Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani appear to be on top of the world, but their actions are causing some of their employees and some of those who feel they have been wronged by Holmes in the past to start working together to take her down in the latest episode of “The Dropout.” While Theranos is constantly churning out fake data, Erika Cheung and Tyler Shultz end up becoming suspicious due to constantly being asked to delete “outlying data.” Meanwhile, Holmes’ former professor and her former next-door neighbor are trying to reveal her as a fraud. In the end, the head of the lab, who most of the episode appears to be on Holmes’ side, is the one who speaks to Dr. Richard Fuisz about what’s going on at Theranos.

This felt timely given that the day I actually watched this episode was the day Sunny Balwani’s trial began in the United States. We’re getting to the nitty-gritty in this series. We’ve seen Elizabeth Holmes have an idea and try to make it work. We’ve seen her step on everyone in her way who points out why it won’t work with the current technology and now we’re seeing her alienate the wrong people within her own company who will eventually take her down. This is one of the biggest cases in American history of hubris being someone’s downfall and it’s incredibly interesting to see this series’ take on her downfall.

While the events of this series are wild, each week it becomes clearer and clearer that the casting was amazing. Between Amanda Seyfried playing the quirky and disconnected Holmes and Laurie Metcalf and William H. Macy playing her former professor and former neighbor, respectively, who both know she’s a fraud and are trying to prove it, the casting is a home run. With each episode, I’m more and more impressed with everyone’s performance and I can’t wait to see how the actors who play Schultz and Cheung handle the part where Theranos and its lawyers are harassing them while they are serving as whistleblowers. That should be a very interesting series of events.

I don’t know how true this series is to the actual events that led to the closure of Theranos and the arrests and trials of Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani. I know some of it has to be dramatized to be more interesting. I also understand that sometimes truth is stranger than fiction and there may be crazier things that we haven’t seen and won’t see. But I know this series has been very well done and tells an amazing story no matter which parts are true and which are embellished.

Ranking: 4.5 stars out of 5

What did you think of this episode of “The Dropout?”

Jeremy Brown

Jeremy has been a big Disney fan since he was a kid growing up during the Disney Renaissance. One day he hopes to go to every Disney Park in the world.

View all posts