Not only does this dampen some of the impact of the prior moments, it kind of underscores Thomas Middleditch’s impressive performance when he so unnervingly stood out for his best friend. Which is why, in another jarring shift, he betrays the very friend who stands by him when he accepts Gavin Belson’s counter-offer of a $600,000 annual salary with a promotion. It’s played for laughs, sure, but there’s a brief poignant side to it as well when Big Head expresses his desire as nothing else but to earn money by programming on computers, not concerned about investor shares or “percentage points”. You can sense Richard wanting him to stay shut but Nelson outs himself as a liability to Pied Piper quickly than anyone can brand him as such. Josh Brener plays Big Head as an absolute naive misfit in the otherwise corrupt world of Silicon Valley who, by his own admission, hasn’t really done anything significant. This brings us to the gang’s truly useless member: Nelson “Big Head” Bighetti.
And again, it’s conveyed rather subtly with the rants being granted the over-the-top moments, ensuring the character dynamic doesn’t really lose its charm. It also brings out an interesting rivalry dynamic between Dinesh and Gilfoyle, with the duo’s constant need to one-up the other for sure to be played out for laughs in subsequent episodes. Both Gilfoyle and Dinesh are able to sell the importance of their contributions with conviction, Gilfoyle adding a lot of technological mumbo-jumbo and exaggerating the work he does by citing safety from packet sniffing and fradulent internet transaction management as examples while also claiming he’s one of those responsible for preventing the PetaBytes of data flowing around the internet from getting corrupted and breaking the chain and it’s done in a hilarious manner that, techies will certainly be able to relate to. That proposal quickly comes to Richard and Jared interviewing the company’s first “employees” about their roles in the organization. It was definitely an out of the blue plot point but one that the show needed to help Richard progress with his B-plan. His departure does come across as a bit jarring, seeing as there was no specific indication made of Jared despising the Hooli life it also seems a little unlike the timid Jared to quit an immensely well-paying job overnight for a role that may not even have a guaranteed future. Thankfully, Donald “Jared” Dunn shows up as their savior who defected from Hooli to join the ragtag bunch of scavengers. The “programmers” are shown to be clueless in the dynamics of business management and quickly realize that running a company is going to involve quite a bit of that. Silicon Valley squeals in delight at the prospect of putting its protagonists in trouble. I was half-expecting Monica to jump into Richard’s aid in secret but it looks like that isn’t happening yet.
Instead, they quickly realize Gregory is a tough mentor who expects a lot more of them and quickly dispenses them off to draft a business plan detailing the company’s shareholding and distribution. And the first one is presented right in the show’s opening moments when Richard and Erlich walk up to Peter Gregory, expecting him to guide them on their path to incorporation. Now that the meeky Richard Hendricks has decided that startup is the way to go, it looks like we’re going to be treated to a host of entrepreneurial challenges that the group faces along the way.