Halt and Catch Fire S02E10: "Heaven Is a Place" Let the rain-dancing/prayer-circling/virgin-sacrificing/finger-crossing begin so that despite lackluster ratings, AMC's Mad Men 1985 lives to see another season. I often struggle to understand why Halt and Catch Fire lags behind its network siblings despite excellent casting, interesting premise, and favorable time-slot. The fumbles of the show's first season are regretful and many, but ultimately proved not to be terminal when AMC greenlit a second season of the techie drama with the perfect soundtrack. And although that inaugural season had its rough—so, so rough—patches, Halt and Catch Fire's sophomore season learned from its freshmen ---- ups and emerged from hiatus practically a different series. It's so good. And I'm not just saying that because Lee Pace gives me feelings. (Though trust me, that doesn't hurt.) Halt and Catch Fire transformed itself from a sterile, corporate boys' club setting, complete with professional machismo dramatics and lots of shouting in conference rooms, into a tale of true underdogs in the form of Mutiny, Cameron and Donna's dysfunctional gaming company run out of the living room of what is essentially a Tri-Lamb frat house. Suddenly, there was some genuine fun mixed into all the corporate melodrama and the never ending soap opera of Donna and Gordon's miserable marriage. Halt and Catch Fire managed to make us love Mutiny in a way that we never felt for Cardiff Electric. Regardless of the fantasy Joe constructed to sell Gordon and Cameron on the Giant in the first season, for Cardiff, that computer was only ever meant to be a money grab, illustrated so harshly when Gordon and Joe were quick to strip the operating system down at Comdex to make the mediocre monster more appealing to the bean counters. Criticism of Cardiff and Gordon and Joe's actions aside, that's not to say that Cameron was untouchable in her logic surrounding Mutiny's mission. If Cardiff represented the cold, calculating, soulless corporate world, then the Mutiny of early Season 2 represented the other pole of these two extremes. It's all well and good to have a vision and and stick to it, but when the cost of that vision is stifling the growth of your peers or, more tangentially, rendering your company unable to pay its employees, well, then what the hell are you doing, Cameron? Donna and Cameron have always been more interesting characters than Joe and Gordon and Season 2's shift to feature their struggles both with Mutiny and their personal lives, is at the core of Halt and Catch Fire's amazing turnaround. They are the heroes to my 30-year-old self the way Xena and Gabrielle were when I was 10. The debates over Wonder Woman and Supergirl and whether Zooey Deschanel's Jessica Day is a feminist role model go on and on, and look, sometimes, you don't realize you were missing something on television until you get it. Halt and Catch Fire certainly didn't set out to give us two "strong female characters" when the show initially began. Sure, Donna was introduced to us as the brilliant-mom-who-gave-up-her-career-for-family, but it wasn't until the end of the season that we saw her move beyond trying to sleep with her boss at TI. Cameron was just irritating, a cartoon parody of a GRRL whose story was ultimately driven by Joe's machinations until the very end. Season 2 was Cameron and Donna's season to come into their own professionally (but of course, not personally) and in a complete role-reversal of last season's dynamics, this time, it was Gordon and Joe we only experienced through their female counterparts. I complained last season that Halt and Catch Fire tried way too hard to be a worthy Mad Men successor and in doing so, essentially came off as a Mad Men ripoff with rolled cuffs and bolero ties instead of starched white shirts and beehives. Any of that residual emulation disappeared in Season 2 and Halt and Catch Fire has finally blazed a trail of its own. However, make no mistake: Halt and Catch Fire has not rebranded itself as a series exclusively about women in the tech sector. Its scope has simply become wide enough to encompass both views of the battlefield. While Donna and Cameron fought and scratched their way into control of their lives and their company, Joe questioned whether he was the sort of person who should control anything. He sincerely tried to make up for the damage he left in his wake after Cardiff, but repeated failures and disasters led him right back to his old modus operandi-- and now he's laying in wait for Mutiny/Mainframe in San Francisco, a self-made network security guru (using Gordon's code to build his empire, of course). Both Cameron and Donna made strides, with Cameron reaching a comfort level with the business side of things that let her navigate Mutiny through some pretty treacherous waters and finally see that she could have her cake and eat it, too. Compromise is not destruction. Making a buck off of a dream does not necessarily diminish that dream, and, conversely, presents opportunities for more dreams and more innovation. Her betrayal of Joe at the Westnet meeting was hard to stomach, but this sort of underhanded move has been a long time coming for Cameron. She's seen her work destroyed so many times in just two short seasons and she was not going to let it happen again. Her personal life was still a trainwreck though. That goes double for Donna, who relocated her family to California in the Season 2 finale, where she seemingly found that perfect balance at long last. The move will, in her mind, save her family and grow her company. Gordon's struggles this season and her success despite her own struggles, emboldened Donna to take the reins in their crumbling marriage and become an active participant in it again. Like so many victories on Halt and Catch Fire, Donna's was short-lived, as the breakdown in the airplane's bathroom illustrated. It will take more than a move to make her marriage to Gordon work again and the instability and paranoia caused by his dementia paired with the instability and paranoia caused by Gordon being Gordon already reared its ugly head before their plane even taxied down the runway. The weakest aspect of this season—and the weakest aspect of the first season—continued to be the saga of sad-sack Gordon. That Gordon was literally stranded in a parking garage for the entire penultimate episode of the season betrayed that Halt and Catch Fire is just as clueless about how to use him as we are. He's just so sniveling and petty and irritating. He reminds me of an ex who talked big about how brilliant and progressive and thoughtful he was, except if we'd paid attention to how he actually acted, we'd have realized he was kind of a dick. Giving Gordon his illness seemed to be a move made to render him more sympathetic but instead, played as weird, uncomfortable justification for all the dick things he's done. When he finally copped to the affair he had a few episodes back, Gordon immediately turned it into a pity party about how he was sick and Donna wasn't there and it was her fault for not showing him how much she loves him and OH MY GOD, SHUT UP. It was almost enough to make me go cry in a tiny airplane toilet myself. Should Halt and Catch Fire snag a third season (PLEASE, OH PLEASE, OH PLEASE), doing something to make Gordon less awful would be at the top of my list of hopes and dreams. His storyline has been an immediate momentum killer all season long. The jury is still out on a renewal, but AMC has surprised us in the past. If this season is any indication, Halt and Catch Fire has a lot of Giant shipments left to set on fire next to a lake. Let's hope this bonfire keeps burning! THE ANDROID SORCERER IS BRILLIANT AND KIND – "I've never met a real life psychopath before." Quote of the season? Orrrrr quote of the season? – Is it just me or does this exchange pretty much sum up the internet? "Why do you have a skull for a head?" "Because I can..." – Joe and Sarah's divorce: CALLED IT. – Favorite S2 moments? I gotta go with Joe and Sarah tripping balls on molly and Cameron and Donna stealing computers out of the back of a van. – What did you think of Halt and Catch Fire's amazeballs second season? Was it everything you hoped for?



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