'Silicon Valley' Finale Roundtable: Can the Show Go Anywhere From Here?

When Silicon Valley came back this season, viewers may not have known what to expect, but they certainly knew what not to expect. T.J. Miller's much-ballyhooed exit meant that the show would be without its most dependable (if incompetent) trickster. Since the HBO show's inception, Erlich Bachman had been the perfect agent of chaos: shortsighted, greedy, and insecure enough to constantly undercut the Pied Piper gang without being an actual antagonist. Couple his departure that with the show's increasingly how are they gonna get out of this--oh, they just did narrative curlicues, and even fans would have been forgiven for assuming the worst for Season 5. Is that how the newest batch turned out? The season, which wrapped up last night, felt as ripped-from-the-headlines as other years--this time cryptocurrency flameouts, Tesla, and Sophia the robot got the parody treatment--but it also added some new variables to the mix.