My Top Ten Episodes of "Halt and Catch Fire"

All the spoilers ahead.

"Close to the Metal" - Joe McMillan is positioned as the lead of "Halt and Catch Fire" in the first season, this Machiavellian asshole who will go to extreme lengths to get what he wants.  Here, after a nail-biting episode where Cameron, Gordon, and finally Donna are all stretched to their limits to save accidentally deleted code, it's revealed that Joe engineered the whole crisis.  It's a credit to the writers that you can look back on this episode and marvel at how far Joe is from this early version of himself by the end of the show.  And maybe Boz too.

"Adventure" and "Landfall" - I think I like the first season of "Halt and Catch Fire" more than most, even though the characters were less developed, and it was following the template of other prestige AMC shows pretty closely.  It managed to wring some great drama out of every step of the product development process, and the clash of big egos was always fun.  "Adventure" is the episode where Joe and Gordon take separate tacks to salvage a deal for LCD screens, while Cameron gets to know Joe's awful father and get some insight into how Joe thinks.  "Landfall," the next episode, is the one with the hurricane.  Joe goes on a tragicomic quest for Cabbage Patch Dolls while Joe is trapped with Donna and the kids.  Both are really about the characters slowly but surely learning to work in collaboration with each other.

"Up Helly Aa" - The trip to COMDEX is very eventful with the Cardiff team throwing an epic party, the Slingshot revealing what Donna's evil boss was up to, Joe saving the Giant by betraying Cameron, and finally the Apple Macintosh making its debut.  I love the recreation of the 1983 convention, the last minute rush to the finish line, and the heartbreaking sacrifices that eke out a win at the last second.  However, this is the episode that could serve as the show's logline.  In spite of all their brilliance and all their best efforts, this is not the story of the ones who won the race.  

"Kali" - Season two was a much slower and less structured year, putting all the characters in new places and letting all the different plot threads play out more gradually.  This episode was the big climax, seeing Gordon hit a low point with his medical condition while Joe tries to give Cameron her due after Westgroup steals Mutiny's users.  It's the culmination of Joe's whole season-long attempt to reinvent himself, only to keep falling into the same patterns of bad behavior.  Cameron, of course, has her own plans in motion, which deliver some sorely needed comeuppance.      

"And She Was" - The episode where Gordon and Cameron bond and play Super Mario together, while Donna is out of town.  Despite their differences, the two most brilliant minds on the show really should be friends, and we finally get to see it happen at just the right moment to give Gordon somebody to confide in when he needs it most.  This is also the episode where Joe loses control of MacMillan Utility, and uses one last card up his sleeve to burn everything down again.  And it's also the beginning of the Mutiny IPO storyline that leads us right into…      

"The Threshold" - This is one of the major turning points for the series, where Donna and Cameron's different approaches to the IPO blow up their partnership, and eventually the entire company after a dramatic meeting and confrontation.  Cameron resorting to an ultimatum and discovering that nobody is on her side is devastating to watch.  The irony is she's right, but her inability to compromise her plans and Donna's eroded trust means that there's no fixing the situation this time.  We also finally see the other shoe drop in the Joe and Ryan story.

"NIM" - The show's biggest timeskip yet takes us to COMDEX in 1990, where Joe and Cameron reconnect, and it feels like there's a future for them together.  Donna and Gordon have divorced, and Joanie is now a sullen teenager played by Kathryn Newton.  The episode does a fantastic job of reorienting us to the new normal, setting up all the pieces for the next phase of the show and the next big idea.  After four years some of the old animosities have gone away, but others remain.  And some things will never change, like the printer bros.

