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In the penultimate episode of Silicon Valley’s premier reality show, nothing much happened and it took an hour for nothing much to happen. Which made it quite riveting. Oh, there was a health scare. But not much of one.

As “Start-Ups: Silicon Valley” staggers toward an uncertain future, it’s easy to wonder that the protagonists are in a similar position.

This afternoon’s penultimate episode began with lots of dynamic speak from these partying entrepreneurs. There was talk of the coding/entrepreneurship axis, which sounds like a very dangerous alliance indeed.

But, within seconds, we had David (gay, relatively sane) visit Sarah (blonde lifecaster) in order to find out what had happened in the last episode.

No, he clearly hadn’t watched it. So here he learned that Sarah had a fight with Hermione (Brit, blonde, boozer) and with Ashley (Hermione’s brother’s on-off-on girlfriend.)

Sarah had been thrown out of a party. She now realizes she should have handled it with more grace.

But then a mournful piano gracefully starts and Sarah announces that she has had lumps in her breasts in the past and has discovered another. She must go to where breasts are best analyzed — L.A.

We are left hanging while Kim (brunette, ambitious, likes to get advice from everybody) goes to get even more advice. This time from philanthropist Zaw Thet.

Kimmy’s big insight is that fashion will now move toward experiential dressing — which I think means dressing in order to feel something. Should her start-up, the beautifully named Shunova, be a Facebook app? Or should it not? This is something you need a philanthropist to tell you.

“I really need to home in on what the f*** I’m doing,” she declares, homing in on the fact that she doesn’t know what the f*** she is doing.
You’re playing pretend entrepreneur for a reality show, Kimmy.

Home, sweet, home
So now she feels she needs to go to New York to do some research. Because in New York everyone homes into what the f*** they’re doing — which is normally having lunch and talking very loud.

Kimmy calls Dwight (blonde, hairy, coder) and, despite his start-up being a few breaths from launch, it seems like he might join her for her New York trip. Just in case, you know, they might bond over fashion ideas or lunch or copious amounts of alcohol.

Sarah, meanwhile, needs to get herself checked out. She once found a benign lump when she was 16. So her sister, who seems to have a lot less lifecaster in her, joins her. They come to the Pink Lotus Breast Center in Beverly Hills.

“I’m not as rich as everybody thinks,” says Sarah. She is paying cash. But why has she gone to Beverly Hills, rather than to somewhere a little more local?
Kimmy calls people “buddy” when she calls them. Regardless of whether they’re men or women.

Dwight calls people “buddy” when he meets them in real life. Who cannot imagine Kimmy and Dwight in flagrante buddio?

But wait, Dwight has a buddy who has a dating site called Grouper. And, well, this could mean more fish in the sea than he thought.

Learning what really matters
You can’t focus, can you? You’re still worried about Sarah’s breast. Oh, come on. This is a reality show. Do you really think they’d show real cancer?

Sarah has two lumps. Neither is cancerous. The piano intones a more cheery melody. The doctor describes the lumps as “very benign.”

Sarah philosophizes about how all the drama (which she rather causes) is “trivial.” But of course.

Lumps are serious. So Sarah goes shopping.

Kimmy goes pre-shopping, as it were. She meets with a company called Quincy Apparel. Why would she do this? Why, to get even more advice.

Kimmy’s strategy is to get lots of people to tell her what to do and then decide which parts of this advice she can actually enact. It’s terribly clever. Or at least she thinks it is.

The Quincy ladies wonder why Kimmy isn’t doing her start-up in New York, rather than slightly tasteless California.

One answer might be because New York weather is disgusting and the people can be frightful. But Kimmy wants to be close to the technological heart of the cameras. Um, I mean of the Valley, Facebook and all that.

The Grouper date — because everything is social
Dwight goes off on his Grouper date, hoping that these Party Groupers won’t be Party Poopers.

Dwight admits he is agoraphobic. He has modern medication for this. It’s called alcohol.

In an act of peculiar mercy, we haven’t seen anything of Ben and Hermione, the sibilant siblings from the eastern side of the pond.

Last week, they had secured $500,000 for their Ignite app. Which enjoys the memorable URL signup.ignite.it.

Oh, forget that. It’s dull. How is Dwight’s Grouper date going? They’re now in the downstairs bar. Kimmy arrives.

“I’m really interested what the tail end of this s***show looks like,” says Kimmy, not referring to the s***show in which she is appearing. I think.
Kimmy suddenly gets the hots for another hairy man who is not Dwight. Where might this possibly lead?

Ben and Hermione finally take a look at a prototype IgnitePad. Hermione jumps up and down on it, until she almost breaks it.

Yes, it’s still dull. They haven’t even paid Lunar, the design company.

More importantly, Kimmy believes Dwight is jealous of her initial interest in Josh, the hairy man she had fished for at the Grouper date.

The big question is whether Kimmy can find some reason to talk to Josh in order to get some sort of start-up advice from him. Otherwise, why bother with him?

We are then tossed another couple of minutes to see if David’s start-up — an AA for the health-obsessed with sponsors and, oh, some sort of iPhone app — can possibly fly.

There is no time. There is panic. This is not benign.

So what can possibly happen in the last episode of this riveting series? My money’s on some angst, some in-fighting, some making-out, some falling out. Oh, and a party.