Margaux and I say goodbye to Halt and Catch Fire‘s debut season. Thanks for sticking with us, it’s been a blast writing these reviews, and we hope you’ve enjoyed reading them.
Trevor: Gordon shaved his beard. Zero stars.
Margaux: Gordon’s brand new Porsche wouldn’t have been stolen if he hadn’t of shaved that night – only bad things happen with you are beardless and in an ill-fitting (80s) suit.
Trevor: I was glad to see things looking up for Gordon, finally. (Minus the carjacking, of course.) It was a good move on the show’s part to end Gordon and Donna’s fussin’ and feudin’, because they work so well as a team. Donna in particular has probably grown the most this season; I remember how wary we were of her back when we reviewed the pilot, and now she might be my favorite character on HaCF. Just look at her hilariously frank exit interview, or the way she pouts when she’s stoned off garage weed and sees that they’re out of cookies.
Margaux: I thought a lot of the best parts of Halt and Catch Fire’s first season was when we were following the Clark family. I got a little choked up when Gordon finally gets to give Donna the decoder ring of her dreams, they had a real on-screen chemistry, even when Gordon was still giving Donna a hard time for making out with Hunt.
I did enjoy Donna quitting (that was hilarious) and her subsequent free time, what she did with it. And though I’m not entirely surprised that she ultimately winds up working with slash for (?) Cameron, I’m glad she did because Mutiny looked like the least organized dial-up internet operation. Like a super shitty, Texan version of the Incubator house in Silicon Valley.
Trevor: “I darf you very gurp.” “I’ll darf you till the day I zoff.” So cute. Loved that scene.
Good description of Mutiny, and good groundwork for season two (if there is one; AMC still hasn’t renewed the show). It’ll be interesting to see Cameron and Donna working together. They’ve always had good, semi-adversarial chemistry.
So what’s up with Joe? Is he the proverbial man afraid of commitment? He couldn’t even pretend to be upset about that defect, then he just burned the whole shipment of Giants!
Margaux: What I liked most about “1984” is that it sets up a very interesting second season – if they get there, and also serves as a pretty satisfying series finale. Though I hope low-ish ratings don’t scare AMC off, I think HaCF is the most promising, original drama on their roster.
And Jesus, Joe. I don’t think he can be so easily chalked up as another dude with issues that can’t commit. I think he over-commits, if anything. He has a vision but bucks when follow-through gets hard and he’s completely dependent on others (Gordon and Cameron) to give him that legitimacy that he so desperately wants. In Joe’s eyes, with Gordon settling for this version of the Giant and no Cameron to yell and cry at him for not being sensitive enough about a fucking computer, Joe has no idea who he is. So he goes off to find the woman who pushed him off a building – I think. I’m a little confused about Joe’s Mommy issues.
Trevor: I’m a little confused about Joe’s everything issues. Kudos to AMC and Lee Pace for making him a more layered and quite frankly bizarre character than I would have guessed. On the surface he looked like a Don Draper clone, but there was a lot more going on there.
I do wish we could have seen some reaction to Joe torching the delivery truck. Robbing us of that, and just cutting to what looks like a few days or a week later, was a little too neat for me. But between the carjacking and the arson, “1984” got nicely WTF on us.
Margaux: Well, I actually liked that they didn’t give us a straight up “reaction” to Joe torching the first shipment of the Giant – they played with time a lot in “1984” and I think it served the pacing very well. But Joe’s vacant stare all night during Giant’s unveiling, the way he’s circling the truck while Gordon is trying to saying good-bye and thank you, I think even Gordon got the hint that Joe was gonna go by way of flooding the IBM servers. Gordon didn’t even look all that surprised, sitting at the head of the conference room table, he looked like that was what he’d expected all along and it’s still a somewhat of a hollow victory. He didn’t even get trick Joe with printer drivers.
Trevor: Okay, I’ll concede the point about the time jump, but it still stuck out to me. Agree to disagree.
I liked when Gordon cut through the chatter to simply ask, “What’s next?” To me, that’s the whole theme of Halt and Catch Fire.
Margaux: Exactly. And that’s kinda-sorta always been Gordon’s problem – he was too busy trying to keep Joe focused and limit the self-sabotaging of the project, he never thought about what was to come next. Maybe the second version of the Giant will have Cameron’s IOS software put back in, that seems like a no-brainer.
Trevor: Agreed, but if HaCF comes back for a second season, I don’t want to see them working on the Giant 2.0. This show has a strong ensemble and a good hook, and even though it stumbled at times I was engaged throughout.
Margaux: The second season has wonderful potential to focus on Cameron and Donna becoming lady-tech giants, which I think would be a lot of fun to watch.
But back to Joe for a second, even though we’re okay with thinking he’s just in need of serious therapy, I think his single-mindedness (becoming obsessed with that stupid, talking MAC or continuing to beg Cameron to come back – which got painful there towards the end) drove Cardiff. Hell, even one of the engineers remarks that if Joe was in the conference room, he’d “make them build a damn spaceship” – if it wasn’t for Joe, Gordon wouldn’t own (probably, now) an 8% stake in the company. I just think Gordon’s Mad Men-ish final shot was a lot heavier than I thought it would be.
Trevor: Yeah, it’s going to be interesting to see how Gordon is changed now that he’s pretty much running the company. More Scoot McNairy is always a good thing. I do miss Bosworth, though.
Anything else to add? Or do you want to talk star count for the season?
Margaux: Bosworth footnote, so, he’s just in jail now?
Trevor: I guess? I don’t see any other outcome for him.
Margaux: Me neither, but was still holding out hope for more Toby Huss.
Trevor: Yeah, he was incredible all season.
Margaux: Well, Halt and Catch Fire had an extremely entertaining freshman season – I didn’t expect much from it but was pleasantly surprised. Sure, they had a few bumps in the road over the course of their 10-episode run (no one got yelled at more than poor Assistant Debbie) but you could always count on top-notch acting from Pace, McNairy, and Kerry Bishe.
And I am forgetting Cameron on purpose because she didn’t drive the story forward so much as she just whined at it, cause she’s the future or some such crap she’s paraphrasing from Bosworth.
Trevor: Haha, well said. I’d like to go four stars for the first season. Thoughts?
Margaux: Four stars indeed – hope to see HaCF again next year.
Season score: 4/5
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