Arrested Development Season 5: 18 WTF Moments
18. The Google Trolling Continues
After Google wouldn't sign off on the show featuring their Google Street View car last season (so all the Google imagery had to be obscured), Mitchell Hurwitz decided to start season five with a few more barbed jabs at the tech giant.
The season begins with Michael Bluth (Jason Bateman) in hiding from his family, where he works at mammoth search engine Search, or as Ron Howard calls it, a "tech company famous for providing access to any information in the world...except for its own name." Ouch.
In the second episode, the ribbing continues. Michael ends up driving the (not) Google Street View car to Mexico, where onlookers start snapping pictures of the vehicle to Michael's disdain (telling the locals, "We take the pictures").
A recovery van then arrives to stop Michael, at which point a fleet of young techies take control of the car remotely. After Michael agrees to hand the car over, the three peppy employees tell him, "They never arrest the drivers. They do come down pretty hard on the cars, but it's cheaper to just retrain the people instead. It sounds super futuristic and dystopian, but it's not."
Given Google's recent privacy issues and the current fracas surrounding the safety of self-driving cars, this couldn't feel much more timely.