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Review: Halt and Catch Fire Season 1 (2014)
This was a pretty interesting show. I think the story was pretty interesting and it had me constantly wanting to see what came next. I'm definitely going to continue onto the next season
I'm going to try to keep my reviews short because I'm doing one per season and the seasons are only 10 episodes each.
Spoilers.
Story
Season 1 took us from Joe joining Cardiff Electric to the release of Cardiff's first PC. I thought the writing was mostly pretty interesting. I found myself wanting to know what happens next.
I expected the story to be mostly about the technical side of the development of the PC, but it included a lot of the administrative stuff too, like how to market it, how to stay ahead of their competitors, etc. Admittedly that stuff probably shone the most, considering it was Joe's area of expertise.
The season ended on a cliffhanger as usual. Joe was on a backpacking journey (probably to get close to his mother, who I believe is now deceased). Gordon was left in charge of Cardiff but he was left unmotivated and uninspired after the release of their first PC. Cameron started a company to create online games, taking with her most of the coders who were previously with Cardiff. She also recruited Donna, Gordon's wife, as her hardware expert.
I liked that there wasn't too much emphasis on interpersonal relationships. I was expecting there to be a lot of drama between Joe and Cameron and between Gordon and Donna, but those relationships were handled relatively simply, and didn't get in the way of the interesting plots about their companies.
The characters were convinced that Joe was falling in love with Cameron, which is wild considering how ruthless Joe was. Joe even acknowledged this, begging Cameron to come back to Cardiff after he'd gotten rid of the programming that Cameron had worked on. But Cameron had already fallen for Joe's tricks once and she was determined not to do so again. She felt betrayed by Joe agreeing to the removal of her programming and she realized she wasn't going to get the respect she needed from him if she was to work with him again.
As for Donna and Gordon, I freaking KNEW there was going to be an affair between Donna and Hunt, but it was solved relatively quickly. Donna and Gordon remained married, and now it looks like Donna is going to get her chance to really push her skills to the limit like she had when she stealthily worked for Cardiff.
In general, I thought the writing was really good. It presented the events in a way that surprised the audience, if that makes sense. The writing for the characters was pretty good too. The main characters did fall into archetypes, but not so much that they felt fake.
In the next season, I think that Cameron is going to grow her company, and perhaps Gordon may find that a threat, even though they are not currently in the same line of business. This will likely cause some tension between Gordon and Donna. Obviously I think Joe will return to the tech world, but it's not clear whether he will return to Cardiff or embark on something new. On Wikipedia, the critical reception to the show only gets higher and higher, so I'm excited.
Production
I don't have any complaints about the direction style. It was good, got the point across, but not in a bland, stationary way.
There was an aesthetic to the show, but it wasn't so stylish that it didn't feel like the 80s anymore. That being said, this was a show rooted in normal life (people going about their days, going to work, etc.), so there probably wasn't as much opportunity to glam anything up.
Characters
Joseph MacMillan
I was pretty impressed with the portrayal of Joe early on in the show, particularly when he was just starting to set up shop at Cardiff Electric. I loved seeing him pitch his ideas and then turn around and show that he was totally bluffing. It was so fascinating to see him so wrapped up in his confidence, but also totally acknowledging that his confidence was phony. He didn't even bat an eye when Gordon and Cameron got mad at him for faking his confidence, because he knew that he was all along. I bet Joe had pulled overconfident stunts like this before.
I did think that Joe's romantic relationships kind of got in the way of the story at times. He was in a FWB relationship with Cameron. Despite her repeated attempt to get close to him, Joe would rebuff her, lying to her about the truth of his scars, etc. And Cameron was quite hurt when she thought she saw Joe reconciling with his ex. I think Joe started warming up to Cameron when she was working on her OS, so in a way, her OS represented their love. After the OS was taken out of the Giant, and Cameron left Cardiff, Joe realized that he needed Cameron. Frankly, I don't buy the idea that Joe was in love with Cameron. I think he liked something about Cameron, but I think it might've been more of admiration or friendship than romantic love.
