Halt and Catch Fire is really growing on Margaux and I. Check out why:
Trevor: I like this show more and more every week. “High Plains Hardware” was a damn good episode.
Margaux: Usually freshman shows take a while to find their footing and I love how fearless Halt and Catch Fire is. Each cold open of the three episodes that have aired, just keep getting stronger and ballsy-er.
Trevor: Great opening to this episode. The soundtrack is fantastic! The music is propulsive and in-your-face, and really adds to the punk rock ethos of what Joe, Gordon, and Cameron are attempting.
Margaux: To borrow from another show who has no right to be as good as it is (spoiler, yes it’s Fargo) the soundtrack is fucking aces! Every week in my notes I’ve scribbled down something about how much I love the choice of music. Nothing is arbitrary and doesn’t have too much to do with my 80s music phase that lasted about 6 years…
Trevor: Good lord. Glad that’s over.
Gordon sucks at firing people. Those scenes were like a black comedy version of Up in the Air. I like that the one guy didn’t even know he was being fired, he was so lost in Gordon’s shitty orange grove analogy.
Margaux: Laughed so hard at Gordon trying to call the engineers who were waiting to be fired “unique snowflakes.” It was a really good scene that exemplified how overwhelmed Gordon is by all the ins and outs of managing people – he truly is the creative type. The backlash in the Kill Room was another good scene, the guys Gordon hand picked basically giving him shit for firing all their friends.
Trevor: I loved all the scenes in the Kill Room. I wrote down “This is like the opposite of Jobs,” a movie that proved that anything is possible if Ashton Kutcher acts at you loud enough. I’ve said it before, but I love how gritty and unglamorous HaCF makes this process, and even though I don’t understand 99% of the computer terms, I love that the show doesn’t dumb it down for the laymen out there. Most shows would say “But Gordon, we have to X so we can Y!” whereas HaCF just sticks with “We have to X.”
Margaux: It really opens it up for the characters to have natural sounding dialogue. Like when Donna stops working on her boring assignment from Texas Instruments to help Gordon solve a spacing issue with the motherboard (?hard drive? See, I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about either), it was really sweet to get a glimpse of how they (most likely) fell in love.
By the same token, it was really interesting to get more of a sense of who Donna is this episode. Which is more than I can say than what they’re doing with Cameron. It was refreshing to see Donna be so stifled in life (aware that sounds bad) and that it’s not limited to her husband. Her job seems to be dreadfully lame, her boss is an old high school friend with and “exotic” aka Canadian wife. By the time Donna wraps up a conversation with her mother, you really get the sense she feels trapped by a lot of things.
Trevor: I think if we were writing an episode of this, it would sound like “We have to Skype these bitcoins before it goes viral!” “It’s already on the Cloud!”
I agree with you about Donna. Kerry Bishe, thankfully, is getting more room to flesh out the character, alleviating some of those fears that we both had after the premiere. She and Scoot McNairy have good chemistry together, that of a husband and wife who have been together for a while. It’s an altogether different beast than, say, the chemistry that Joe and Cameron have to have together, which is partly adversarial, partly loaded with innuendo and double entendres, like when he asks her “Do I have to come down there?” On my notes, I just copied that line and wrote SEX next to it. Very insightful.
Margaux: Given your track record with women, not entirely shocking that that’s your insight.
I just want Cameron’s character to stop being stuck, I want to see her be the brilliant coder everyone’s fucking told us about. Okay, it was kind of fun to watch her interact with street kids in the alley, “we’re just gonna thrash…” but it was supposed to show us more of who she “is” and ultimately just keeps pointing us in the direction that she’s a baby-Joe in the making. All talk, no walk. Which, is turning into a let down, if this is the only direction they’ll have go.
Trevor: I agree. Cameron has a lot of potential because she’s so wildly different than any other character (and her Walkman provides much of the stellar soundtrack). I hated that hotel room party, not because it was poorly directed (by Girlfight’s Karyn Kusama), but because I have crippling social anxiety. I had the same reaction to Jesse’s non-stop party on Breaking Bad.
Anyway, Mackenzie Davis is doing fine work, but with the amount of time spent tonight fleshing out Gordon and Donna – and really fleshing out Joe – she kinda got short shrift. I hope HaCF can rectify that, and soon, because I really don’t want to see Cameron squandered.
Margaux: They’re definitely having a lot of fun with Joe’s character though, and taking their sweet time revealing parts of him, real or not though – we don’t know. Like, is he gay or is Joe just that damn ambitious in wanting to “prove the haterz” wrong that he’s willing to bang some debutante’s kept boy? Cause damn, that was impressive.
Trevor: Yeah, part of me thinks that AMC knew that Joe was gonna get compared to Don Draper, so they had him do something that Don would never, ever do. And in episode three! That steely look he gave to Lulu afterward, coupled with Travis’s shirt being slightly unbuttoned, spoke volumes. I don’t think he’s gay, or even bi, but I think he picked up that vibe from Travis and capitalized on it just to fuck with Lulu. He didn’t want her involved, so he sabotaged the whole meeting. Sabotaged it hard and deep.
Trevor: Jesus. I’m actually surprised it took you that long. THAT’S WHAT SHE SAID.
Margaux: Anyway, so you agree then, Joe is just downright ambitious and one of those “do whatever it takes”-type. His glance to Lulu after he blew (ha.) Travis’ mind was pitch-perfect bitch face cause it was clear from the onset that Joe was a firm, nah-uh on involving Lulu with them, it just took him a while to figure out how to sabotage it. Talk about sticking a landing (okay, I’m done for now).
Trevor: I’m sure I’ll get twenty texts today of Joe jokes. We didn’t see much of him last night – that was really his big scene – but he really made his presence known. Lee Pace is an unknown commodity to a lot of viewers, but with “High Plains Hardware” I think he really made a case for why he should be the lead on an AMC drama.
Margaux: Pilot kiss of death title be damned, Lee Pace is rocking Joe. And his power struggle with Toby Huss is going to be a major plotline in the coming episodes, considering how much they kept trying to pull one over on each other in “High Plains Hardware.”
Trevor: Toby Huss was great! We didn’t talk about him much, but Bosworth is proving to be a much bigger character than I thought he would be at first. And he’s more or less the human face of the company (note to self: stop using phrases like “human face,” it makes you sound like a serial killer).
Star count? I’m leaning towards four and a half. This was a damn good episode. HaCF is getting better every single week .
Margaux: Just to piggyback on what you said about Bosworth, I liked his interaction with Cameron when she was stalking around the office late at night. I didn’t think there would be many opportunities for them to have tete-a-tetes but was pleasantly surprised.
In terms of stars, I’ll concede to your four and a half.
After Gordon fires his half-wit neighbor at the end of the episode, I can clearly see a chance for Donna to assume his position in the Kill Room. Each week, they build more for you to look forward to.
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