The Dropout wants to know: "Why her?"

We can’t just like something, can we? We can’t just support something. No, we have to worship it. It’s human nature, I suppose, this desire to deify, to deem infallible that which inspires us. Criticize Elon Musk or Kamala Harris or BTS and watch your mentions implode. We want gods. We want gods we can see and touch and, most importantly, fight for. We want to believe and we refuse to trust those who don’t.

Elizabeth Holmes is a god in “Iron Sisters,” which encompasses the era in 2014 and 2015 when Theranos’ media blitz centered her in a now-iconic ad directed by filmmaker Errol Morris, and the press breathlessly posited her as the next Steve Jobs (who, as this show has made clear, was Elizabeth’s personal Alpha and Omega). Elizabeth’s apotheosis comes at her 30th birthday party, where guests strap on terrifying masks of her face. God created man in his own image; Elizabeth’s followers wish to be remade in hers.

At the forefront of her cult is George Shultz (Sam Waterston), who, like many who work in politics, emerged from the scandal-ridden cabinets of Nixon and Reagan with a desire to do “something purely good” with his life. When his fresh-out-of-Stanford grandson, Tyler (Dylan Minnette), presents him with his knowledge of Theranos’ fraud, George isn’t even willing to entertain the notion that he’s being played. He isn’t interested in Tyler’s account, his evidence, or, most importantly, the data.

We’ve seen this before on the show. A few weeks back, we watched early investor Don Lucas wax rhapsodic about instinct and his “gut.” And we’ve seen this before in our world. Hard science has no power over the spiritual. That’s because worship is aspirational; We worship that which we want to be. We worship that which makes us feel as if we are right. And people don’t like to be told they’re wrong. Powerful people like George Shultz really don’t like to be told they’re wrong. They will take a lie as far as they need to to never accept that they were wrong.

So George tells Tyler he got “bad intel,” that the science is “over his head.” He tells Tyler’s lab partner and fellow whistleblower Erika Cheung (Camryn Mi-young Kim) that she’s betraying Elizabeth, who he says has done so much to support female scientists. “This is the way you repay her,” he spits.

He’s not the only one playing that card, either. The Dropout doesn’t shy from how Theranos and its supporters shrewdly weaponized feminism against their critics, categorizing valid criticism as sexism. During an interview at Stanford, for example, Elizabeth recalls when professor Phyllis Gardner (Laurie Metcalf) told her that her early Theranos ideas weren’t scientifically feasible, categorizing it as a spurned woman’s disdain for the younger generation. “It’s hard for some women to get out of their old thinking,” she says, neglecting to mention that her ideas were flawed and Phyllis was right.

That doesn’t sit well with Phyllis, who’s joined up with Richard Fuisz (William H. Macy) and Rochelle (Kate Burton), Ian Gibbons’ widow, to help expose what they believe to be fraud at Theranos. (They haven’t really justified Phyllis’ vitriol and distrust of Elizabeth, have they? All Elizabeth did was pitch her a dud idea when she was a college freshman.) They connect with John Carreyrou (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), a Wall Street Journal reporter who can’t run with the story until somebody who works there agrees to talk on the record.

Soon, the gulf between Carreyrou, Tyler, and Erika will shrink, but first we get a deeper look at the inner workings of Theranos. Erika’s fresh, uncorrupted POV is helpful: We see Sunny (Naveen Andrews) dressing down workers in full view of their colleagues; we see the extensive NDA process and the intense security; we see her confusion at the malfunctioning tech. Isn’t this supposed to be the future of Palo Alto?

The “real” tests, the ones from actual patients at Walgreens, are being conducted in a different lab, Normandy. She and Tyler, however, are working in the old lab, where they run validation tests and are told to “eliminate outliers.” But the company’s fraud doesn’t end with cherrypicking data. Blood is diluted and scanned through a rejiggered Siemens machine covered in Theranos stickers. Other samples, clumsily handled, arrive at the lab unusable. When Erika is transferred to Normandy, shadowy figures force her to push flawed results onto Walgreens customers. She’s told not to ask questions. The contrast between such sophisticated security and such sloppy tech is striking.

Tyler and Erika’s struggles to convince their superiors—not to mention each other—of what they’ve discovered result in the episode’s best scenes. Erika’s working class upbringing has made her less susceptible to the hypnotic powers of charismatic corporate leaders, so she still needs to sway the coddled Tyler, who refuses to believe Elizabeth knows about the lab mismanagement. When he confronts Elizabeth with what he knows, Elizabeth’s gaze hardens, her spines protrude. “You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” she says icily. Amanda Seyfried delivers it with a controlled menace, her words a verbal spike strip.

Later, after Tyler and Erika send an email detailing the mismanagement to Elizabeth, thus ensuring she can’t say she wasn’t aware of the regulatory breaches, Sunny (Naveen Andrews) gets the chance to truly gnash his teeth at the pair. “You think you’re the good guy here,” he spits at Tyler. Then to Erika: “Are you going to be a problem?” Sunny’s a fascinating character, a sneering bully loathed by everyone except Elizabeth. I still don’t feel the writers have a handle on what really makes him tick, but Andrews has nevertheless excelled at playing the World’s Worst Boss.

The real question at the heart of this episode is “why.” Why doesn’t anyone challenge her? Why do they believe she isn’t capable of fraud? Why is she a being worthy of worship? What “Iron Sisters” understands is that there’s no one answer. “Because she’s a woman?” Erika posits to Tyler. “Because she’s rich like you and comes over for brunch?” Phyllis has a theory, too: “She’s a symbol of feminist progress. She makes the men in tech and business feel good without challenging them.” Fuisz replies: “Yes, and she’s pretty and blonde.” They’re all right! The thing about Elizabeth Holmes is that culturally, philosophically, and aesthetically she was at that time what the world wanted and thought that it needed. Her story was so good, her tech so universally desirable, that it felt like blasphemy to question it.

Stray Observations

• Like “Old White Men,” “Iron Sisters” benefits from keeping Elizabeth on the sidelines for the majority of the episode. I didn’t realize how much I wanted an outsider perspective like Erika’s until I got it.
• Some excellent cringe this episode: Elizabeth responding to a question from George about her “friends” by saying “you’re my friends!” Nothing more sad than kids who’d rather hang out with adults.
• Also cringe: Tyler’s sycophantic song and the psychos at the party making him play it twice. (Made me think of this.) Sunny nibbling on an Elizabeth-shaped cookie during it maybe my biggest laugh of the episode.
• That said, some hilarious banter between Metcalf and Macy as Phyllis and Fuisz. “It must be hard to be a woman,” he offers uncomfortably. She sighs: “I can’t believe you’re the person I have to talk to about all of this.”
• Tyler nearly flunked out of Stanford because he was on the road with Dispatch. Google tells me they’re a real band.
• The minute I saw those Elizabeth masks I began hooting and hollering for Elizabeth to strap one on. Obvious metaphors can be distracting, but that one’s just too good to pass up.
• Remember how the first several episodes included bits from Elizabeth’s deposition? They kinda dropped that, huh?