Biweekly Binge: A thriller and a photo finish

Biweekly Binge: A thriller and a photo finish

A fortnightly column on what’s good in the vast ocean of content in the streaming platforms around you, and this week, it's The Dropout

The young Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried), a freshman at Stanford, is so taken with doing something entrepreneurial that she can only see the destined unicorn and not the journey towards it. She is fascinated by Yoda’s quote, “Do or do not. There is no try”. Her perennial squinting, staring-at-the-distance pair of eyes reveal that as soon as an idea pops up in her head, it’s already manifested in real life. But that’s Holmes. She got an idea, manifested a company and had the whole world believing in a sham—Theranos—that according to her inner self, accomplished its goal. The future is here and now and not after hundreds of published and peer-reviewed research. The only challenge was to convince the world which she did for almost ten years beginning at its incubation period during her time at Stanford in the early 2000s. 

The Dropout’s (Hotstar)—created by Elizabeth Meriwether based on the podcast of the same name—first two episodes focuses on this Holmes, Seyfried playing the goggle-eyed teenager stepping into her twenties. Early on, we get a taste of the saleswoman that she is with her always bubbling enthusiasm and quick-witted ideation mere gravy over her conviction. She manages to get into her fold two white men—professors and scientists—Ian Gibbons, a biochemist played by Stephen Fry who rations reason over innocence and Channing Robertson (Bill Irwin), professor of Chemical Engineering at Stanford, utterly floored by Holmes. Scepticism comes from Laurie Metcalf’s Phyllis Gardner, professor of Medicine at Stanford, the only person in Holmes’s early life to poke holes in Yoda’s quote. “Science is trying. That’s all that it is. You only ever get to do something when you’ve been trying for so long that doing doesn’t even seem possible anymore.” Holmes approaches her in the hope that a woman would be more receptive only to encounter the sternest but well-meaning rejection. Refusing to heed Gardner’s advice Holmes goes ahead with doing instead of trying, which proves prescient in the larger narrative of Theranos—it became an excuse to stall women entrepreneurs and set them back by years.

The carefully chosen episode titles of The Dropout add to the parabolic rise and fall of Holmes and her company—how her open floor plan ran counter to the closed scheme she operated inside with her partner and COO Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews). “Green Juice”—the Kool-Aid Holmes consumes to transform herself into Steve Jobs second coming from an underfed grad student. “How you present yourself to the world is your identity”, someone says. Her white face (the series frames Seyfried in wide angle closeups, highlighting the privilege she enjoyed, an image that gets scarier with every iteration) combines with her black turtlenecks and men line up to throw money into her ideas often delivered with panache. It’s apparent that she was the first believer of her lies. “Old White Men” is an episode that marries the world weariness of legacy companies like Walgreens and CVS, and men running them with the worldliness of Silicon Valley and Holmes’s practiced passive aggression. The Flower of Life is the opposite of what it suggests. It’s when Holmes commits the cardinal sin—so far only playing with people’s money she begins to play with people’s lives. Iron Sisters may refer to the hashtag that Holmes created—everything is optics with her—to talk about high achieving women to spruce up her own credentials, an armour around her that makes everyone think twice before questioning her. But what Iron sisters really refers is to the women who come forward—Ian Gibbons’s wife Rochelle, Gardner, a young lab employee and eventual whistle-blower Erika Cheung (Camryn Mi-young). They begin to question the science behind Holmes’s claims of redefining healthcare. It’s followed by an episode titled Heroes—Erika and the brave journalists who remain patient and dig deep.

The second half of The Dropout—episode five to eight—makes for one of the best thrillers (written by Liz Hannah, Wei-Ning Yu, Lez Heldens and Meriwether, and directed by Francesca Gregorini and Erica Watson) in recent times, television or film. It marries awe and suspense, horror and comedy, the put-on deep, throaty voice of Holmes going against the collective responsibility and conscience of people like Erika, Gardner, Taylor Schultz and WSJ journalist John Carreyrou (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) and editor Judith Baker (LisaGay Hamilton). Seyfried squiggly jiving from her office to Sunny’s becomes a mix of absurdist comedy and disgust as we learn about the investigation and how Theranos sends false test reports to HIV positive people and pregnant women. The series skips years in episodes but that doesn’t mean it lacks in detail, a feature not a bug. It highlights the kind of money that went into Theranos and how the company remained on top with nothing to show. It goes from a deadened office that banks would balk at to the look of any cash rich Silicon Valley company with tens of employees sitting together but not knowing what the person at the neighbouring desk really does. That’s how Holmes was to people and the investors. The series ends with an episode titled Lizzy, Holmes without the halo that followed her for almost two decades, a halo she purchased by duping everyone from venture capitalists to presidents and more importantly, vulnerable people looking to obtain accurate information about their health.

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