'Silicon Valley' Season 6 review: Why the end looks like the beginning

As Silicon Valley enters its sixth and final season, it's hard not to notice how much has changed — and how little.

The series still feels like the one we started watching in 2014. It remains laugh-out-loud funny and occasionally prescient; the new season opens with Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) looking downright Zuckerbergian at a Senate hearing. The showrunners were not to know that the real Mark Zuckerberg would be lambasted before Congress a few days before the show returned.

Even though his company, Pied Piper, has joined the big time with its user-controlled internet and new giant HQ, the show continues to temper Richard's starry-eyed idealism with well-earned cynicism. And its characters are still weirdos and doofuses, lovable if not always likable.

What's different — what has been different for a while now — is the context in which the series is being released. As even the showrunners have readily acknowledged, the job of satirizing Silicon Valley has grown harder as the real Silicon Valley has devolved into a horrifying caricature of itself.

In that light, Silicon Valley's sameness makes it seem like a charming throwback to a more innocent era, before we understood just how fallible our tech titans could be, and how much damage they could wreak.

What was once biting commentary on startup life has now become a cozy fantasy. Watching the socially awkward Richard bumble his way through the tech world used to provoke anxiety by osmosis. Now it just makes you wish real-life Silicon Valley CEOs were as well-meaning as Richard.

In the three episodes I've seen (out of a total of 7), the show continues with the same formula it has honed over the past few seasons. There are silly side plots and puerile dick jokes, and earnest speeches immediately undercut by snarky gags.

And, as ever, there are the dizzying reversals of fortune: the millions of dollars lost and made and lost again, the companies swallowed up and spit back out, the alliances formed and dissolved and mutated into rivalries.

At one point, a devious plan culminates into a literal race to the finish. It's fun stuff.

It's just not really new stuff. All of Silicon Valley's breathless plotting amounts to a seesaw, bouncing up and down within a safely fixed range. Over the years we've seen the technology on the show evolve, the trends move on, and the targets of the jokes change (keep an eye on those opening credits), but it's been a while since we've seen it venture into new thematic or emotional territory.

Any time Richard threatens to get too dark, or Dinesh threatens to become too successful, for example, a new twist will bring them back to the status quo.

At least based on the first few episodes, the final season doesn't really try to go there, either. A few major shakeups lead the Pied Piper gang into a vastly different position than they began the season with, but even these technically unprecedented developments have the ring of familiarity to them. I keep expecting them to blunder their way back to their comfort zone.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. Silicon Valley's consistency is one of its most admirable qualities. It's still a treat to sit down to new episodes of this series, trusting that each new entry will deliver the laughs and thrills you've enjoyed this whole time.

It's a pleasure to be reunited with old friends (oh Jared, how I've missed you), and I was delighted to see what shenanigans they got up to this time.

But as Silicon Valley moves toward the end, it's hard not to think it's about time. Maybe Silicon Valley will end with Richard finally realizing his dream of a decentralized internet, or maybe he'll become the newest tech billionaire, or he'll get kicked all the way back down to the hacker hostel where he started.

Whatever the outcome on Silicon Valley, the real Silicon Valley has already moved on beyond him.