Margaux and I talk drug problems on this week’s Halt and Catch Fire.
Trevor: “New Coke” didn’t have the zip of last week’s “SETI,” but I’m interested in seeing how all these storylines will coalesce. Especially cause Joe seems so far removed from the other narratives.
Margaux: Literally and figuratively. Joe is back in Dallas, having accepted a job offer from his new fiancee’s father at an oil company, but he’s starting at the bottom (literally) in a basement office stuck in the 70s (at best) that looks like a bomb shelter. I wonder if the company has a high suicide rate?
Trevor: I just hope they never have to see their boss’s office. And I do mean BOSS, Jacob Wheeler is chilling in a hangar right out of the “Otis” video. That was a great set, with the planes and leather chairs and artwork. Very nice juxtaposition. And it’s always good to see James Cromwell on my TV.
Margaux: It was a pleasant surprise, Cromwell gives good stern, disapproving Dad. Obviously, having been seduced by the prospect of starting over surrounded by animal heads in a fancy-ass hangar, did Joe really think it was would be that easy? Regardless of the former Mr. Wheeler’s poor business choices, that led to Jacob loosing a couple million, he flat-out tells Joe he has a checkered resume and zero references. That didn’t scream out, 3D COMPUTER MODELING ASAP to me.
Trevor: To Joe’s credit, though, he has learned something. I would have peaced out of that shitty basement right away, but deciding to stick around speaks to Joe’s maturity. And sending Jacob the waffle iron was a nice touch (granted, that kind of thing only happens on TV, but I’m still a sucker for it).
Margaux: Joe did recover nicely, and if his options truly were: unemployment or basement office, he made the right choice for now. But as you said earlier, Joe is really removed from the main action around Munity, and I’m not sure if/when their plotlines will meet, there’s still a lot of talk about Northern California.
Trevor: NorCal is getting name-dropped a lot lately, but I feel like if there was a change of setting, it might sabotage what Halt and Catch Fire has done really well, which is explore the Silicon Prairie. I like that a show about computers is set in Texas!
Margaux: Don’t call it NorCal.
Trevor: I’m hella sorry.
Margaux: Thanks for confirming that you’re the worst.
Speaking of worst, after being a band of faceless coder-monkeys up until now, the nerds fueling Mutiny went a long way to look like insensitive pricks who always wanted that “frat house” experience. Who the hell hazes Bos?! ABOUT PRISON.
Trevor: That seems…ill-advised. I wouldn’t have fucked with Bos before he was an ex con. But it afforded Toby Huss a nice, human moment (that scene at the end with Cameron). The ground is continually shifting under Bos – first with the Giant, then prison, now with freedom – and Huss is good at digging under the surface, to pass that good-ol-boy bluff and bluster.
Margaux: Even though the sweet scene with Cameron and Bos all but yelled at us, THEY ARE HAVING A PSEUDO FATHER-DAUGHTER MOMENT, FEEL STUFF, I think if it were anyone other than Toby Huss playing Bos, it might’ve felt cheesier. But it didn’t, it built nicely from the previous scene when Bos walks in on those dickheads reading his last letter to Cameron from prison. The way he gently tells them to “keep reading” was heartbreaking. I really thought Bos coming to Munity was going to completely different direction, I thought he might be still be sore about taking the fall that landed him in jail, but obviously from the letter – he’s over it. And it made for an unexpectedly bittersweet curve ball for Bos’ character.
Trevor: Yes, absolutely. One thing HaCF’s second season is doing really well so far is showing actual change in the characters. Except, well, for Cameron. She’s still kind of the same as she was when we met her, am I right? She’s still doing behind Donna’s back, and Donna is the one doing the adjusting. Granted, hiring that hacker Tom Rendon was the smart thing to do, but once again Donna was left out of the loop. She had to take the initiative to fuck Rendon over at work, because she knew Cameron wasn’t going to check with her about hiring him. Mackenzie Davis does good work, but I need a little more growth out of Cameron.