"Who Needs a Guy" and "Goodwill" - These are arguably the show's finest hours.  I've never seen any death on a television show handled as well as Gordon's, with the actual death heralded by these heartbreaking final hallucinations and then the immediate reactions of everyone else to the loss.  The next episode has the main cast coming together to pack up Gordon's house, creating the opportunity to put everyone together to have uncomfortable conversations and reach some epiphanies.  Donna and Cameron go a long way toward burying the hatchet, while Joe has to confront failure again as he and Haley search for a missing sweater.  And Boz showing up with chili at the end is just perfect.    

Honorable Mentions: "I/O," "1984," "Limbo," "Ten of Swords."

---

"Halt and Catch Fire," Year Four

Minor spoilers ahead.

I understand why "Halt and Catch Fire" is held in such high regard by some viewers, but I came away from it a little shell shocked, and I'm still processing the last stretch of episodes.  I want to make it clear up front that I enjoyed the whole series and I admire that the show's creators were willing to take their characters to some pretty difficult emotional places.  Nobody gets what I would consider a happy ending, but at least they reach an understanding about who they are, and who they are to each other.  

It's now the early '90s, and Gordon and Joe are working on internet indexing/search, with Cameron often flaking on them as she finishes on her newest video game.  The Clark girls are now teenagers, rebellious Joanie (Kathryn Newton) and nerdy, brilliant Haley (Susanna Skaggs).  Meanwhile, Donna is leading a team that is putting together Rover, a competitor to Gordon and Joe's outfit, which will eventually be named Comet.  There are a couple of new faces in the mix, including Anna Chlumsky as a new Comet employee, and Molly Ephraim as Alexa, a financier who is very interested in working with Cameron.  

After a big time jump in season three, the only relationships among the four main characters that are doing pretty well are Joe and Gordon's working partnership, and the tentative rekindling of the Joe and Cameron pairing.  "Halt and Catch Fire" continues to have its tech innovation battles stand in for the animosity between the characters, and this time it's personal with Donna on an opposing team.  The show is much better now that it's putting more focus on the characters' growth and change, and boy have there been some changes.  I think Donna in her relative isolation has the most ground to cover this year.  She's now a much more Joe-like figure on the finance side, struggling to balance priorities and decide what she really wants.  Cameron also makes some important breakthroughs and finally acknowledges some of her faults.  I spent most of the season rooting for her and Joe, and knowing from pretty early on where that storyline was going.

I didn't really connect to Joanie and Haley as characters, but the actresses are great, and they signal a new generation on the rise.  Parenting is one of the big themes of the season, and suddenly Gordon and Donna's relationships with their daughters are put front and center.  Gordon and Haley get the bulk of the screen time, with a little interference from Joe, but Donna and Joanie certainly have their moments.  The Clark family functions so differently from how they did in the first season, with Gordon and Donna practically switching roles.  The girls' issues reflect how they've been in the thick of the drama the whole time, so a lot of their storylines feel like Gordon and Donna's chickens coming home to roost.  Boz, of course, is still the best Dad in the show by a considerable margin. 

The shift into the '90s and the internet era  is a lot of fun, bringing a different set of cultural references that I was more familiar with.  (Haley's a comedy fan, so "The Kids in the Hall" gets a shoutout).  The passage of time is a major part of the story, with season four taking place a full decade after season one, and a lot of history repeating itself.  Even Boz ends up in trouble again, though this time around it's in a completely different context.  And finding everyone running the same races and fighting the same fights is a big reason why the final round of resolutions play out as well as they do.  I reacted badly to the ending initially, but the more I think about it, the more I like it.  I'm still getting my head around what kind of story "Halt and Catch Fire" really is, and that it's way more thoughtful and perceptive than it appears to be at first glance.

I probably shouldn't have binged so much of the show, but I enjoyed the ride immensely.  I'll get into more discussion of spoilers in my Top Ten episodes list for "Halt and Catch Fire," coming up soon.

---

"Knowing" is the Strangest Disaster Film

Spoilers ahead.

