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Review: Halt and Catch Fire Season 2 (2015)
I was kind of disappointed by this season because I was expecting it to be better than last season. In terms of the story, I thought season 1 was more unique and compelling than season 2.
Spoilers.
Sorry, I didn't edit this so sorry for any sloppy writing. I just wanted to get this written before I went to bed lol.
Story
While Season 1 focused on Cardiff Electric producing a PC, Season 2 focused on Mutiny and its struggles as a startup to stay afloat. That was not the inherent problem. Cameron was obviously not a business mind and I didn't love her as a character, but it was still interesting to see how someone with more technical knowledge like her would run a business.
Rather, what disappointed me in this season was that there was a lot of side plots related to personal lives and relationships that I felt turned the series into a generic drama rather than a tech-focused, fast-paced show like Halt and Catch Fire was supposed to be.
I'll talk more about the personal relationship in the characters section, but here's a brief rundown on what bothered me about them.
From the very beginning, it was hard to believe that Joe was truly in love with Sara. Their relationship would've been more believable if Joe used his flashy moves to woo her like he sort of did with Cameron. Though I guess the fact that he didn't showed us that he wasn't drawn to Sara like he was with Cameron. In any case, it was very hard to take his relationship with Sara seriously.
As for Cameron, she randomly met Tom Rendon after he hacked and cloned Parallax. Over their mutual love for gaming and computers, they fell in love, but their opposing views on how to run a company kind of broke them apart. Their relationship was more believable than Sara and Joe's, but I can't say that Tom was a particularly compelling character that I felt would stay past this season.
Gordon and Donna's thing from season 1 was that they ran into marital problems from time to time, and it was their mutual love of computers that kept them together. There was a lot of drama thrown into their relationship during this season. I felt that it would suffice to only include the tech related ones, such as Gordon's Sonaris interfering with Mutiny, and Gordon's custom computer business failing. Gordon's brain damage and mental illness would be fine to keep in if the writers intended for them to be relevant in later seasons. While Gordon's affair was a symptom of the broken marriage and not a cause, so I will leave that out. Donna's pregnancy, however, felt unnecessary to the plot. It was to show that Donna was going through a tough time, but it felt over the top. I think the writers could've shown that Donna was going through a tough time without introducing a pregnancy and abortion.
There were just a lot of people coming and going in this season without seeming to make an impact. For example, Joe and Cameron apparently fell madly in love with Sara and Tom respectively, and yet they both seemed not to have left as big of a mark on Joe and Cameron as their technological endeavours did. Yo-yo left Mutiny because he couldn't handle not having a paycheque, and then he returned as if he had never left, as if none of those who stayed might've felt bitter about his leave.
In last season, the success of the Giant made an impact on all of the four main characters, but it's hard to say that Mutiny did the same in this season, mostly because only Cameron and Donna actively worked at Mutiny. Joe was only sort of connected to Mutiny, and Gordon's story line was mostly concerned with his personal conflicts. I'll talk about these more in the characters section.
At the end of the season, our four main characters all moved to San Francisco, California. Cameron and Donna hired Gordon as they were going to set up their network in California. As for Joe, he used Gordon's anti-virus program to start his new business which would also be situated in California.
Obviously Joe stealing Gordon's idea is going to be a huge point of tension between them. I think that Cameron and Donna are going to continue having conflicts over the way the business is run, though by the end of this season I think it's safe to say that Cameron is no longer as prideful as she once was. Donna basically made Gordon take the Mutiny job to fix their marriage, so we're likely going to see more of them trying to reconcile next season.
Considering Joe set up his own company while the other three are at Mutiny, I wonder if it will be another Joe vs. the world situation, or whether they will end up working under the same umbrella. Frankly, Season 1 was interesting because they were all working together and it was interesting to see how their characters clashed. I'd like to see more of that as opposed to the negotiation that we saw in Season 2.
Production
Style wise, I think Season 1 made a bigger impression on me than Season 2. This included both visuals (sets, costumes, etc.) and music. This season felt a bit too modern for me to believe I was still in the 80s.
The concept of a startup operating out of a house like a nerd frat felt fairly modern, and even the idea of Mutiny being big enough to hold a meetup felt a bit too novel for the 80s.
The wardrobe felt fairly modern too. Even for Cameron's normally grungy outfit, she didn't look like she belonged in the 80s like she did in Season 1.
I don't know if I'm being picky because I just didn't like this season as much and I don't have concrete examples to back myself up though.
