Directed by Michael Showalter
Written by Dan LeFranc
Starring Amanda Seyfried and Naveen Andrews
New episodes airing Thursdays on Hulu

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

In my last Dropout write-up, which covered the limited series' first three episodes, I said I hoped the show would expand to include more weirdos like Holmes. As a narcissistic founder of a tech company, she isn't that special, but as a lying billionaire with a fake low voice, she's a high watermark of gonzo humanity. We've seen William H. Macy's Richard Fuisz and Hart Bochner's Larry Ellison, but neither has stuck around for especially long or had more than a momentary impact on the plot. Episode 4, "Old White Men," gives us a Three Stooges (plus eventual Shemp) combo of personalities that put Amanda Seyfried's Elizabeth Holmes in context, and at least one of them is the kind of nut I was waiting for.

The primary old white man of "Old White Men" is Alan Ruck's Jay Rosan. He's a higher-up at Walgreens corporate, who had success in the early 90s and still thinks of himself as being hip and with it (he tells multiple people that he likes to be called "Dr. J" because he used to play basketball, and he touts his Webby like it's a Pulitzer). It's impossible to not compare him to a more successful version of Ruck's character on Succession, in that he's a total mark who's managed to fail upward. He's sent, with Andrew Leeds' Roland and Rich Sommer's Kevin, to Theranos HQ in California to see whether the Edison box has a place in Walgreens stores.

Jay is gung-ho, fascinated by everything happening in California, while Kevin, an outside consultant sent to test the science, is forced to be the realist. That's harder than you'd expect, given Theranos' extreme reluctance to show him any lab equipment or data. The Theranos line is that Kevin once worked for Qwest, and could be trying to steal their tech. The real reason, of course, is that Theranos still hasn't been able to make their machine accomplish even half of what they say it can. The third Stooge is Roland, played by Andrew Leeds. He's fully in the Larry Fine role, trying to appease both of the men he's tagging along with, smiling and nodding when anybody tells him anything. They're later joined by their superior, CFO Wade, played by Josh Pais. Waid keeps it together, but he's clearly anxious to get his company a win. As Theranos jerks them around, pitting pharmaceutical retailers against each other, Waid and Jay get exponentially more worried that they're potentially blowing the opportunity of a lifetime.

I'm excited to see more of the Walgreens crew. Rich Sommer isn't listed as a recurring actor on Wikipedia, but I hope he continues to show up. Ruck's character is the kind of heightened character I wanted more of, but I need Sommer's character to be a voice of reason, for catharsis, so that I can watch The Dropout and not want to yell "What is wrong with you" at my TV. I need a character to do that for me.

The Walgreens plot has so many beautiful moments of peak dumbass. Ruck sings along to the inspirational words of Katy Perry, and he delights in noticing somebody play Angry Birds on an elevator. In honor of Walgreens' history with World War II, Elizabeth Holmes presents the crew with an American flag authentically flown in Afghanistan. She's signed the flag. She's framed it. It's a perfect push-pull between easily manipulated dopes and people who shouldn't be good at manipulating others, but are lucky to have somehow met folks who are stupider than they are.

The b-plot, fittingly, follows Stephen Fry's Ian Gibbons trying to uncover the mysterious "Project Beta." Beta is just a shadowy name for "trick Walgreens into buying our snake oil." Gibbons is intrigued and worried ("Has anybody noticed there seem to be more armed guards than usual?" he asks coworkers), and is punished for his curiosity. As shifty new security protocols are put into place - rules like "Do not talk with people outside your department" - Gibbons asks too many questions. He's fired and then, when his fellow scientists take a tiny stand, re-hired for the sake of morale. He isn't allowed to do much, though. He can't work in the lab. He's trapped in an open concept rubber room.

Gibbons confronting Holmes about the ethics of putting Theranos' defective product into Walgreens is a good reminder that Holmes isn't just some harmlessly narcissistic goof. There's an Angelyne show coming out soon - that's the platonic ideal of a harmlessly narcissistic goof. Holmes fully knew she was going to profit off false medical diagnoses. That's evil. She's a malignant force in the world. The Dropout does well to remind you of that, and I don't think it would be able to if it wasn't balancing comedy and drama this well.

There's a smile Seyfried always pulls out in scenes where Holmes talks with people she's trying to impress. It's the same smile Christian Bale observed on Tom Cruise while preparing for American Psycho. It's a tightly-controlled attempt at looseness, and it's disarmingly gross. That's the comedy-drama balance in one gesture.

Two brief things–the dark synth music, especially in the Fuki Sushi scene (a real, great restaurant, though the building in the show is a stand-in) is straight out of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross' The Social Network score. Their work proves more influential every year, just like the drum-heavy Birdman work Antonio Sánchez made that gets copied by shows like Fargo.

And then, and the scene is so brief it almost isn't worth mentioning, I was excited to meet Sam Waterston's George Schultz. Schultz was a successful politician in his 90s, who, like everybody interested in Theranos, was more anxious to glom onto something big, than he was to admit he didn't know anything about tech. His grandson would later bring Theranos down by talking with journalist John Carreyrou (author of the incredible book Bad Blood). I'm excited to see this all play out, especially Schultz' bizarre intervention with his grandchild.