The most important image of Elizabeth Holmes you see in The Dropout is of her running away.
Late in "Lizzie," the eighth and final episode of Hulu's series about the collapse of blood testing startup Theranos, Holmes sees the company collapse in the wake of an investigation by the Wall Street Journal. She has broken up with her boyfriend and second in command, Sunny Balwani, as the two prepare to try to put the blame on each other. But the CEO, played by Amanda Seyfried, isn't slow: She's got a dog and a new boyfriend and is insisting she's going to give it a go. That's his plan: keep it going, keep going.
In the mostly empty Theranos offices, she is confronted by Linda's (now former) company attorney Michaela Watkins, whom Holmes cannot stop asking for help, even though Linda no longer works for the company that she is not being paid. is . Linda, who carried out some of Theranos' ugliest tasks earlier in the series, now has no job and a tarnished reputation (all of which she has brought upon herself). Holmes utterly fails to read the room; She wants to talk to Linda about the boyfriend, the dog, out of all this mess, with a smile. But Linda reminds him of the huge mess she's made, eventually telling him, "You hurt people." Holmes Bolt.
She runs, literally, through the large glass doors, down the stairs, through the front door of the building, pulling the dog behind her, as Linda follows her saying she has hurt people. She runs, and then she spends a moment screaming, just screaming as hard as she can, and then she calmly climbs into an Uber with her radiant smile, and that's the end.
There's an obvious way to structure a story about a figure like Elizabeth Holmes: She creates herself, she's on top of the world, and then her dramatic collapse occurs. This is your original tragedy. (Not "tragedy" in the colloquial sense; "tragedy" in the traditional narrative sense.) The problem with that structure and this story is that, in real life, the "fall" of a wealthy white entrepreneur who is caught dishonest or deceptive, One that hurts employees or customers, that creates a toxic environment - it's rarely dramatic. The real Elizabeth Holmes married a rich man and is still rich. She was convicted of defrauding her investors, but it remains to be seen whether she will remain in prison for much longer or at all.
It's a trap to try to make any of these filthy startup stories — whether they're about Holmes, or Adam Newman at WeWork, or Travis Kalanick at Uber — for the same reason satisfying, schadenfreude stories. Honestly, not much happens to these guys. So The Dropout doesn't make for Holmes' fall from grace as a CEO or a billionaire, but makes for a scene in which you see him rushing under pressure. The climax is not a fall; This is the moment you learn who he is, what his flaws are, why his downfall won't last. You learn why it won't change this version of Elizabeth Holmes, and why she'll never admit what she did.
Because the idea of The Dropout is that Holmes was raised by connected people, wanted to be wealthy, was extremely ambitious, went all-out on a disastrous Silicon Valley culture, and was stubborn to the point of absurdity, there There was something special in the way he processed his past that paved the way for him to become.
In particular, the series appears to have Holmes taking his mother's misguided (but very common) "go ahead, forget it" advice after her college sexual assault and use it as a "move on, Forget it" attitude expanded into . He developed the ability to completely separate the past from the future, breaking any connection between those two things at any time. And without the connection between now and the after, there is no relationship between actions and results, and without it, there is no real room for discretion to work. This is incredibly sad, because it starts from the point where she is harmed, and it moves on to how she harms others. But it doesn't frame that progress as liberating, only as insight into one of the things, perhaps several things, that went wrong to allow him to be that person.
This insight isn't the only thing that made The Dropout good in any way, but it's an example of what a need like this is if they're going to be good. They need a reason to exist - something to say, some talented actors and a smart script. And it just can't be that the person is disgusting, because it's not interesting, especially with someone who's already been cast in the public imagination as a villain. It may not be anything that feels like it's making excuses for the unforgivable, as it becomes a conflicting morality tale of a different kind.
What has made The Dropout the most successful in this run of "startups that went terribly wrong" is that it has a range of ideas within its writing—about corporations like Walgreens and those every red flag. How do you remember, about people who couldn't admit they had them like George Schultz, and even about lawyers who lived in Silicon Valley's prime power-trip environment? fuels self-destruction. And artists, especially Seyfried, are working to make all those ideas completely real.
It's hard to conclude a series about a story that not only doesn't have a full ending yet (and at least until Holmes is sentenced) but it probably won't be very satisfying when it does. But they did it here, as they moved away from the collapse as the biggest disclosure, and toward the revelation of how a fearful CEO could turn out to be, above all, too afraid to face what he has done.