Characters
Joseph MacMillan
At the beginning of the season, we were supposed to believe that Joe was madly in love with Sara, which was hard to believe right off the bat, when he found himself out of place at her party, and not being able to mix with his friends. This was further emphasized when Gordon and Donna came to visit and Sara was appalled by this different version of Joe, who was frankly the real Joe. I guess Joe wanted to believe he was madly in love with Sara, but I can't figure out why he so badly wanted to believe that. We know that Sara was the woman he met at the observatory when he went on his backpacking trip, but we don't now much else about how they fell in love.
It's clear that there were cracks in their relationship that both of them chose to ignore. From Joe's perspective, I think he was essentially playing house, just going along with what he thought Sara needed to be happy. He thought he was following the script perfectly well. The problem was that he hadn't had an opportunity to show who he really was until he finally got back to working. That's when he came up with his scheme to lease out the network time on Westgroup's servers.
If this was the old Joe, he would've gone all out, pushed to acquire Mutiny and then taken control. He had brief period when he realized that he hated Jacob Wheeler and what he stood for, and in that moment of weakness, he urged Cameron not to give in to the acquisition agreement.
However, soon after, Cameron gave Joe the virus, which just reverted slightly sentimental Joe back to cutthroat Joe. And his marriage with Sara was over before it even began.
I really felt that this season wasted Joe's character. In Season 1, he was unapologetically portrayed as a psychopath. He was a necessary evil that got the job done. Perhaps after his soul-searching trip, he'd decided he didn't want to be a cutthroat businessman like his father anymore, and tried to settle down and be a good, normal guy, except that didn't make sense, because his mother, whom he loved so much, always encouraged him to reach for the stars. So why did Joe want to be this normal guy so much?
After getting married and divorcing Sara, and becoming disillusioned with Jacob Wheeler and Westgroup, Joe returns to being the same person as he was last season. He was a wrench thrown in Mutiny's operations, but as a character he didn't do anything that I felt made him grow.
Cameron Howe
From the end of last season, I knew that Cameron would have struggles in running Mutiny. She was largely a computers expert and from her interactions with Joe at Cardiff, we could see that she wasn't the most savvy when it came to business operations. She would have great ideas but was not willing to compromise to keep a business afloat. That was what drove her away from Cardiff (because the Giant couldn't keep her OS) and start Mutiny.
Though Cameron and Donna were both technical minds, Donna was far more practical about running a company. At the very least, she was older and had more work experience and understood that there were some administrative tasks that could not be ignored, such as the fact that borrowing a neighbour's bandwidth is not reliable for a business. Donna was willing to compromise in order for Mutiny to stay afloat (such as dealing with Joe MacMillan), and it wasn't until after Mutiny had no options did Cameron understand that compromise was necessary.
I think another rift between Cameron and Donna was the fact that Mutiny Community grew to be more successful than the video game component. Cameron's pride as the leader of Mutiny prevented her from understanding that Community had a much bigger impact and much wider reach than the video games did.
For the most part, I think Tom represented the part of Cameron that was idealistic and wanted to create the best video game ever. But I was confused because Tom kind of flip-flopped between supporting and being against Cameron selling out to Mutiny. At first, he wanted her to consider it after Joe spoke to him. Tom said he didn't care about money...but the fact that he was asking Cameron to consider it spoke of the opposite. And then when Cameron sold their game for money, he got angry at her. I guess I should talk about that more in Tom's section. In any case, Cameron asked Tom to come with her to California, even if they weren't going to work together, but we see that he did not join her. And I think that is a representation of Cameron letting go of the too-idealistic computer genius part of herself.
So all in all, I think Cameron's transformation was from a purely tech mind to one who understood that as a business owner, she had to compromise a product or to sell out to live another day. I think she realized that being too personally wrapped up in products was taxing on her soul. After she sold the game, she said she felt lighter, probably because now she had freedom to start something new. I think it's representative of the idea that you can't start a project with the intent to make it perfect. Instead, you work on many projects over time to build up experience that will enable you to make better and better things.
Gordon Clark
Gordon's struggles in this season were mostly personal as opposed to business related. He learned that he had brain damage, and later mental health issues, and many of the things that happened to him this season were related to that. But now that I'm thinking more about his story line, it's quite messy and doesn't really add up.
Donna was becoming increasingly busier and Gordon felt he had no way to tell her about his health problems. It wasn't until he'd gone to California and come back that he told her. Gordon's trip to California (where he had an affair) was kind of a symptom of his alienation from his wife.
Gordon's failed custom computer business was also a point of stress. He started becoming paranoid that competitors were actually his friends going behind his back and it was the cause of him hurting himself in that parking lot.
