Directed by Francesca Gregorini 
Written by Liz Hannah 
Starring Amanda Seyfried and Naveen Andrews 
New episodes airing Thursdays on Hulu

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

We get a few great moments in "Flower of Life," the fifth episode of The Dropout. Right off the bat, William H. Macy and Mary Lynn Rajskub return (though Rajskub only gets one scene, sadly). Macy's character's lawsuit against Holmes is heating up and that means a lot of Macy shaking his head and having outbursts. Sam Straley comes in as Elizabeth Holmes' brother, Christian. He's Theranos' Associate Director of Strategic Initiatives, a wordy title that means he gets to sit in on meetings even though nobody could tell you what he does. There are tight deadlines in Theranos world, and Christian is going to remind his employees that he went to Duke every time they ask how they're going to hit those deadlines.

We also get the darkest, saddest thread of the series so far as Stephen Fry's Dr. Ian Gibbons is further marginalized at a company he was supposed to help lead. He goes to work in his open concept purgatory, listening to opera in front of a computer that never shifts off its screensaver. He drinks a little to pass the time, and then he goes home at 5. His routine finally, terribly shifts when he gets served in the William H. Macy character's lawsuit and doesn't know what to do. Theranos lawyers make it clear that if he testifies they'll discredit him and let everybody know he's been drinking at work. He'll never get another job again. If he takes the stand and denies what he knows, he'll be committing perjury. Fry and Kate Burton, who plays Ian's wife Rochelle Gibbons, do a beautiful, haunting job communicating the hell they've been put in by a company Gibbons had initially believed would help save lives. Gibbons literally did nothing wrong, his only sin honesty. As in real life, Fry's Gibbons commits suicide.

Seyfried's Holmes isn't saddened by the news. At best, she's stunned. And then celebratory, because now Gibbons can't testify against her. Her deepest emotional reaction involves playing with a dragon finger puppet. "He has no wings. He has to walk" she says as she bounces the puppet forward in an oblique show of grief from a totally empty human being.

It was getting harder to watch the show as the episode went on, and I didn't really know why until the Ian Gibbons suicide. It clicked then, that last week's episode felt like Theranos was falling apart and this week we all got reminded that Theranos had much more fuse left to burn. And that, in turn, is a reminder that these people won. Holmes is disgraced but she's rich and she has a new baby. She was found guilty on four counts of fraud in January and is scheduled to get sentenced in September, but nobody's kidding themselves that she's going to face any real ramifications. She's been staying in a $135 million mansion about twenty minutes from Theranos' old headquarters.

This is not the show's fault! It's very funny when Seyfried dances and lip syncs to Lil' Wayne's "How To Love." I've seen Fry be funny but I've never seen him perform anything close to this level of melancholy, and he does a great job. I'm just having a difficult time, after finding the first half of the show's eight episode run entertaining, figuring out why it exists. Because I don't know why the Uber or WeWork shows exist either, though they look well-made. I bet they're a lot of fun. But I can't watch them. I've seen the documentaries and, in the Theranos case, read the book. And Travis Kalanick and Adam and Rebekah Neumann have more money than ever. The verisimilitude here is impressive and the acting is very good besides that.

But what am I getting out of this? Michael Showalter doesn't have any kind of David Fincher visual flair. He and the other directors (Francesca Gregorini, this week) are not particularly good at making this look different from any standard network drama. I know the details of this true story turned book turned documentary turned podcast turned narrative TV show. I'm just watching the bad guys win again and again, and the performances aren't enough of a salve. If anything, I'm bothered Stephen Fry is good enough to make his character's suicide hurt.

So why does the show exist? It's a fascinating story, but you can take it in a half-dozen other ways. It's fun to laugh at Holmes, Balwani, Shultz, and company falling on their faces, but they don't really care. Shultz is dead and still revered by the kind of Republican who publicly distances themselves from Trump but supports almost all of his employees. Holmes and Balwani don't care what we think. They have money. This kind of thing will never scratch them. Kurtwood Smith plays Theranos lawyer David Boies, whose reputation exploded post-Theranos, when it came out that he had worked hard to silence Harvey Weinstein's victims. It hasn't really hurt him at all. He's still a millionaire, and he’s still, according to his website, on the Board of Trustees at the National Constitution Center. He won a long time ago, and no tight association with fraud all-star Elizabeth Holmes or convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein will ever take that away from him.

There is no advocacy here, no speaking truth to power. It's a very well acted reflection of a story you could learn more about by clicking around news articles from the past five years. And you aren't even watching their downfall, no matter how the next three episodes play out. You're watching minor inconveniences in the lives of the worst people alive.