We found out that Joe had left IBM after a falling out with his father. When he was a child, Joe had gone to stargaze with his mother, but his mother was under the influence of drugs and endangered him. Joe had fallen onto a fence and that was where his scars came from. After that ordeal, Joe's father told him that his mother had died but actually she had just gone away, and she was alive the whole time until he was an adult. Joe finding out the truth was what caused him to dip from IBM and disappear for a year.
Joe clearly revered his mother. He insisted that she encouraged him to reach for the stars, to be ambitious. It's irrational, but that's how human relationships are. Joe might've been on civil terms with his father, but he probably always felt that he had a special relationship with his mother, and finding out about the secret just made their relationship worse than it was.
I mentioned on my personal blog that at times, Lee Pace seemed to overact his character, but it actually kind of worked out. He'd overact his sales pitches and it'd emphasize the phoniness and hollowness in his words. He didn't need to believe himself, he just needed others to believe him, and that was what I found haunting about his character at first.
I think that Joe's going to return to the tech scene with even more ambition, after he goes on a soul-searching journey to become closer with his mother.
Cameron Howe
Cameron was a programming genius who came from a difficult background. I thought that she was kind of immature and naive in the sense that she had an idealized view of the world. She insisted on doing things her own way, and Cardiff relented because she was put in a position where she had to be relied on (to write the OS), and I think that kind of put her under the impression that she had special say in the company.
As I mentioned above, things seemed to be going well when she was working on her OS and she was getting closer to Joe. Things took a turn when Bosworth was arrested for hacking into Cardiff's bank account, and Cameron realized that Joe was completely phony. I think she was sort of able to get over that, but she could not get over Joe removing her OS from the computer. That felt like the ultimate betrayal to Cameron as the OS was something that was dear to her, born out of memories from her father.
Cameron left Cardiff and started her online gaming company Mutiny. She was able to take all of the Cardiff coders with her as she had a good rapport with them. She was also able to recruit Donna to her side as well.
At the end of the season, it felt like Cameron was on track to bigger and better things, but I don't believe that Cameron is savvy enough to manage a whole company to success yet. I still thinks he maintains an idealized version of the world. While that may ensure that her product is filled with heart, I don't know that that is enough to keep her company afloat. She insisted that there were no titles in her company, which seems great, but looks like a recipe for disaster if the company grows bigger and it has to start making more significant decisions. So I can see Cameron struggling with the administrative aspects of managing Mutiny, but we will see how that plays out in the next season.
Admittedly I wasn't convinced with Mackenzie Davis' acting, especially near the beginning. But over the course of the season, I realized that her acting did kind of match Cameron's character. I just felt that Mackenzie Davis' acting felt a bit too...grand? As a character it seemed like she thought that everything she was doing was great and genius when she was just a girl with no job experience, but I realized that that kind of suited Cameron. She was smart, but she didn't have much practical business experience, so she didn't realize that making a computer wasn't as simple as just hardware and code, and that there was a lot of bureaucracy and administration to wade through as well.
Gordon Clark
At the beginning of the season, Gordon was uninspired by his job. He'd been beaten down once when he'd built a machine and it was not well-received. He was just moving along for the sake of providing for his family.
Things took a turn when Joe came to Cardiff and reignited his enthusiasm for computer engineering. This turned Gordon back into the man he was before the Symphonic failed. He was excited about the PC, but he also had pride. He was protective of his ideas and hated them being challenged, even if for something more innovative and practical.
The problem was that Gordon isn't quite able to manage his life very well. When he was on a roll with the Giant, he was neglecting his family life to the point that Donna was seeking emotional support from Hunt. His life was probably at its peak when he had Donna working with him on the Giant despite technically still being a TI employee, but that couldn't last because they still had kids, and Donna also wanted to fulfill her own potential too.
At the end of the season, Gordon was questioning his staff about what Cardiff would work on next. Gordon, as an engineer, is a perpetual problem solver. If there is no problem to solve, then he'll just wither away (which was the case when he was still a sales engineer and Cardiff hadn't worked on PCs yet). The issue is that as the head of a compny, Gordon has to create the "problem" himself, in terms of deciding what direction to go in next.
