'Silicon Valley' used Google's robot dog Spot in its season 3 premiere
Warning: There are spoilers ahead for season 3 of "Silicon Valley."
When the season three premiere of "Silicon Valley" kicks off, Richard Hendricks (Thomas Middleditch) is furious after learning he was removed as CEO from his own company "Pied Piper" at the end of last season. He's so distraught that he and Erlich Bachman (T.J. Miller) race over to the company to try and sort things out.
Their trip is quickly halted.
A minute into the premiere, the two get stopped dead in their tracks when Hendricks hits something in the middle of the road.
"Did I just hit a deer?" asks a frazzled Hendricks.
Not quite.
The two get out the car only to find it's a robotic dog with antlers attached to it.
Mad, Erlich gets out of the car and starts kicking it over and over.
That wasn't just any old robot dog, though. That was Spot, Boston Dynamics' dog-like robot originally built to scout for the U.S. Marines. And yes, it really was wearing antlers. They were its costume for its star turn as "Bambot," apparently a deer-like project of Stanford Robotics in the show's universe.
An HBO representative told Tech Insider that not only did Boston Dynamics actually let Spot appear in the man-on-robot violence scene with T.J. Miller, but the "Stanford students" running out of the forest to protect their robot deer were actually Boston Dynamics technicians.
Don't worry about Spot though. While the kicking was real, the smallest robot in the company's four-legged line-up is built to withstand such abuse. Check out the video below from way back in February 2015 of Spot climbing hills, wandering the forest, and taking kick after kick from a surprisingly friendly-looking roboticist.
