Carson Mell’s script lets this play out as a breakup-inducing lover’s quarrel.
After earnestly explaining his reasons for leaving, and how hard the decision is for him, Jared receives the full brunt of Richard’s fury. His frustration bleeds into his meeting with Jared. Since Colin’s company is keeping Pied Pier afloat, there’s nothing Richard can do about these ads. I once got a massage at Massage Envy, and I swear it felt like they were rubbing a pterodactyl on me, so kudos once again to this show’s wicked, snarky use of product placement. Gamers don’t even have to say anything that makes sense to invoke an ad a loud explosion of gibberish by Dinesh brings up a pterodactyl dragging a Massage Envy flyer behind it. Anything remotely sexual brings hundreds of porn-site pop-up ads. Saying “vacation” results in a Carnival cruise ship and a Southwest Airlines jet. The API is always listening and is incredibly persistent. “He’s using our API to run ads directly in the game?!” asks Richard incredulously. No attempt is made to incorporate the restaurant into the game’s visual motif - it looks like a regular Domino’s, complete with a sign that takes up half the screen. Immediately, a building in the medieval game turns into a Domino’s Pizza. “It is,” says Dinesh, “until I put on my headset.” He mentions pizza. “This looks like the normal game,” says Richard. Dinesh and Gilfoyle call Richard over to look at the latest PiperNet release of Colin’s Gates of Galloo. Perhaps if Colin hadn’t lied about using the data he collected from gamer headsets to sell ads, Jared might have felt less guilty. To say that Richard doesn’t handle Jared’s decision well would be putting it mildly. There, he discovered Jian-Yang running an incubator with a programmer named Gwart who could use an detail-oriented assistant. Jared was so shaken by his role in this debacle that he accidentally drove to Hacker Hostel. That path led to Colin turning the tables on their blackmail scheme, using the incriminating recordings Richard indexed as proof that PiperNet has a fantastic data mining algorithm.
“I let my desire to be needed by Richard lead me down a horrible path,” he told his court-appointed therapist on last week’s show. Except this time, Jared blames himself for the bad advice he gave Richard regarding the Colin data-collection situation. Thankfully, Jared rescinded his resignation at the end of that episode and all was well.įast-forward to this week’s similar, less satisfying episode, “Blood Money,” and Richard is once again staring down Jared’s third letter. We learned that the Pied Piper crew looked to Jared to handle all the due diligence they consistently neglected to do. With Jared no longer around as a voice of reason, Richard did some incredibly dumb things that almost cost him Pied Piper. Our resident empath could no longer stand those personality changes, so he quit. By this point, Richard had become something of a tyrant, and a dishonest one at that. In “ Server Error,” Jared tells Richard, “I write three letters whenever I start a job: a personal action plan, a letter to my 40-year-old self, and a resignation letter.” His explanation precedes handing Richard that third letter.