Teleplay by Elizabeth Meriwether
Story by Elizabeth Meriwether & Sofya Levitsky-Weitz
Directed by Erica Watson
Starring Amanda Seyfried and Naveen Andrews
All episodes streaming now on Hulu

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

Elizabeth Holmes is a terrible person. Objectively, demonstrably, inarguably, Holmes has spent her entire professional life doing fucked up shit. "Lizzy," the final episode of The Dropout, makes an argument that she was also a scapegoat.

How does the worst person in a massive grift qualify as a scapegoat? Well, she takes a fall that her supporters nimbly sidestep. There were investors, a board of directors, lawyers, a fawning press, and when it became clear Theranos was crashing, they were able to point to Holmes, a singularly weird person, and mumble, "It was her fault."

And, again, it was her fault. But The Dropout has been at its best when it's argued the Theranos farce had an ensemble cast. When Sam Waterston's George Shultz shows up at The Wall Street Journal to deliver a prepared statement to John Carreyrou, he recognizes he's made mistakes but stops short of fully apologizing. He says he's a good person - who was sure he was right and who intentionally ignored the red flags. George Shultz is complicit.

As the episode begins, Holmes and Balwani do damage control with their board. Holmes blames the Carreyrou article on sexism, comparing herself to Rosa Parks (yikes) and Margaret Thatcher (okay, that one might check out). The same misogyny that's largely kept women out of executive positions in tech is now trying to tear down one of the few women to make it. The board is complicit for making Holmes seem like a strong woman maverick in the first place - people like Errol Morris and Bill Clinton are complicit.

Following the Journal article's publication, Holmes gets a TV interview to explain herself. The FDA has shut one of her labs down for two years, and it's clear the Theranos Edison is about to go the way of the Microsoft Zune. Everybody back at the office watches, stunned, as Holmes trips over herself trying to justify all of her failures. Lawyer David Boies (Kurtwood Smith), who tried to kill the article, stares at a TV, flabbergasted. He is complicit.

The interview is the same as, or maybe even better than, other Holmes press. It's certainly less creepy than the Errol Morris footage. And I could say that's a slip-up, that the show should have made this interview dramatic, but I don't believe that. I think presenting the same information multiple times and having people freak out only at the very end, when they know their big investment is evaporating live on network television, makes perfect sense. You see what you want to see. The content of the interviews isn't important. It matters that it took public scrutiny for any of these losers to realize they were doing bad things. They're all just as broken and culpable as Holmes is.

Later, lawyer Linda Tanner (Michaela Watkins, playing a composite character), chews Holmes out in the empty, Chernobyl-esque, Theranos offices. "Is there something wrong with you?" she asks. Holmes puts her AirPods in and literally runs away from Tanner, yelling, "You hurt people." And she did. But Tanner pressured Ian Gibbons into suicide a few episodes earlier. Nobody on this show can see how bad they are.

If Holmes is the worst person among an army of bad people, and she is, it's her lack of remorse. When Tanner yells at Holmes, she just wants her old boss to acknowledge that she ruined people's lives. The facade just never slips in public.

Sometimes I'll get into a disagreement and the only thing I want is for the other person to say, "I was wrong." Maybe it's so I don't feel crazy. Maybe I want an apology because then I can infer it won't happen again and I won't, say, get anymore mean emails about my job performance in the future. The provenance of the feeling doesn't matter, really. The important part is that I'm stuck with a feeling that won't resolve itself. Holmes won't let any feelings resolve. It's infuriating. It's also infuriating that Tanner can't see her own faults.

Even as things are falling apart, Holmes mentions receiving an award from Jared Leto. The actor, a onetime Holmes supporter, is now starring as Adam Neumann in AppleTV's WeCrashed, about WeWork's Theranos-level flameout. Leto is in one miniseries eviscerating a billionaire tech scammer while another miniseries name drops him as the celebrity enabler of a different billionaire tech scammer. The Dropout is a perfect reflection of real life in this way: everybody always thinks they're one of the good guys. Leto can cast aspersions on Neumann all he wants, but he was praising Holmes and calling her "the only person I know who makes me feel like a lazy bastard" in 2015.

If Holmes is the worst, Sunny Balwani is just a few steps below. I'll miss watching Amanda Seyfried and Naveen Andrews' interactions on this show. Their conversation about who's going to be left holding the bag is a thrilling piece of TV, two people talking past each other with veiled threats about how much each knows about the other. "We met when I was 18," Holmes says. "You taught me all I know." Balwani responds with a mention that he's been looking through their old texts - he's saved everything.

He's quickly reduced to snarling "I invented you inside my head. For 12 years, I've been making you up. You don't have any feelings. You're a ghost." Holmes blankly gathers her things and walks to her car. "You're a mediocre software developer," she says. He throws her box upside down, scattering everything. "Okay, bye," Seyfried deadpans as Holmes in the best line-reading of the entire show.

This last episode gets its title from something Holmes' new boyfriend Billy Evans calls her in bed. He describes Burning Man to her (a nod to how the show would have ended had COVID never happened) and says she looks "like a Lizzy." It's such a smart decision to name the episode after a post-meltdown moment of tenderness between Holmes and some rich kid who can promise her a new life. She'll be fine. The show ends with updates on its characters and Silicon Valley, telling us, "One female founder was told to dye her hair so she looked less like Elizabeth Holmes." There's still a crater in the wake of Theranos. People's lives were shaken when they got false test results from Edison machines. Employees with souls had to deal with threats from a wildly powerful legal team. And now, women who have the same hair color as Elizabeth Holmes are being held back. But Holmes will be fine. She'll pivot to a new business model and lifestyle, if she's capable of separating those two concepts. There are no dead ends when you're this messed up. The Dropout ends and Hulu recommends 20/20 episodes about other scams. It never stops.