By the end of the season, Gordon and Donna felt like their marriage wasn't going to work. But from my perspective as a viewer, I didn't really get the sense that their marriage was in shambles. Perhaps it was because their marriage had been through tough times before. Donna used to be the one bending over backwards for Gordon but this time, it was Donna who was unable to do that for Gordon. That may be why the two felt that their marriage wasn't going to work out.
Donna's proposition was that Gordon would work with Mutiny to salvage their marriage. This sounds weird, but I think it technically works because the way they'd salvage their marriage was always through their mutual love for computers. So by working together, I think Donna figured that they'd find something to bond over again.
As a person, I don't think that Gordon had changed much, but his "quirks" are becoming more apparent. Gordon always had a bit of an ego regarding his work (which is understandable), but now that ego is branching into paranoia as well. He was worried that Stan stole his idea about creating custom computers, and now that Joe had actually stolen his idea, that wouldn't help his paranoia.
Now that I've written it, I do think that Gordon's story was rather weak, mostly because it was due to his personal problems and not his relation to the company in this season's spotlight.
Donna Clark
As I mentioned, Donna was kind of a counterpart against Cameron at Mutiny. She would always urge Cameron to look at things more practically, and Cameron never showed an ounce of gratitude. When Donna tried to pressure Joe into lowering the price for network time and it didn't work, Cameron yelled at her for not doing anything, and Bosworth had to jump in and tell Cameron that she was completely out of line.
Though Cameron did come to see that Donna had good points and that she was blind to them, I can't say that I saw a good working relationship between them even by the end of the season. Maybe it was because it was too late in the season that Cameron started to agree with more practical business practices.
In terms of her relationship with Gordon, there was hardly one for most of the season, because Donna was always busy with Mutiny. So I thought it was a bit of a surprise that she was the one to say that she thought their marriage wasn't working out. If she'd noticed this earlier, I felt like she would've been more proactive to do something to rectify that. In the past, she'd always been the one to bend over backward for Gordon, and I understand why Gordon would feel abandoned. Perhaps it was knowledge of the affair that pushed her over the edge.
The first time I heard Donna's proposition, it sounded kind of weird to me. Why would Gordon accepting a job with Mutiny fix their marriage? But I tried to contextualize it in terms of how Gordon and Donna had always gotten along. They got along best when they were working on a computer together, and I guess that is how Donna figured they'd fix their marriage.
I was glad to see more of Donna doing her own thing in this season, but I guess like Gordon's story, her story was a bit all over the place and not as cohesive because so much of it centered around her marriage with Gordon.
Sara Wheeler
I think Sara always sensed that she and Joe weren't compatible. If it wasn't obvious from the dinner party, it had to have been obvious when Joe invited Gordon and Donna over and became a person that Sara couldn't recognize. And yet Sara still went on believing that Joe was the one. I think Sara was desperate to get married again to erase her last marriage. She felt infantilized by her father interfering in her love life because she felt that she could handle it on her own.
And yet, the marriage fell apart before it even began because Sara was so eager to make it work. Ironic, but it's a truth that's hard to swallow.
Jacob Wheeler
I'm still not quite sure why Joe came to hate Jacob. I guess Joe didn't have Jacob's personality, he just hated that Jacob was trying to take over his project, which was to manage Mutiny. And by breaking Mutiny's trust and cloning Mutiny Community, Jacob jeopardized any chances of working with Mutiny in the future.
I don't think it bothered Joe too much that Jacob was interfering with his marriage with Sara. Sara hated it, but to Joe, I think he just saw it as an administrative hurdle.
In the end, Jacob was ousted as CEO after WestNet was hit with the virus, but I doubt he's hurting too much.
John Bosworth
After leaving prison, Bosworth worked for Mutiny because Donna insisted that they needed business personnel to take away the burden from Cameron and Donna (though mostly Donna). However, Bosworth only seemed to have so much influence as most decisions were made unilaterally by Cameron anyway. Instead, Bosworth helped to smooth out business relations, whether with customers or with potential buyers of their gamse.
For a short period of time, Bosworth worked for the company his son was working for, but I guess he found that it was too impersonal, and not something he was interested in anymore, so he rejoined Mutiny when they moved to California.
I appreciated that Bosworth was the one person that Cameron would listen to when she wouldn't listen to anyone else. Not that he had any technical knowledge, but he had great managing skills. He was a combination of believing in the future with a set of fine-tuned old-school skills. I'm glad that Season 2 brought him back because I quite enjoyed his character,
Tom Rendon
So as I mentioned, I think Tom sort of represented the side of Cameron that was idealistic, and him not going to California represented Cameron realizing that she couldn't always make a perfect product.
