The Theranos Founder is at the height of her fame, but the truth is starting to come out
Telling the story of how Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes fooled the world for a while, “The Dropout,” which is now streaming on Hulu (DIS) – Get Walt Disney Company Report, is an attempt to get inside Holmes’ head.
Adapted by Elizabeth Meriwether from the podcast of the same name, its as much about why Holmes lied to investors, her board and America about her machine the Edison, which famously did not work, as much as it’s about how she pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes.
The episode starts with Holmes filming an advertisement by famed documentarian Errol Morris.
As she has throughout the series, Amanda Seyfriend gives a compelling performance, capturing Holmes’ unnerving glare and halting, awkward speech patterns — though you’ll have to catch an earlier episode for her sure-to-win an Emmy solo dancing.
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When Morris asks her to talk to the camera like she’s talking to her friends, Holmes becomes flustered and unmoored; it’s clear at this point she doesn’t know how to have an interaction with anyone who’s not an employee or public admirer.
Basically, she’s a complete dork, which is often the scariest thing in the world.
Paved With Good Intentions
While Holmes may have started with good intentions to build a machine that would revolutionize blood testing, saving lives in the process, the show makes clear she’s always been driven more by her own narcissism and need to be seen as a revolutionary figure than any genuine desire to help people.
But the series sixth episode also examines why so many people were quick to believe that a Stanford dropout was poised to be the next Steve Jobs.
Her friend and board member, former Secretary of State George George Shultz (played by Sam Waterston as the ultimate cold fish blue blood) has organized her 30th birthday party, which notably features almost no one near her own age.
The party features the surreal and unnerving image of everyone wearing masks of Holmes’ face, a handy metaphor for the hopes they project onto her, and her ability to conform to people’s need to believe in a visionary.
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Later, Holmes and her secret boyfriend Sunny Balwani (who is getting increasingly peeved that he’s not getting any credit for her success) dance awkwardly while wearing Holmes masks to Nick Jonas’ “Jealous.”
Speaking onstage at Stanford, Holmes is clearing loving the idea that she’s become a feminist icon and inspiration to women who want to success in the boy’s club of technology.
Still consumed by petty slights, she takes a swipe at a professor (Dr. Phyllis Gardner, played with acidic perfection by Laurie Metcalf) who (rightly) didn’t believe in her, saying “it’s hard for some women to get out of their old thinking.”
Meanwhile Gardner and Richard Fuisz (played by William H. Macy, king of frustrated, nebbish men) are trying to expose Holmes.
They’ve contacted the widow of Ian Gibbons, who committed suicide last episode, wracked with guilt for enabling Holmes to hurt innocent people.
That leads to the ultimate pitfall: Talking to Wall Street Journal reporter John Carreyrou, the future author of “Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup,” and the man who eventually unmasks Theranos to the world.
The Beginning of the End
There’s not quite enough evidence to go forward yet, Carreyrou tells everyone, but that’s about to change.
While plotting how to take Holmes down, Gardner and Gibbons pontificate on how she fooled everyone, with the widow saying she knows why Holmes has been able to thrive.
The CEO helped people to flatter themselves into feeling like they are progressive and forward-thinking for supporting a woman, and then not looking any further. “She makes them feel good without challenging them.”
The episode’s B-plot concerns two new hires, George’s grandson Tyler Shultz (Dylan Minnette) and Erika Cheung (Cameron Mi-young Kim).
In between Tyler talking her ear off about the jam band Dispatch, the two begin to realize something is very off.(That they have to use a hanger to fix a jammed Edison is a big tell.
Eventually, they realize that the Edison machines are consistently giving people fake results.
They both quit, and eventually contact Carreyrou, while their supervisor, ashamed that be broke the Hippocratic oath, tells Fuisz that the Edison never worked.
He adds that Theranos has been secretly using tests from the Siemens machine, the dinosaur Holmes bragged she was going to destroy.
But now the water is fast boiling around Holmes, and her goose is about to be well and truly cooked.
