In the final episode of Silicon Valley’s third season, Pied Piper’s master BS artist Erlich Bachman is broke. But Bachman—who failed at running an incubator and then failed utterly to show up his enemies with his Bachmanity project—has a gift for spin. Somehow he turns a modest “uptick” in the number of daily active users into an incredible windfall for the company as well as the season’s most elaborate dick joke.

Problem is, the uptick is fake. Business manager Jared couldn’t face the possibility that Pied Piper—and his idol, founder Richard Hendricks—will soon collapse. In the series’ biggest twist, we discovered where the “uptick” came from—a crowded, smoky click farm in Bangladesh. The masterful sequence at the end of episode nine shows a Bangladeshi worker’s morning commute, biking his way through the crowded streets of one of the world’s poorest countries. There’s no hip music as the episode ends, just the quiet clacking of hundreds of keyboards. Is this how a bunch of coddled California techies define success?

Farming for fun and profit

The thing is, Jared isn’t the only one who knows about the scam. Pied Piper founder Richard (Thomas Middleditch) knows, too. Actually, it turns out a lot of people know. In a hilarious sequence from the final episode, Dinesh and Gilfoyle congratulate Richard while Dinesh "accidentally” drops a flash drive with a "zombie script" that would "randomize user actions," making “fake users in click farms absolutely indistinguishable from real users." Richard is on the verge of being corrupted, and they love him for it. Finally, they have a boss ready to swim with the sharks. The click farm scam is some "serial killer level shit," Dinesh tells him. "I think I finally respect you as a CEO," Gilfoyle says.

We may well see this come up again. Richard, faced with his biggest ethical dilemma yet, hasn’t quite made up his mind. Will he take the $6 million second round in venture capital that Bachman drummed up on false pretenses?

For more than a few minutes, it looks like we're really going to see an ugly end to Richard's character arc. Underneath the humor, the show's creators are proffering this dim view: if even the last honest guy in the software business is going to lie his way to success, then maybe the whole industry is corrupt.

Richard, though, ultimately tells the truth about his app's poor user base. He does so even though it means the loss of his company to his archenemy Gavin Belson and Hooli. Or at least, he thinks that's what it will mean. In the final episode’s final twist, everything turns out for the best—Bachman, through his alliance with a tech blogger, manages to regain part of his fortune and a place of esteem at Pied Piper.

Boxes and betrayals

Despite the relatively sunny ending, Silicon Valley’s third season is its darkest yet. The “click farm” lie is the biggest point, but just about everyone in the show this season is trying to pull a fast one on someone else. For a few episodes, Pied Piper gets a new CEO, Jack Barker, whose status as a business rock star impresses even the jaded Gilfoyle. But his “conjoined triangles of success” turn out to be a recipe for enforced mediocrity. Instead of a consumer service, Barker tells the Pied Piper team that they’re building “a box” that will live in obscurity in massive server farms.

So the Pied Piper gang tries to deceive him, planning a “skunkworks” in which they’ll secretly work on their own project. They’re found out by Richard’s literal bumbling—he trips and falls, scattering papers covered in their nefarious plans.

The "box" concept lives on, though, bringing with it all sorts of opportunities for satirizing the tech business world, mainly through characters that give viewers the "I've met a guy just like that" feeling. There's the hip designer who insists on grooving with Richard until they have a "shared aesthetic vocabulary" and an office full of foosball-playing, chummy but ultimately worthless salespeople.

These people all seem logical and even necessary to a CEO like Barker, but Richard and his band of true believers can't see the point. The box is "artless commerce," Gilfoyle tells Richard, and he doesn't want to be a part of it. Only by swatting away all the ridiculous trappings of the business world, we sense, will Pied Piper be able to seek its true north—something close to real innovation.

But just building "the box," of course, is the opposite of that. The box has no risk—it's a sure thing that will surely make money as long as it's powered by an army of Jack Barkers, compliant designers, and sales-bros. No surprise, it's the box that saves Barker's life, even after he loses the power struggle at Pied Piper. The "artless commerce" that Gilfoyle haughtily rejects is a healing salve for Gavin Belson and the Hooli board.

This search for scientific purity, free of commercial restraints, is an ideal that's been around a long time. At times, I wondered if the Pied Piper gang is groping toward some kind of archetype that's a modern-day version of Martin Arrowsmith; Sinclair Lewis' famous researcher, who inspired generations of doctors, ultimately walked away from wealth, finding his salvation by pursuing "pure science" in a cabin in the woods. In the software business, of course, we know what must replace Arrowsmith's cabin—the holy Garage, home to Pied Piper and the megalomaniac Belson.

The occasional vision of purity, though, mostly seems to just serve as a contrast to the corruption. And in the third season, just about everyone is a grifter.

Consider Bachman and his housing scheme. He rents out rooms in his Palo Alto home, hoping to build an “incubator.” But he’s handily beaten by the newly wealthy Big Head, who rents out rooms in his much nicer house, barely realizing he’s competing. Bachman tricks Big Head into merging his assets into a partnership with him. One million-dollar party later, the partnership ends in disaster for both.

Meanwhile, Bachman’s being taken advantage of as well. The financial adviser who created the partnership moved money around in some “unconventional” ways. When Jian-Yang finds out about California’s lenient tenancy laws, he just decides he’ll live at Bachman’s place rent-free. (Note: don’t try this at home.) Jared faces housing woes as well when he discovers that his Airbnb is being Airbnb’d.

User experience

There's another surprise that comes along just before the "click farm" fraud that's almost as jarring to the plot. Throughout the show, Pied Piper has had all manner of troubles, but one thing has been clear since the product's unveiling at the Disrupt conference: the product itself, we're led to believe, seriously kicks ass.

In the third season, we find out that even what seemed like bedrock truth might not be as solid as we thought. Examined by focus groups filled with (gasp!) regular people, Pied Piper's vaunted compression software doesn't look so hot. Its raw power blows away engineers and Valley cognoscenti, but Hendricks and his team have a serious UX problem. The product is far too complicated for regular people to embrace, and an irritating animated character called “Pipey” (producing obvious flashbacks to Microsoft’s Clippy) doesn’t help.

Therein lies one of the central ironies of Silicon Valley. It isn't just a show about a group of lone geniuses beset by setbacks and shifty characters; it's about people who dislike people, trying to design apps for the people they dislike. It's a social barrier, not a commercial one—and it exists in spades in the real Valley.

We also don't know if it will be surmountable. In the final episodes, Richard pushes forward, angrily rejecting the focus group feedback. But in one of the season's last scenes, his heartfelt evangelism fails, and he's left with just one true believer (Bernice, of course, his single 'convert' from the focus group.)

In the end, it looks like Pied Piper's best chance for success won't be the tool loved by the valley's engineers, but Dinesh's video app—designed so that he can ogle a faraway coworker. Even in a Valley flooded with wealth, honest success is fleeting and scarce.

The real Silicon Valley does a great job of strapping digital tools to the engine of capital. But finding a way to solve a problem rooted in real human desires and make money doing it? That's still quite the trick. Can they pull it off? Stay tuned for season four.