Alex Proyas is a talented director, best known for making two of the best genre films of the 90s, "The Crow" and "Dark City."  His later films got middling to bad reviews, and I know I skipped "Knowing" because of the terrible critical reception.  I read the spoilers for the ending at some point, which just reinforced my decision.  However, recently I stumbled across the Nicolas Cage action film "Next," where he plays a magician who has precognition.  I remembered that people frequently got "Next" mixed up with "Knowing," where Nicolas Cage also wrangles with precognition, so I thought it might make for a fun double feature.  And maybe I could get a post out of it.  It turns out there is plenty in "Knowing" for a whole post by itself.

"Knowing" was released in 2009, the same year as apocalypse movies "2012" and "The Road."  All three seemed to be building on anxieties about the impending Mayan apocalypse while processing some of the lingering fallout of 9/11.  Nicolas Cage plays a widower with a young son, who stumbles across a list that predicts a series of fatal disasters, culminating in the end of the world.  The first hour of "Knowing" is an excellent supernatural thriller, full of creepy revelations and building suspense.  Cage decodes the list and tries to prevent the disasters, but fails every time.  Meanwhile, sinister figures dubbed "The Whisper People" keep showing up, looming over Cage's son.  There's a good argument that "Knowing" should be considered a horror movie, with occasional jump scares, smash cuts, and some of the most spectacular kill sequences ever put on film.  The plane crash and subway derailment sequences are still jaw-dropping to watch, among the best I've ever seen.  However, it's the bleak tone and paranoid atmosphere that really set "Knowing" apart, where the hero is helpless to do anything except witness the carnage.  At times it feels like a repudiation of the Roland Emmerich style disaster films like "Independence Day" and "The Day After Tomorrow."  

The second half of the movie is about the discovery of an apocalyptic event coming to wipe out all life on Earth, and how the characters respond.  The final disaster is solar flares destroying the atmosphere, and this is scientifically pure bunk, but that's not really the point.  Suddenly the movie shifts to more spiritual and existential matters, as Cage is forced to confront his own faith, and the Whisper People are revealed to be benevolent creatures, interceding to save some of the children of Earth from annihilation.  There are visual indicators that they might be aliens or they might be angels, but it's left ambiguous on purpose.  This is the material that left so many viewers dumbfounded, and in some cases very upset.  The impact on me was blunted by the fact that I had read the spoilers, but I agree that these elements should have been set up better than they were, since many viewers clearly weren't ready or receptive to them.  The ending is a perfect illustration of tonal whiplash, as we're treated to a view of the total destruction of life on Earth, immediately followed up by shots of the rescued kids running through an Edenic alien landscape, ready to start over.  

However, "Knowing" turning out to be part Biblical allegory, and pivoting to a different genre in the last act felt familiar and oddly nostalgic to me.  "Dark City" had a similar reveal, though that one showed its hand earlier, and the dark sci-fi tone was still pretty much the same throughout.  The answers to supernatural mysteries in films like this are frequently so insubstantial or incomplete that it was a wonderful shock to realize that "Knowing" was giving us something completely different.  Suddenly I was watching a "Twilight Zone" episode, where I was being asked to accept an answer that was much bigger and stranger than I had been anticipating.  It was Revelations all along!  And as silly as it sounds on its face, this is a satisfying answer, even if the sequence of events to reach it is shamelessly contrived to fit the demands of a suspense thriller.  I want to make it clear that I'm not Christian and have no particular attachment of affinity for Christian mythology.  However, I respect and appreciate the writers of "Knowing" incorporating this kind of material in a thoughtful way.

"Knowing" turned out to be an unexpectedly pleasant surprise, and it now gives me a third Alex Proyas film I can wholeheartedly recommend.  It's not a great film, and will not work for everyone, clearly, but the parts and pieces are so interesting that I think it warrants further consideration.  Roger Ebert certainly thought so, devoting multiple pieces to "Knowing" and its deeper themes that I had to go to the Wayback Machine to dig up.  And they're worth digging up. 

  

---