god i don’t know, i thought this was a little weird. if it had been a work of fiction i would’ve said this was like the show of the year (the latter half of the year, i miss u succession 💔), but it’s not and that makes it kind of….odd. there is a level of sympathy here for elizabeth holmes and sunny balwani that i don’t love, and an almost fanfiction-like focus on their relationship throughout. it’s weird bc i found it all very engaging until i’d have to remember over and over again that these are real people and this is highly embellished. and these embellishments seemed designed to make us feel bad for them, basically. it just didn’t match up with what i’ve seen and read about these people in real life, so it didn’t provide me any real insight into who they really were or why they did what they did. and with the focus so heavily on the characterisation—possibly mischaracterisation—of elizabeth and their relationship, it also failed to provide me any insight into theranos itself. like, we get the bullet points that you already know if you’ve watched even one documentary, but with almost an hour per episode i kind of hoped to understand more about what actually went wrong here. like we get it, she wanted to be a billionaire and she was in a rush and she lied and lied and lied. but specifically. why exactly couldn’t her ideas be built? were they simply not possible? how have other companies managed to create similar machines since? where was all the money going if not into figuring out how to make these things work? what exactly were people doing all day in those earlier stages of development if not figuring this out? how on earth did it go on for so long?? it sounds like i’m blaming her workers but i’m honestly baffled by all of it still and i kinda thought the show might give me something i hadn’t already seen or read elsewhere. that’s the nature of a dramatisation though i guess. in that regard it did have one thing that more fact based stuff is kind of unable to provide: real gut wrenching horror and empathy for her victims. not to say that what she and sunny did was meaningless before, but it’s very different to read “trials on cancer patients with faulty tech” and actually see a dramatised depiction of such a thing. that and the suicide of ian gibbons, the harassment of erika cheung, the “she’s a real person” scene regarding test results, all of that was just really horrible to watch in a way that reading an article simply cannot be. weirdly enough, in a show that’s supposed to be about elizabeth holmes, the best moments are the ones that don’t focus on her but instead on the damage she did.