Written by Liz Heldens
Directed by Erica Watson
Starring Amanda Seyfriend and Naveen Andrews
New episodes airing Thursdays on Hulu

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

"Heroes," the seventh episode of The Dropout, opens with Amanda Seyfried superimposed into televised clips of Elizabeth Holmes with Bill Clinton and Joe Biden (and these are crosscut with Seyfried chugging green juice, in a great bit of physical comedy). Clinton says the future is in good hands. Once again, nobody asks what Clinton's credentials are for verifying Holmes' legitimacy. Later, Seyfried is placed into a Holmes interview with Charlie Rose. I don't think it's a coincidence that the three TV clips in "Heroes" are with older men accused of preying on younger women. Or maybe it's inevitable that any recreation of our media landscape will be full of bad men providing platforms for, and endorsing, young women. Rupert Murdoch is discussed frequently in this episode, apropos of whatever.

That's been Holmes' MO in The Dropout, from Sunny Balwani on up to George Shultz - create a living wall of men too powerful to question, and then hide behind it and make billions. We just live in a crappy world where "too powerful to question" has often meant "abusive."

In this penultimate episode of The Dropout, the wall is the weakest it's ever been. John Carreyrou's list of sources is growing and Holmes is feeling some heat for the first time since Stephen Fry's Ian Gibbons gained his coworkers' support. Ebon Moss-Bachrach's Carreyrou is the primary focus of this episode, racing to get a story out before Theranos' legal team shuts him down, and before Rupert Murdoch, Wall Street Journal owner, kills the story Carreyrou's trying to expose, to protect his $125 million investment in the company. It's a classic journalism story, where a writer (and his editor, here a made-up character played with a "hell yeah" verve by LisaGay Hamilton) alternates between begging sources to go on record, and looking over his shoulder - worried the corrupt folks he's reporting on are watching.

It all culminates in a meeting where David Boies and a posse of seven march into the Journal's offices and try to intimidate Carreyrou into dropping everything. Kurtwood Smith has Boies' demeanor down. It's that "I'm intimidating you in a way that looks like normal conversation on paper" sniping that it's so easy to hate. Boies announces his respect for journalists and then elliptically threatens a journalist with endless litigation. He blows it, though, admitting Theranos isn't purely running on proprietary technology. They've got Siemens machines they had once denied using, and Boies realizes he's fucked up the second he lets that information slip. The article goes live, Holmes' phone blows up and William H. Macy's Richard Fuisz cackles alone in a messy mansion.

Elsewhere in "Heroes," we've got George Shultz setting up a secret intervention with his grandson Tyler in an attempt to convince him to stay away from Carreyrou. Theranos' lawyer, played by Michaela Watkins, comes on a little stronger than George had expected and he has a slight change of heart, ultimately defending Tyler in ways he didn't in real life. Shortly before his death, the actual George Shultz apologized for putting Tyler through all of this. It's probably easier to make a show where Sam Waterston is well-intentioned by misled than it is to admit his inspiration was at one point ready to send his grandson to jail.

Carreyrou and the Shultz family are the episode's heart, but I enjoyed Holmes and Balwani even more. There's a great shot of Naveen Andrews in a white Adidas tracksuit, sitting on a white bed, in a white house, that seemed like a perfect physical representation of this sleazeball shot into tech's high society. His partner's getting facetime with presidents but he's Tony Montana. Later, he holds a meeting denying everything in the Journal article and leads his employees (I guess they're his employees-- we still have no idea what his official role at the company is) in a chant of "Fuck you, Carreyrou." There's an anger he presents to everybody, this "who are you to question me" authority that he's rubbed off onto Holmes. The chant is, famously, real. Carreyrou, blessed with a skill for investigative journalism and damned with a last name that rhymes with "fuck you," has written about it, and I think of the chant as a sort of mask off point for Balwani. He's always treated his underlings like disappointing children, but that was in private meetings. Now he's doing it in Theranos' lobby, at the top of his lungs.

Holmes is at a Harvard dinner when the Journal article drops. She runs into Dr. Phyllis Gardner, her old Stanford professor, expecting praise. She receives all the venom Gardner's been building up since their classroom confrontations. Gardner tells Holmes she's setting women in tech back. I hope she isn't right. I don't have any data to quantify that and, if I did, it would probably make me sick.

This is more of that feeling I've said I was looking forward to. By episode 7, Holmes has established herself enough that she can't hide behind a wide-eyed ambition-- the tech needs to have been in place by this point. Holmes is now actively lying to everybody but Balwani. The question I hope The Dropout tries to answer in its final episode is whether she's also lying to herself. I've inferred from Seyfried's performance that Holmes buys her own bullshit, and from Andrews' that the show's version of Balwani is less convinced of his own altruism. I'd like some probing there, especially as the real Holmes awaits sentencing. She got pregnant right before her trial and Gardner showed up in an episode of 20/20 to say she doesn't doubt the baby was all a calculated sympathy magnet. It's gross, but in character for Holmes. I think Seyfried and the writers are capable of broaching the topic of Holmes' sincerity, but I don't know if they'll do it. That might almost be too dark.