S02E08 - White Hat/Black Hat

No: 16  |  Season: 2   Episode: 8  |  Air Date: 31-May-15  |  Ratings: 1.78

Summary

When Russ Hanneman learns Richard has arranged a trial with Intersite he arrives at the house with a bottle of his brand-name tequila, "Tres Commas". Meanwhile, after a Hooli board meeting, Gavin Belson seeks out a scapegoat on which to transfer the blame for the Nucleus failure. He convinces Davis Bannercheck to return to Hooli to head up the Nucleus project. However, after Bannercheck interviews the Nucleus team to assess the state of the project, he immediately speeds away from Hooli in his car. Back at Pied Piper, Richard feels responsible, after he learns that Seth Lee, EndFrame's security engineer, was fired. After meeting with Seth, Richard becomes paranoid Seth is going to hack the Pied Piper system. Later, as Pied Piper is transferring data from Intersite, Russ Hanneman arrives to celebrate. Soon, Intersite's content begins to be indiscriminately deleted, making the Pied Piper team fearful that Seth has hacked their system. However, it turns out that Russ placed his tequila bottle on the delete key of a laptop that was connected to the Intersite server.

Director and Writers

Director: Alec Berg
Written by: Daniel Lyons

Quotes

Russ: Richard, this is my own brand. Tres Comas. Do you know what that means in Spanish?
Richard: Three comm...
Russ: (interrupting) Nope. Three commas.

Russ: We are going to drink to re-billionizing.

Gavin: That strategy just sounds so inside the box. Might it not be more innovative to shroud Nucleus in mystery until the official roll out next January?

Jian-Yang: What if I told you there is an app on the market...
Erlich: No, you wait until you're inside. Okay? We haven't even gotten the bottle of water yet.

Jian-Yang: I don't smoke. Except for special occasions.
Erlich: So you do smoke? Wait, have you been smoking in my house?
Jian-Yang: No. There's no special occasion ever happen in your house.

Erlich: Monica, we may never know what indecipherable Chinese province Jian-Yang comes from, but I know this much, Jian-Yang was born to bring it, and you have got to try women.

Richard: The point is, what are we gonna do about Seth?
Gilfoyle: How do you mean?
Richard: Well, I mean, we have an unemployed and very pissed off systems guy, who very publicly threatened to skullfuck our whole system.
Gilfoyle: He's not gonna do shit. He's a coder.
Dinesh: By definition, we're all pussies.
Gilfoyle: Look, he'll vent for half an hour and then he'll go LARPing and mogging and stroke his dick for a while. Even if he does try to crack us, Richard, I built our network security myself. I'm not worried about it at all.

Monica: The problem is, he's basically created the perfect tool for pedophiles to find victims.
Erlich: Yes, and pedophiles are typically not early-adopters, so we would miss out on that whole market. That's problematic.

(Bannercheck's first meeting with the Nucleus team)
Bannercheck: I'm sure the work that you have done so far has been very good. But now that I am here, the real work begins, and time is of the essence. I'm gonna need status reports from every department. Where are we?
Aly: We have a mobile beta on a HooliPhone.
Jason: You wanna see it?
Bannercheck: Mmm? Yeah.
(Cut to Gavin Belson at a "Habitat for Humanity" construction site)
Gavin: He quit? What do you mean he quit?
Scott: According to security, he entered the building at 9:13. He met with the Nucleus team for 11 minutes. Then he used his key card to exit the building.
Patrice: Three minutes later, he was clocked at 73 in a 25 zone going past our daycare center. He never returned, and he hasn't responded to our calls or e-mail.

Richard: Seth is out there lurking. Just lurking in the darknet ready to pounce like an Internet panther. And we don't care. Okay, well, frankly, your lack of paranoia is insane to me.
Gilfoyle: Now you're paranoid that we're not paranoid enough?
Dinesh: You're para-paranoid, Richard.

Erlich: In our initial build we realized that the same geo-tagging technology that could be used to locate uncrowded playgrounds could also be used to prey on children, our greatest natural resource, by one of society's worst elements Pedophiles.
Laurie: The pedophile facing nature of the app would present marketing pain points. Yes.
Erlich: But under Monica's guidance, we realized the same technology could also be used to create a real-time, crowd-sourced map of an even worse segment of the population.
Laurie: Worse than pedophiles?
Erlich: Smokers. Because, let's face it, no one's ever died of secondhand heroin.

Gilfoyle: Richard, no one is cracking our transfer. Not Seth, not some rogue nuclear state, not Sk3wl of fucking R00t. No one.

Richard: Russ, we're at a pretty critical juncture right now, so
Russ: (points at the computer screen) What's that?
Jared: That is pornography, thousands of hours of it.
Russ: Yeah, it is.

Richard: (referring to the McLaren) You got this for me?
Russ: What? No, I It's for me. I bought this for myself to celebrate you guys helping me get back to a billion. That's why I came here, to show it to you. To say thank you. I'm not an asshole.
Dinesh: You drove here with a bow on it?
Russ: No, I put it on after I parked.

Richard: Did we delete over 9,000 hours of your premium content? Yes, we did. And that is bad, certainly. But the way we did it. See, our compression is so incredibly powerful that we were able to delete all those files at a rate that until now was unthinkable...

Erlich: I would be remiss if I didn't mention that your sites are some of my primary destinations.

Music

"Stretch Your Face" by Tobacco (Opening title music)

"Lost In The Crowd" by Bass Nectar feat. Fashawn and Zion I (End-credits music.)

Notes and Trivia

There is a deleted plot line in this episode where Jared is having difficulty with Pied Piper's broadband supplier, and tries to make the company seem larger by inventing fictional employees and an aggressive supervisor. Everything comes to a head when he has to pretend he is his own supervisor on the phone.

Goofs

When Richard and Russ are drinking tequila and Russ raises his hand to be hi-fived, his mouth can be seen moving (with no sound) during the shot over his shoulder.

When Russ and Richard are drinking tequila, Richard's shirt has a wet spot in one shot and is dry in the next shot.

Locations

None

Cast

StarringThomas MiddleditchRichard Hendricks
StarringT.J. MillerErlich Bachman
StarringJosh BrenerNelson 'Big Head' Bighetti (credit only)
StarringMartin StarrBertram Gilfoyle
StarringKumail NanjianiDinesh Chugtai
StarringAmanda CrewMonica Hall
StarringZach WoodsDonald 'Jared' Dunn
StarringMatt RossGavin Belson
StarringSuzanne CryerLaurie Bream
StarringJimmy O. YangJian Yang
Guest StarringJill E. AlexanderPatrice (as Jill Alexander)
Guest StarringChris DiamantopoulosRuss Hanneman
Guest StarringPatrick FischlerDr. Davis Bannercheck
Guest StarringAly MawjiAly Dutta
Guest StarringRogelio T. RamosAnother Executive (as Rogelio Ramos)
Guest StarringRomy RosemontMolly Kendall
Guest StarringScott PrendergastScott
Guest StarringBrian TichnellJason
Guest StarringAlice WetterlundCarla Walton
Co-StarringShalin AgarwalEshwar
Co-StarringJoshua ChangSeth
Co-StarringTaylor CoffmanMarketing Executive
Co-StarringDustyn GulledgeEvan
Co-StarringAnna KhajaRachel
Co-StarringPing WuHenry