If Joe returns to Cardiff next season, I can imagine Gordon getting into fights with him because Gordon is protective of a direction he's decided to take his company and Joe thinks it's a bad idea.
Donna Clark
Donna was Gordon's wife. In addition to her job at TI, Donna also took care of their kids. We could tell that she was unfulfilled in her life, both career wise and emotionally. That was where Hunt came in. To Donna, Hunt not only saw the value in her work, but was also a friend who gave her the time of day to chat. That was more than Gordon could ever do.
Donna had been unintentionally leaking information about the Giant to Hunt, who'd only been cozying up to her for that intel, and that enraged Donna. By the end of the season, Donna also recognized that the job at TI was not a good use of her brains, and she left the company.
I think Donna was an interesting character because she was clearly very smart, but still took traditional values seriously, including taking care of her kids and supporting her husband. At the end of the season, Donna took up the job with Mutiny, but I wonder if she'll continue being that loving mother and wife. I definitely think there'll be conflict when it comes to splitting her time between her job and being Gordon's sounding board. We saw throughout the season that Gordon was pretty self-centered and Donna always had to be the one to cater to him. I can see that happening again next season. But I also wonder whether Donna will spend less time at home with the daughters because of her commitment to a new job where she is faced with more interesting challenges.
John Bosworth
I thought Bosworth was an interesting character. He was upper management at Cardiff. He was manhandled into developing the PC, and that made him angry, but he also tried his best to control the situation. He was locked in a power struggle with Joe and so he tried to learn more about coding to keep up.
Meanwhile, Bosworth was also trying to mediate between Joe and Nathan Cardiff. It was in Bosworth's interest to convince Cardiff that he had the project under control and that it wasn't Joe who was steering the project.
I thought the relationship between Bosworth and Cameron was interesting. They both were at odds with Joe, so that was their starting point. Bosworth looked to Cameron as a computer tutor, and I think Cameron saw Bosworth as a pseudo-father-figure who noticed when she wasn't doing well, etc.
Bosworth had asked Cameron to help him hack into Nathan Cardiff's bank account for money for the PC project, and Bosworth took the fall for the crime. To be honest, it seemed too short-sighted of a plan for me to believe that Bosworth was the one who came up with it, but I can believe that Bosworth would be willing to take the fall for it.
Nathan Cardiff
Nathan Cardiff was the owner of Cardiff Electric. He was mostly very conservative about Cardiff's business. He'd rather he made less money safely than take big risks and win big, which put him at odds with Joe. He hated Joe for forcing his hand, but he could deal with that as long as Bosworth kept Joe on a leash, which he struggled to do. At the end of the season, Joe once again forced Nathan Cardiff's hand in producing the Giant after receiving an offer from an investor at Comdex.
Hunt Whitmarsh
Hunt was an old friend of Donna's, and also her boss at TI. They were on very friendly terms, and Donna's mom even approved of him, but right off the bat that made me wary of him as a possible affair partner later.
It was made clear later that Hunt was only getting close to Donna in order to get intel on Gordon's work. Donna had mistaken Hunt's interest as an interest in her personally. She was so emotionally neglected that she was willing to have an affair with Hunt, but Hunt obviously didn't return the feelings. After Hunt got enough information, he left TI which cut off his communication with Donna.
Joseph MacMillan Sr
We didn't really find out much about him, but we do know that he had a frosty relationship with his son. I wonder if we're going to see him in the future, since he did still work for IBM, which is a direct competitor in the PC business. As well, Joe was going on a journey to find out more about his mother and I guess that will push him further away from his father.
Themes
Feminist themes
I think a lot of feminist themes were expressed with Donna's character. She rode the fine line between being a woman who could take care of herself, and being a woman who lived for her family. Throughout the season, Donna never had the chance to shine in her own right as an engineer. Even when she helped Cardiff with recovering their data, she was unable to be recognized by her true name. It wasn't until Comdex when Gordon acknowledged her contribution to the Giant for the first time. After she quit her job, I think Donna started to think about what she really wanted out of her career, and that was why she ultimately joined Mutiny.
Donna also conformed to the role of a wife. She took care of Gordon and babied him when she needed to, and she was much more well practised with handling the kids.
