The Iron Lady

Okay. Wow. 

Episode six of The Dropout was by far the best episode that has been released and I genuinely cannot believe how well written, directed, shot, and performed this episode was. 

While the previous episodes were paced like mini psychological thrillers, episode six was a horror movie, with scenes that brought forth so much suspense and anxiety- a notably difficult feat considering the fact that most of the show’s audience probably already knows what happened with Theranos. 

Choosing to go with the “behind the scenes” of Elizabeth Holmes’s infamous Forbes’ cover was a brilliant choice, and I loved that the throughline of this episode was dissecting the story of Theranos through a critical feminist lens. In “The Iron Lady” we see two parallel storylines: Elizabeth’s, continuing on, and Erika Cheung’s, one of the initial Theranos whistleblowers.

Cheung’s story starts a lot like Holmes’s. She was a young college graduate (they do differ here) with her heart set on changing the world when she joined Theranos. She was inspired by dreams of making healthcare accessible and led on by the promise of a powerful female CEO that was breaking glass ceilings left and right. 

Throughout the episode, we start to see Cheung and Tyler Shultz (the grandson of former secretary of state and Theranos investor, George Shultz) start to unravel the fraud and conspiracy behind Theranos’s egregious lies. There is one standout scene where Cheung walks down a dimly lit corridor, sneaks through the restricted lab doors, and discovers the Siemens machine actually being used to run Theranos’s tests. The scene seems like something out of a Hitchcock movie and it was such a great moment in such a great episode. 

However, my favorite part had to be the repeated flashbacks to the Forbes shoot and the cuts between Holmes and Chung at very different parts of their respective careers. Chung, a young woman who’s career and self-esteem is eventually destroyed by her boss, who is another woman being praised at the time for supposedly uplifting female scientists. 

This episode tackles quite a few nuanced topics: nepotism, empty feminism, classism, and elitism- and it does it phenomenally. There were no corny or cheesy scenes where it’s evident that the writers were just trying to jam in some lines for some woke Twitter points, something that has become increasingly prominent in recent television shows.

Some people have asked the valid question- why do we need a fictionalized version of a story that’s already been told in decidedly entertaining ways? Well, this episode answers that question. 

There are lessons to be learned from Theranos; so much nuance and complexity that can be explored in creative and intriguing ways through the vessel of this story of fraudulent fame and botched ethics. When done well, exploring current events and issues through media doesn’t have to be a chore we all are forced to deal with, but rather an interesting way of thinking them through. 

This episode has just made me even more excited for the remaining few, and I can’t wait to see how the rest of the story is tackled!