YMMV / The Dropout

• Alternate Character Interpretation: On a meta level with the documentary film The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley for Elizabeth Holmes. In The Inventor, most, including Erika Chung, believe that Holmes was a zealot for her company to the point that she wasn't even aware how much she was Believing Their Own Lies. In contrast, The Dropout and Bad Blood argue that Elizabeth Holmes had it too soon, and was in over her head and simply kept the facade going rather than risk her company collapsing.
• Anvilicious: One point that the series hammers home is that the "move fast and break things" ethos of Silicon Valley is incompatible with the very strict parameters of medical science. Elizabeth treats Theranos like just another tech company, claiming it has the potential to change the world for the better while hiding the many corners she's cutting beneath marketing, money, trade secrets, and outright lies. She never grasps that medical tech demands much more transparency and diligence than she's willing to apply en route to achieving her real dream, which is to build a billion-dollar company. It becomes uncomfortably clear that her choice to invent a health-related product was incidental—perhaps a product of the many respected doctors in her lineage—and she would have managed her company according to the same warped values no matter what the invention was. Not only that, but she would likely have managed herself the same way, dropping out of college at 19 to pursue her dream without building the knowledge and skills to back it up. It's one thing to become an expert-level coder at that age, but you can't become a qualified biomedical engineer that easily.
• Catharsis Factor: After all their life-risking fraud, their employee bashing, their bullying/terror tactics and their overall unpleasant and morally bankrupt approaches, seeing Elizabeth and Sunny's ambitions all fall apart around them through the joint factors of a damning Wall Street Journal entry and an unavoidable act of professional inspection is incredibly satisfying.
  • Fuisz himself is an incredibly petty man who attempts to paten-blackmail Elizabeth for the heinous action of not seeking his advice, before undertaking a personal mission to see her ruined when she sues him back. On top of that, he ropes in poor Ian Gibbons into testifying against Theranos, which would result into all sorts of legal trouble no matter what option in it he takes and eventually leads to his death via suicide. Whilst Fuisz gets what he wants in the end, seeing Elizabeth taken down, it came at the cost of his credibility and family, leaving him with absolutely nothing left in his life.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Elizabeth seems to have difficulty understanding basic human emotions. She doesn't understand why you wouldn't let children play with a real stove rather than an Easy-Bake Oven, doesn't realize her employees have lives outside of work, reacts to troubling information by acting like a child, and outright states that she doesn't feel emotions the same way others do. It gets to the point where, during Episode 6, she is tasked to perform an advertisement for her company and she continually botches it with her robotic demeanor, and can't understand the simple direction of "Talk to the camera as if you are talking to a friend."
• Fridge Horror:
  • "Heroes" shows the whistleblowers being followed. Erika is walking through a parking lot at night when she notices a parked car nearby, making her realize she is being watched. This would be scary enough — until you remember what she told Tyler about being assaulted as a college student and almost dropping out afterwards. What memories must this be bringing forth? Another scene shows Erika dropping in on Tyler to check in on him, and his roommate lets her in - and Tyler is so jumpy he nearly pulls a knife on her, thinking she's someone from Theranos come to hurt him. Mark is also so scared he takes to living out of his car, resulting in him deleting all the evidence emails from Theranos he had saved to a drive.
  • Theranos running tests on cancer patients, despite knowing full well at the time that their machine didn't work and they were using terminally ill patents for nothing.
  • The Theranos Wellness centers completely botched the running of tests, meaning hundreds of patients were given incorrect results, including one person who was told he had cancer.
• Moral Event Horizon: Elizabeth commits many, according to different characters:
  • For Ana: conducting a trial of the Edison device on terminal cancer patients.
  • For Edmond: faking the Novartis demo.
  • For Avie: lying about the status of the Pfizer contract.
  • For Rakesh: pitting two teams of engineers against each other.
  • For Ian: preparing to launch the still-faulty device into retail stores.
  • For Brendan: staying silent about Ian's death.
  • For Erika and Tyler: running blood tests on Siemens machines.
  • For Mark: allowing inaccurate test results to go to patients.
  • For the Walgreens execs: failing the CMS inspection.
  • For Sunny: breaking up with him and blaming him for the company's problems.
  • For George: bullshitting her way through a post-shutdown TV interview.
  • For Linda: refusing to hold herself accountable for anything that's happened.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: At the beginning of the series, Elizabeth Holmes as portrayed in the series may come across as more sympathetic than her actions would justify; she has a Freudian Excuse of distant parents who took a financial blow, suffered a sexual assault in college, was ostracized by classmates, had trouble being taken seriously as a young student, and was treated with sexism compared to her male peers. Scaachi Koul from BuzzFeed News seems to agree:
  "Many people watching the show already know the company didn’t really function, that the technology never worked, and that Holmes and her coconspirators are likely to face legal consequences for their malfeasance. So what's left for a dramatization to explore? Nothing beyond the humanization of someone who maybe doesn't deserve it."
• The Woobie: Ian Gibbons. He sincerely believes in the mission of Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes's goal, to the point where he genuinely sees her as a friend. He routinely gives her opportunities to explain herself and tries to reason for her. For his troubles, he's fired. He gets rehired after his former team threatens to quit, only to be ostracized and Reassigned to Antarctica. Denied access to the lab, he stays on doing meaningless work for three years because he needs the health insurance. Then he's subpoenaed to testify in regards to the patents he supposedly shares with Elizabeth. To get him out of it, the in-house lawyer tells him to fabricate a drinking problem, which would kill any chance of him getting hired as a chemist ever again, despite chemistry being his life's passion. This leads Ian to kill himself.

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