Surprisingly, I found Cameron to be a character who didn't challenge the feminist themes as much. This was because Cameron was in a field that was already made up of social outcasts. Her defiance of social norms (e.g. how to dress, her free attitude towards sex, etc.) were not seen as despicable among the other coders. She was also not attached to a family who might chastise her for such behaviours as Donna might be.
Sales vs. Engineering
There was a constant battle between Joe and Gordon. Joe hated bringing Gordon along to expos and other marketing events because he felt that Gordon was always getting in the way of his excellent sales pitches. However, as we know, Gordon was very possessive, protective, and proud of his own work, and he refused to not be acknowledged for it.
This issue would also come up when Joe would bring up possible additions and features to the computer. As the hardware engineer, Gordon always thought of the practicality of it first and it frustrated him when Joe would bring up these ideas so willy-nilly.
We did also see this once near the end when Joe voted against having Cameron's OS in the Giant. It would make their computer identical to Hunt's Slingshot computer, but at least it would make the Giant work in time for their demo. For Joe, it was a matter of survival, of getting their product out, but for people like Cameron and Gordon, it was about the beauty of the product itself.
Progress
Throughout the season, people called Cameron "the future," because she was the one with the innovative ideas. She herself started to believe this, and I think that is one of the things that encouraged her to start her own company.
A side effect of capitalism is a constant need to progress, and we see this at the end of the season, when Gordon thinks of what Cardiff should work on next. Especially with minds like Cameron and Gordon, in a stagnant world, they are unfulfilled. They always have to be solving a new challenge.
The field of technology was probably still a bit new in the 80s, but it was the beginning of the world of technology as we know it now. The one that is fast paced and only about innovation, to the point that sometimes change is valued over practicality.
Overall
Sorry for my sloppy writing today, I'm not feeling too well :( Basically, I am pleased with this season of Halt and Catch Fire. I was more intrigued by the business dealings and the hiccups that they got into in pushing out the PC than I was with the personal relationships. However, the personal relationships were kept to a minimum, and they were used to enhance the characters as opposed to the plot, so I didn't mind them that much. I'm interested to see what the next seasons have in store.
I'm going to try to keep my reviews short because I'm doing one per season and the seasons are only 10 episodes each.
Spoilers.
Story
Season 1 took us from Joe joining Cardiff Electric to the release of Cardiff's first PC. I thought the writing was mostly pretty interesting. I found myself wanting to know what happens next.
I expected the story to be mostly about the technical side of the development of the PC, but it included a lot of the administrative stuff too, like how to market it, how to stay ahead of their competitors, etc. Admittedly that stuff probably shone the most, considering it was Joe's area of expertise.
The season ended on a cliffhanger as usual. Joe was on a backpacking journey (probably to get close to his mother, who I believe is now deceased). Gordon was left in charge of Cardiff but he was left unmotivated and uninspired after the release of their first PC. Cameron started a company to create online games, taking with her most of the coders who were previously with Cardiff. She also recruited Donna, Gordon's wife, as her hardware expert.
I liked that there wasn't too much emphasis on interpersonal relationships. I was expecting there to be a lot of drama between Joe and Cameron and between Gordon and Donna, but those relationships were handled relatively simply, and didn't get in the way of the interesting plots about their companies.
The characters were convinced that Joe was falling in love with Cameron, which is wild considering how ruthless Joe was. Joe even acknowledged this, begging Cameron to come back to Cardiff after he'd gotten rid of the programming that Cameron had worked on. But Cameron had already fallen for Joe's tricks once and she was determined not to do so again. She felt betrayed by Joe agreeing to the removal of her programming and she realized she wasn't going to get the respect she needed from him if she was to work with him again.
As for Donna and Gordon, I freaking KNEW there was going to be an affair between Donna and Hunt, but it was solved relatively quickly. Donna and Gordon remained married, and now it looks like Donna is going to get her chance to really push her skills to the limit like she had when she stealthily worked for Cardiff.
In general, I thought the writing was really good. It presented the events in a way that surprised the audience, if that makes sense. The writing for the characters was pretty good too. The main characters did fall into archetypes, but not so much that they felt fake.
