Directed by Francesca Gregorini
Written by Wei-Ning Yu
Starring Amanda Seyfriend and Naveen Andrews
New episodes airing Thursdays on Hulu

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

Director Francesca Gregorini opens the sixth episode of The Dropout with a perfect recreation of Errol Morris' ads for Theranos, where Elizabeth Holmes, dressed as Steve Jobs, voice pitched to a "friendly but dim Muppet" level, stares into the camera and a ring light, and fits buzzwords into buzz sentences that let you know she's doing great things - even if she won't tell you what those things are.

Clips from the ads went viral on Twitter upon release and Alex Gibney took Morris to task in the HBO documentary The Inventor. That means that these are, like everything in The Dropout, old news, covered extensively. They're also still eerie 7 years later, their outrageousness more novel than any of the backroom deals and conversations we watched last episode. Morris has made a lot of great work, but his interrotron has unnerved me even in its most benign uses. Essentially, the interrotron is a camera Morris invented that projects his face into the lens, so that the people he's interviewing can talk with him in real-time while looking straight into the camera. In this situation, that means holding a staring contest with Elizabeth Holmes in an Apple commercial void. Gregorini returns to the shoot throughout the episode, and each time I was anxious to have Seyfried-as-Holmes look anywhere but my face. Horror filmmakers take note.

Morris, named in the episode but used as an extra, is one of the growing number of background characters getting crammed into this unsustainable Jenga game. There are two episodes of The Dropout left and the loose ends just keep piling up. In a different show that might be frustrating. You'd start to assume this would be a Lost situation, where the plotlines needing to get wrapped up were far outnumbering the time to wrap them up in. Here, every new character's importance is directly tied to Holmes and Sunny Balwani. They're all being used in similar ways and they'll all either do their part to take the pair down or go down themselves. The Dropout makes its already inevitable conclusion that much more sure, rather than biting off more than it can chew.

The two big introductions are to John Carreyrou (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and Erika Cheung (Camryn Mi-Young Kim). Carreyrou is the Wall Street Journal writer who doesn't buy any of the Holmes hype, tries to find out more about Theranos and ultimately helps the whole thing collapse. Moss-Bachrach plays him the way most good journalists are played in movies and TV shows, which is to say he has a dogged determination to get to the truth, even with every frustrating barrier that pops up in his way.

Kim's Erika Cheung is more complicated. Cheung is a new employee who discovers Theranos has put its own logo stickers over Siemens machines and that the test results are as accurate as a coin flip. She becomes friends with Tyler Shultz, who starts singing Dispatch's "The General" with almost no prompting (I can confirm this is a thing people do in the San Francisco suburbs).

She calls Tyler on his privilege and seems to be the first person to point out that he's got a job because his grandfather is on the Board of Directors. He's hurt, but quickly understands that he has a power that Cheung, who grew up poor and has always felt like an outcast, does not. She can't afford to lose this job. They probably wouldn't fire him under any circumstances.

Unfortunately, they both lose their jobs. In the episode's greatest scene, Tyler performs an off-key acoustic guitar ode to Holmes at a party, in front of a room of guests who couldn't love Holmes more. As he finishes, she thanks him for the song and instructs Tyler to play it again, immediately. And he does. It's a little mind game that Holmes uses to signal to Tyler that he's in her pocket.

A day or two later, he's brought into her office with Cheung. Tyler and Cheung have sent an email to Holmes and Balwani explaining Theranos' technological failures. Cheung's name wasn't on the letter, but it's clear Tyler got most, if not all, of the outlined information from his new friend. He offers to quit, but is fired on the spot. Cheung is let go later. We don't know the pretense but Holmes and Balwani haven't needed airtight reasons to get rid of staff before. We understand that if the show spent ten minutes on her firing scene, it would just be repetitive.

The episode ends with George Shultz confronting Tyler and Cheung about their distrust of Holmes. She held personal demos for George, so obviously it's all above-board stuff. George chastises Cheung, especially, angry and condescending that one woman in tech would try to make things harder for another.

It's the fourth or fifth time Holmes' gender has been brought up in this week's episode. George Shultz is a 90-something-year-old Republican politician - if he actually cared about women's issues, he would have done something about them at some point in the past seven decades of his career. I'd be surprised if the real George looked his wife in the eye more than a couple times a month. His enthusiasm for supporting women is more than a little left-field. But it symbolizes the way Holmes took advantage of Silicon Valley's desire to look progressive without actually doing anything progressive. "Look, we made a woman a billionaire this time." Watching this episode, I could feel the frustration from the women who wrote and directed this episode, who worked their asses off to make a piece of television about a woman more than willing to sell everybody else out. And I appreciated that frustration.