Few comedies… wait, scratch that. Few shows deploy plot twists quite as well as Silicon Valley. Look at the evidence: There was the mathematically correct dick joke that saved the day at the end of season one, and the season two finale ended with a series of twists all stacked on top of each other, like a balloon animal made by a… whatever you call a master balloon maker. (That’s a thing, right? A master balloon maker? Feels like it should be a thing.)
And yet, despite this grand history of borderline genius twists, Silicon Valley might have just pulled off its best and funniest one yet. Because, at the end of last night’s episode, after 30 minutes of making us think things were going one way, this happened…
And here’s the thing: That twist might actually be even twistier than it first appeared. We’ll discuss that in a minute. It will involve some history. But first, we should back up. A little context will help.
The second season of Silicon Valley ended with Richard getting voted out as Pied Piper CEO, which led to the introduction of Jack “Action Jack” Barker, a veteran CEO played by the always delightful Stephen Tobolowsky. Action Jack is all about capitalizing on the tech bubble (well, that and horse sex), so he and his sales team promptly took steps to turn Pied Piper into a boring business appliance instead of a potentially world-altering compression tool. Our heroes were upset.
In an attempt to get Action Jack to back off, they tried three strategies. First, Richard went to him and made a pitch based on passion and idealism. No dice. Then Erlich went to him for a CEO-to-CEO chat that lasted all of 90 seconds. And then they got their investor to call and tell Jack he was out of line, but Jack threatened to quit and the optics of losing two CEOs in a matter of weeks caused her to give in to Jack and his plan.
So the team developed a new plan. A very Ocean’s Eleven-y one, right down to the slow-motion walking and clandestine meetings by a pool. (Note: According to Jared, Ocean’s Eleven was “a 2001 casino heist film starring Julia Roberts and eleven men,” which is perfect.) The gist: They would secretly build the platform they wanted while making Jack think they were building his appliance, knowing that Jack couldn’t do anything once they were done because there would be no time to change it and it was what the investor wanted all along. They spent the last 10 minutes of the episode methodically plotting it all out, with cool heist-type music playing in the background, and then they showed up at the office for their first day of putting it into action.
Which brings us back to this GIF.
On its face, what appears to have happened here is that Richard tripped in the middle of his confident entrance and all of their secret plans fell into Jack’s hands before they could implement a single one of them. This, to be very clear, would be hilarious, because it would mean the show spent an entire episode laying the groundwork for a super-cool top-secret renegade plan that could conceivably drive the plot for the entire season, only to take out a pin and pop the balloon at the very end, just for a goof. That would be maybe the funniest thing I’ve seen a television comedy do in years.
But there’s another possibility, and it’s hidden in the episode’s title, and it might be even better. This is where things could potentially get a little spoiler-y, so if you want out, feel free to jump off here.
The episode was titled “Meinertzhagen’s Haversack.” Seems like an odd title, yes? Almost like it might contain supplemental information? Almost like it could be that thing I mentioned earlier about a lesson from history? We go now to the Wikipedia page for British intelligence agent Richard Meinertzhagen, under the heading “Haversack Ruse.”
During 1917, Colonel Meinertzhagen was transferred from East Africa to be put in place at Deir-el-Belah. He made contact with a useful spy network of Palestinian Jews. They were instrumental in contacting Jewish officers in the Ottoman army, amongst many other sources, for information, and attempted their defection to the allies. A German Jewish doctor stationed at el-Afulah railway junction gave valuable reconnaissance reports on troop movements south. Meinertzhagen’s department produced regular maps from the data showing the dispositions of enemy forces in the desert.
In October 1917, the Turks broke up the network by subjecting the Jews to hideous torture. Meinertzhagen’s sources of information dwindled to the occasional prisoner caught out by patrols, and deserters. He is frequently credited with a surprise attack known as the Haversack Ruse in October 1917: during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign of the First World War, according to his diary, he let a haversack containing false British battle plans fall into Ottoman military hands, thereby bringing about the British victory in the Battle of Beersheba and Gaza.
So what we have here is one of two possibilities. Possibility one: This episode was an homage to both Ocean’s Eleven and a century-old spy flim-flam technique (I love you, Silicon Valley), and our Richard used that Richard’s trick to “accidentally” turn over incriminating evidence to Jack, as a way to provide cover for their real plan to build the platform. This feels right, both because of all the historical evidence and because it would be a classic Silicon Valley double-twist.
Possibility two: The title itself was the Haversack Ruse — a ruse within a ruse, if you will — and the show’s goal was to misdirect me personally and send me down a lunatic Wikipedia rabbit hole to come up with this, all to make me look stupid in a next-day recap. Which… dang.
(I would still love you, Silicon Valley.)