In the next season, I think that Cameron is going to grow her company, and perhaps Gordon may find that a threat, even though they are not currently in the same line of business. This will likely cause some tension between Gordon and Donna. Obviously I think Joe will return to the tech world, but it's not clear whether he will return to Cardiff or embark on something new. On Wikipedia, the critical reception to the show only gets higher and higher, so I'm excited.
Production
I don't have any complaints about the direction style. It was good, got the point across, but not in a bland, stationary way.
There was an aesthetic to the show, but it wasn't so stylish that it didn't feel like the 80s anymore. That being said, this was a show rooted in normal life (people going about their days, going to work, etc.), so there probably wasn't as much opportunity to glam anything up.
Characters
Joseph MacMillan
I was pretty impressed with the portrayal of Joe early on in the show, particularly when he was just starting to set up shop at Cardiff Electric. I loved seeing him pitch his ideas and then turn around and show that he was totally bluffing. It was so fascinating to see him so wrapped up in his confidence, but also totally acknowledging that his confidence was phony. He didn't even bat an eye when Gordon and Cameron got mad at him for faking his confidence, because he knew that he was all along. I bet Joe had pulled overconfident stunts like this before.
I did think that Joe's romantic relationships kind of got in the way of the story at times. He was in a FWB relationship with Cameron. Despite her repeated attempt to get close to him, Joe would rebuff her, lying to her about the truth of his scars, etc. And Cameron was quite hurt when she thought she saw Joe reconciling with his ex. I think Joe started warming up to Cameron when she was working on her OS, so in a way, her OS represented their love. After the OS was taken out of the Giant, and Cameron left Cardiff, Joe realized that he needed Cameron. Frankly, I don't buy the idea that Joe was in love with Cameron. I think he liked something about Cameron, but I think it might've been more of admiration or friendship than romantic love.
We found out that Joe had left IBM after a falling out with his father. When he was a child, Joe had gone to stargaze with his mother, but his mother was under the influence of drugs and endangered him. Joe had fallen onto a fence and that was where his scars came from. After that ordeal, Joe's father told him that his mother had died but actually she had just gone away, and she was alive the whole time until he was an adult. Joe finding out the truth was what caused him to dip from IBM and disappear for a year.
Joe clearly revered his mother. He insisted that she encouraged him to reach for the stars, to be ambitious. It's irrational, but that's how human relationships are. Joe might've been on civil terms with his father, but he probably always felt that he had a special relationship with his mother, and finding out about the secret just made their relationship worse than it was.
I mentioned on my personal blog that at times, Lee Pace seemed to overact his character, but it actually kind of worked out. He'd overact his sales pitches and it'd emphasize the phoniness and hollowness in his words. He didn't need to believe himself, he just needed others to believe him, and that was what I found haunting about his character at first.
I think that Joe's going to return to the tech scene with even more ambition, after he goes on a soul-searching journey to become closer with his mother.
Cameron Howe
Cameron was a programming genius who came from a difficult background. I thought that she was kind of immature and naive in the sense that she had an idealized view of the world. She insisted on doing things her own way, and Cardiff relented because she was put in a position where she had to be relied on (to write the OS), and I think that kind of put her under the impression that she had special say in the company.
As I mentioned above, things seemed to be going well when she was working on her OS and she was getting closer to Joe. Things took a turn when Bosworth was arrested for hacking into Cardiff's bank account, and Cameron realized that Joe was completely phony. I think she was sort of able to get over that, but she could not get over Joe removing her OS from the computer. That felt like the ultimate betrayal to Cameron as the OS was something that was dear to her, born out of memories from her father.
Cameron left Cardiff and started her online gaming company Mutiny. She was able to take all of the Cardiff coders with her as she had a good rapport with them. She was also able to recruit Donna to her side as well.
At the end of the season, it felt like Cameron was on track to bigger and better things, but I don't believe that Cameron is savvy enough to manage a whole company to success yet. I still thinks he maintains an idealized version of the world. While that may ensure that her product is filled with heart, I don't know that that is enough to keep her company afloat. She insisted that there were no titles in her company, which seems great, but looks like a recipe for disaster if the company grows bigger and it has to start making more significant decisions. So I can see Cameron struggling with the administrative aspects of managing Mutiny, but we will see how that plays out in the next season.
