Jack was going to break into his house to steal the papers?  Even if he had torn them up into little pieces and put them in the garbage...even if he had thrown them in the trash at a Dennys, it would have been a better idea.  If you think the man is having you followed to the point where you can't throw away the papers at a local dumpster or Kinkos recycle bin (don't they shred that stuff?) than you really wouldn't take the papers to work.  So, I hope its all a part of some elaborate plan.....I'm not sure how that would work unless the plan is to let Jack believe that he has talked them out of their Skunkworks plan and they do it anyways, since he will be lulled into a false sense of security after they all agree to drop it.

[PinkRibbons]

I'm with the what happened to good old-fashioned fire approach. Maybe because my mother used to burn checks and she's kind of a pyro so she perfected the method. Here's what you do, Richard: you take your papers and put them in the kitchen sink. Then you take a lighter (and don't tell me there are no lighters in that incubator with Erlich being, you know, there) and set one piece of paper on fire. Drop that paper onto the other papers. Enjoy watching everything curl up an disappear into nothingness. Then, turn on the faucet over the sink and put out the fire. There. You have just destroyed your papers way better than any kind of shredding ever could. Fire good, Richard.

[Muffyn]

On ‎5‎/‎10‎/‎2016 at 6:29 PM, Accidental Martyr said:

After reading these posts, I'm going to go along with the apparent gaffe at the end being part of the ruse.

I think it's also possible that Carla may be in on the plan in some way, contrary to what we were led to believe earlier in the episode.

I so want this to be true.  That would make Carla the Julia Roberts of the team.  Think of how happy that would make Jared.

[ElectricBoogaloo]

7 hours ago, PinkRibbons said:

I'm with the what happened to good old-fashioned fire approach. Maybe because my mother used to burn checks and she's kind of a pyro so she perfected the method. Here's what you do, Richard: you take your papers and put them in the kitchen sink. Then you take a lighter (and don't tell me there are no lighters in that incubator with Erlich being, you know, there) and set one piece of paper on fire. Drop that paper onto the other papers. Enjoy watching everything curl up an disappear into nothingness. Then, turn on the faucet over the sink and put out the fire. There. You have just destroyed your papers way better than any kind of shredding ever could. Fire good, Richard.

I finally got my mom an awesome cross cut shredder a few years ago but before then, she burned all of her old bills and mail too.

[mojoween]

Also, was he not wearing a messenger bag?  That has sufficient size to fit a file folder?  Ugh this show sometimes.

[Hootis]

It had better be a damned ruse, because I'm tired of watching these fuck-ups.  I guess I'd better go watch the next episode.

[hincandenza]

It's probably too late to warn you, but I've got some bad news for you, Hootis... 

[EDTV]

this show is getting really silly... Jack the successful CEO with a dumb idea and not even listing to the CTO and guy who created everything?

And of course 4 geniuses always do stupid things...

Rinse and repeat...

[Camera One]

I liked most of the episode and though the season was going to gain some momentum with their new plan.  But then that idiotic ending tripping over the cord and bringing the incriminating papers to work to shred.