Margaux: I thought I detected a small nudge of change on Cameron’s part, if only for a second. When she’s waiting for Donna in the art-deco VC offices, in her ripped jeans and in-need of a dye job hair, Donna steps out of the elevator looking like she was back in her Texas Instruments days. It finally hits Cameron that this meeting they have with an investor is a Big Deal, and gets self-conscious about her appearance and how it might affect the outcome of getting funding. It was like she finally snapped out of her Brat Mode for millisecond and realized this was real and happening. Usually she just pulls the shit she usually does, like she does throughout the rest of “New Coke”. Yelling at people she turns around and hires without talking to Donna, arguing moot points to stuffy white old guys who are writing the check, more varied yelling.
Trevor: She does love yelling at stuffy old guys, that’s for sure. I liked the scene with the VC, even if every story like HaCF has the scene with someone who Just Doesn’t Get It. It’s a testament to how much I’m enjoying this second season that I can watch scenes that I’ve seen a million variations of – like the waffle iron – and still like it.
Another thing I like is that the show is kind of torpedoing Gordon – intentionally, of course. He’s a weird, jittery dickhead now, and HaCF isn’t taking any pains to make him particularly likable. It’s a bold move, one that many shows have failed at in the past, but Scoot McNairy is up to the challenge. But even coked to the gills, Gordon is still smart as hell, which we saw when he fixed the Tank Battle timing issue.
Margaux: And resulted in his kids’ school thinking his children were getting abducted. That was hilarious, even if you could see it coming from a million miles away. I wouldn’t say that Gordon is acting particularly unlikeable, but his restlessness is stressful to watch. Even though he’s leeching onto Donna’s work, which I’ll go ahead and say now will cause Problems In Their Marriage, I’m glad Gordon found something to put his weird energy into, besides doing coke in his garage by himself. Which is a new level of depressing I haven’t seen on TV.
Trevor: You’re right; I wouldn’t say Gordon is unlikable quite yet, but he definitely has the potential to go there, and if you’ve seen drug addiction stories on TV (which you have) it’s unlikely to end well. That’s impressive of Halt and Catch Fire; any other show would have had Joe get addicted instead of Gordon, Joe being the ’80s Reaganaut type.
Margaux: Gordon’s wavering coke problem, coupled with his forceful personality – ie: when he charges into Mutiny, coked outta his mind, demanding they fix the timestamp issue – set him up to be wholly unlikable down the line, especially with his unofficial-official involvement in creating a user map for Mutiny.
Trevor: I like the whole chat room/online gaming angle that it looks like we’ll be exploring this season. And one thing I really like about this show, which I failed to mention last week, is all the nuts-and-bolts shop talk. I don’t understand half of what these assholes are saying, but I still like hearing them say it.
Margaux: That’s a great aspect of the show from last season that we enjoyed, the clinical computer-shop talk with zero over explanation of its meaning, that they’re using more often in the Mutiny plotline, which makes sense for all those characters. And I could even go so far as to compare the youths of today and how easily they interject internet/computer talk into their everyday vocab to how the coders of Mutiny speak amongst each other, but I’m too lazy. And it’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?
Trevor: Still an apt comparison. Honestly I didn’t make the connection, because while watching HaCF I was only thinking about the 1980s – look at the color palette. The whole show looks like an 80s movie, it’s really impressive.
Margaux: Haven’t heard a dial-up modem in one hundred years, that was jarring and hilarious. HaCF is doing a great job of showing another side of the 80s, from the clothes to computers, keeping it very of-the-era.
Trevor: Even seeing landlines weirds me out. But hearing the old modem sound was weeeeird. I liked it.
Margaux: Stars?
Trevor: Hmm, well, “SETI” definitely moved faster, but that doesn’t make it a better episode. I’m inclined to give “New Coke” the same four-star rating. It established some plot points that are going to be important, and as a rule, second episodes need to pump the brakes to give the narrative some breathing room. What do you think?
Margaux: “New Coke” didn’t have quickness of last week’s episode, but it did go a long way to establish the themes and plotlines we’ll most likely explore in-depth for the rest of the season. Will Mutiny get funded? What’s Gordon gonna do with all that money and time? Will Joe take Drake’s lyrics and start from the bottom and end “here,” wherever that may be for him by the end of this season? Like we said at the beginning, Joe’s pretty far removed from the main narrative, and Lee Pace might be a tall man that takes large steps, but I don’t know if he’ll take enough to catch up to the “future.”
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