Admittedly I wasn't convinced with Mackenzie Davis' acting, especially near the beginning. But over the course of the season, I realized that her acting did kind of match Cameron's character. I just felt that Mackenzie Davis' acting felt a bit too...grand? As a character it seemed like she thought that everything she was doing was great and genius when she was just a girl with no job experience, but I realized that that kind of suited Cameron. She was smart, but she didn't have much practical business experience, so she didn't realize that making a computer wasn't as simple as just hardware and code, and that there was a lot of bureaucracy and administration to wade through as well.
Gordon Clark
At the beginning of the season, Gordon was uninspired by his job. He'd been beaten down once when he'd built a machine and it was not well-received. He was just moving along for the sake of providing for his family.
Things took a turn when Joe came to Cardiff and reignited his enthusiasm for computer engineering. This turned Gordon back into the man he was before the Symphonic failed. He was excited about the PC, but he also had pride. He was protective of his ideas and hated them being challenged, even if for something more innovative and practical.
The problem was that Gordon isn't quite able to manage his life very well. When he was on a roll with the Giant, he was neglecting his family life to the point that Donna was seeking emotional support from Hunt. His life was probably at its peak when he had Donna working with him on the Giant despite technically still being a TI employee, but that couldn't last because they still had kids, and Donna also wanted to fulfill her own potential too.
At the end of the season, Gordon was questioning his staff about what Cardiff would work on next. Gordon, as an engineer, is a perpetual problem solver. If there is no problem to solve, then he'll just wither away (which was the case when he was still a sales engineer and Cardiff hadn't worked on PCs yet). The issue is that as the head of a compny, Gordon has to create the "problem" himself, in terms of deciding what direction to go in next.
If Joe returns to Cardiff next season, I can imagine Gordon getting into fights with him because Gordon is protective of a direction he's decided to take his company and Joe thinks it's a bad idea.
Donna Clark
Donna was Gordon's wife. In addition to her job at TI, Donna also took care of their kids. We could tell that she was unfulfilled in her life, both career wise and emotionally. That was where Hunt came in. To Donna, Hunt not only saw the value in her work, but was also a friend who gave her the time of day to chat. That was more than Gordon could ever do.
Donna had been unintentionally leaking information about the Giant to Hunt, who'd only been cozying up to her for that intel, and that enraged Donna. By the end of the season, Donna also recognized that the job at TI was not a good use of her brains, and she left the company.
I think Donna was an interesting character because she was clearly very smart, but still took traditional values seriously, including taking care of her kids and supporting her husband. At the end of the season, Donna took up the job with Mutiny, but I wonder if she'll continue being that loving mother and wife. I definitely think there'll be conflict when it comes to splitting her time between her job and being Gordon's sounding board. We saw throughout the season that Gordon was pretty self-centered and Donna always had to be the one to cater to him. I can see that happening again next season. But I also wonder whether Donna will spend less time at home with the daughters because of her commitment to a new job where she is faced with more interesting challenges.
John Bosworth
I thought Bosworth was an interesting character. He was upper management at Cardiff. He was manhandled into developing the PC, and that made him angry, but he also tried his best to control the situation. He was locked in a power struggle with Joe and so he tried to learn more about coding to keep up.
Meanwhile, Bosworth was also trying to mediate between Joe and Nathan Cardiff. It was in Bosworth's interest to convince Cardiff that he had the project under control and that it wasn't Joe who was steering the project.
I thought the relationship between Bosworth and Cameron was interesting. They both were at odds with Joe, so that was their starting point. Bosworth looked to Cameron as a computer tutor, and I think Cameron saw Bosworth as a pseudo-father-figure who noticed when she wasn't doing well, etc.
Bosworth had asked Cameron to help him hack into Nathan Cardiff's bank account for money for the PC project, and Bosworth took the fall for the crime. To be honest, it seemed too short-sighted of a plan for me to believe that Bosworth was the one who came up with it, but I can believe that Bosworth would be willing to take the fall for it.
