'Silicon Valley' Season 6 finale: 3 theories about Richard’s missing PiperNet pen drive including Monica giving it to NSA
One of the best-written comedy shows of this generation, ‘Silicon Valley’ came to an end on Sunday. What started with a motley crew of coders working at a house, saw Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch), Bertram Gilfoyle (Martin Starr) and Dinesh Chugtai (Kumail Nanjiani) rise to the position of tech giants with PiedPiper and then ultimately kill their life’s work for the greater good.
One of the more satisfying series finales written in a long time, it saw PiedPiper’s end and the lives of its founders ten years after the incident -- Richard ended up at Stanford as a professor of ethics in technology; Gilfoyle and Dinesh co-founded a web security firm in San Francisco; Monica Hall (Amanda Crew) said she joined a Washington D.C. think tank (although it is altogether possible she joined the NSA); and Jared Dunn (Zach Woods) went to work at a nursing home for the elderly.
But it left a very important question unanswered: What happened to the thumb drive? At the very end of the finale, Richard, talking to the interviewers making a documentary on PiedPiper, said he had the only surviving copy of PiperNet on a thumb drive. Despite looking for it everywhere, he couldn’t find it.
Of course, it is highly likely that Richard, being the absent-minded man he is, misplaced it. Someone may have found it, deleted its contents and used it as their own, blessing their luck for finding a free thumb drive, while absolutely oblivious to the fact that they may have for a moment held the most dangerous piece of tech in the world. But there could be other possibilities. For one, Dinesh could have stolen it. Dinesh never wanted to destroy PiperNet.
In fact, he specifically opted out of the plan to destroy it, saying, “No offense to me, but I am greedy and unreliable, bordering on piece of sh*t. If there is a chance to stop you guys from stopping you guys, I will do it. I will sabotage your sabotage. So if this company needs to fail, like epically fail, you need to do it without me. Revoke my permissions, delete my PiperMail account. I will use Gmail like a f**king basic b***h. Don’t let me anywhere near that launch. I may beg, I will lie to you, I cannot bribe you because I do not have any money. But do not let me anywhere near that launch.”
Dinesh was also the last person we saw who had the thumb drive. Even if Richard misplaced his drive, who is to say he had the only copy? Also, by the looks of it, Dinesh’s and Gilfoyle’s web-security firm was a successful one. It is possible that they both used PiperNet to make sure they were at the top of their game.
The other scarier possibility is that Monica stole it. It is implied that she now works for the National Security Agency, a branch of the U.S. intelligence network that has been notorious for violating the privacy of citizens in the name of national security.
What if Monica took the thumb drive and gave it to the NSA? It’s a spine-chilling thought, but one that is not beyond the realm of possibilities. It is also perhaps why Monica did not want to admit on camera that she worked for the organization. After all, she would then be directly responsible for handing to the NSA a piece of tech that could penetrate the best of encryptions in mere hours.
The scariest possibilities of all, however, is that Jian Yang (Jimmy Yang) stole the thumb drive. Though there is no way to quite explain how he could have done it. After all, he left in a hurry when he realized Erlich Bachman (TJ Miller) was rich because of PiperCoin.
In the finale, we see Jian as a warlord living deep inside forests in a south-east Asian country. It is implied that he murdered Erlich and used the money to fund his own ambitions -- which may have been to become a warlord.
It is definitely possible that he stole the drive to use it in his possible plans for world domination. If only he figured out how; after all, he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, even if he was malicious.
Of course, we’ll never know. But it is fun to guess.