Nathan Cardiff
Nathan Cardiff was the owner of Cardiff Electric. He was mostly very conservative about Cardiff's business. He'd rather he made less money safely than take big risks and win big, which put him at odds with Joe. He hated Joe for forcing his hand, but he could deal with that as long as Bosworth kept Joe on a leash, which he struggled to do. At the end of the season, Joe once again forced Nathan Cardiff's hand in producing the Giant after receiving an offer from an investor at Comdex.
Hunt Whitmarsh
Hunt was an old friend of Donna's, and also her boss at TI. They were on very friendly terms, and Donna's mom even approved of him, but right off the bat that made me wary of him as a possible affair partner later.
It was made clear later that Hunt was only getting close to Donna in order to get intel on Gordon's work. Donna had mistaken Hunt's interest as an interest in her personally. She was so emotionally neglected that she was willing to have an affair with Hunt, but Hunt obviously didn't return the feelings. After Hunt got enough information, he left TI which cut off his communication with Donna.
Joseph MacMillan Sr
We didn't really find out much about him, but we do know that he had a frosty relationship with his son. I wonder if we're going to see him in the future, since he did still work for IBM, which is a direct competitor in the PC business. As well, Joe was going on a journey to find out more about his mother and I guess that will push him further away from his father.
Themes
Feminist themes
I think a lot of feminist themes were expressed with Donna's character. She rode the fine line between being a woman who could take care of herself, and being a woman who lived for her family. Throughout the season, Donna never had the chance to shine in her own right as an engineer. Even when she helped Cardiff with recovering their data, she was unable to be recognized by her true name. It wasn't until Comdex when Gordon acknowledged her contribution to the Giant for the first time. After she quit her job, I think Donna started to think about what she really wanted out of her career, and that was why she ultimately joined Mutiny.
Donna also conformed to the role of a wife. She took care of Gordon and babied him when she needed to, and she was much more well practised with handling the kids.
Surprisingly, I found Cameron to be a character who didn't challenge the feminist themes as much. This was because Cameron was in a field that was already made up of social outcasts. Her defiance of social norms (e.g. how to dress, her free attitude towards sex, etc.) were not seen as despicable among the other coders. She was also not attached to a family who might chastise her for such behaviours as Donna might be.
Sales vs. Engineering
There was a constant battle between Joe and Gordon. Joe hated bringing Gordon along to expos and other marketing events because he felt that Gordon was always getting in the way of his excellent sales pitches. However, as we know, Gordon was very possessive, protective, and proud of his own work, and he refused to not be acknowledged for it.
This issue would also come up when Joe would bring up possible additions and features to the computer. As the hardware engineer, Gordon always thought of the practicality of it first and it frustrated him when Joe would bring up these ideas so willy-nilly.
We did also see this once near the end when Joe voted against having Cameron's OS in the Giant. It would make their computer identical to Hunt's Slingshot computer, but at least it would make the Giant work in time for their demo. For Joe, it was a matter of survival, of getting their product out, but for people like Cameron and Gordon, it was about the beauty of the product itself.
Progress
Throughout the season, people called Cameron "the future," because she was the one with the innovative ideas. She herself started to believe this, and I think that is one of the things that encouraged her to start her own company.
A side effect of capitalism is a constant need to progress, and we see this at the end of the season, when Gordon thinks of what Cardiff should work on next. Especially with minds like Cameron and Gordon, in a stagnant world, they are unfulfilled. They always have to be solving a new challenge.
The field of technology was probably still a bit new in the 80s, but it was the beginning of the world of technology as we know it now. The one that is fast paced and only about innovation, to the point that sometimes change is valued over practicality.
Overall
Sorry for my sloppy writing today, I'm not feeling too well :( Basically, I am pleased with this season of Halt and Catch Fire. I was more intrigued by the business dealings and the hiccups that they got into in pushing out the PC than I was with the personal relationships. However, the personal relationships were kept to a minimum, and they were used to enhance the characters as opposed to the plot, so I didn't mind them that much. I'm interested to see what the next seasons have in store.