So I was a bit confused when Tom was convinced by Joe to convince Cameron to sell to Westgroup. Tom insisted it wasn't for the money, but he went to lengths to describe the low income his family was struggling with. And then at the end, he became angry at Cameron for selling a game? I just felt his writing could've been smoother.
As a character, I didn't love Tom either. There was nothing about him that was interesting. Even Sara was interesting because she was flawed in a consistent way. But Tom was just a bunch of mild character traits thrown together wrapped up in a semi-good looking man to pose as Cameron's love interest for the current season, because I guess all main characters need love interests. Tom and Cameron bonded because they had similar interests, but I don't know what Tom brought to Mutiny that Cameron couldn't do as well.
Themes
Community
A point was made about how so many people found friends through Community. I felt that this concept was a bit too modern for the 80s. I don't know if such technology was widely used at that time, but the internet wasn't used by normal folks until like the 90s.
I thought it was a bit cringy when Mutiny had that meetup party and the girl told Cameron about how much Mutiny Community meant to her. I thought there could've been a more natural way of showing that to Cameron other than someone literally saying it to her. Speaking of that party, Donna had mentioned that someone had proposed to a person they'd met on Mutiny Community, and that also felt like too modern of a concept to really fit in with the 80s.
I was surprised by that subplot about Lev meeting someone on Community and wanting to meet up with them. First of all, the show made such a big deal about Lev being gay, and I guess it was for woke points, but it could've been handled a bit more gracefully in my opinion. Anyway, Lev met up with his friend but instead got jumped. I thought Mutiny was going to address it by introducing more features to make Community safer, but that was never addressed and never brought up again.
So even though community through this phone line system was a consistent theme, I felt that it was clumsily executed.
Selling out
Cameron had a huge thing against selling out, as do many geniuses. They have a vision and they refuse to let anybody touch it. Actually, this was how Cameron handled Mutiny as well. She hated that Bosworth and Donna had input on how she ran her company, but ignored the fact that employees were there to give opinions on how to better run her company.
I already covered most of this in Cameron's section, but it was only when she was cornered and Mutiny was going to die, that she realized she had to sell some of their assets to stay afloat and to live another day. Donna was surprised that Cameron would think this way, but I guess Cameron knew it all along, and was just too stubborn to give in until now.
Overall
So yeah, I was disappointed with Season 2. The story was weaker and less cohesive from Season 1. Too many subplots about personal relationships were added in, instead of focusing more on one company. As well, the season didn't feel as 80s as Season 1 did. I'm still going to keep watching because according to Rotten Tomatoes, the ratings keep going higher, but I feel like I have to temper my expectations now.
Spoilers.
Sorry, I didn't edit this so sorry for any sloppy writing. I just wanted to get this written before I went to bed lol.
Story
While Season 1 focused on Cardiff Electric producing a PC, Season 2 focused on Mutiny and its struggles as a startup to stay afloat. That was not the inherent problem. Cameron was obviously not a business mind and I didn't love her as a character, but it was still interesting to see how someone with more technical knowledge like her would run a business.
Rather, what disappointed me in this season was that there was a lot of side plots related to personal lives and relationships that I felt turned the series into a generic drama rather than a tech-focused, fast-paced show like Halt and Catch Fire was supposed to be.
I'll talk more about the personal relationship in the characters section, but here's a brief rundown on what bothered me about them.
From the very beginning, it was hard to believe that Joe was truly in love with Sara. Their relationship would've been more believable if Joe used his flashy moves to woo her like he sort of did with Cameron. Though I guess the fact that he didn't showed us that he wasn't drawn to Sara like he was with Cameron. In any case, it was very hard to take his relationship with Sara seriously.
As for Cameron, she randomly met Tom Rendon after he hacked and cloned Parallax. Over their mutual love for gaming and computers, they fell in love, but their opposing views on how to run a company kind of broke them apart. Their relationship was more believable than Sara and Joe's, but I can't say that Tom was a particularly compelling character that I felt would stay past this season.
Gordon and Donna's thing from season 1 was that they ran into marital problems from time to time, and it was their mutual love of computers that kept them together. There was a lot of drama thrown into their relationship during this season. I felt that it would suffice to only include the tech related ones, such as Gordon's Sonaris interfering with Mutiny, and Gordon's custom computer business failing. Gordon's brain damage and mental illness would be fine to keep in if the writers intended for them to be relevant in later seasons. While Gordon's affair was a symptom of the broken marriage and not a cause, so I will leave that out. Donna's pregnancy, however, felt unnecessary to the plot. It was to show that Donna was going through a tough time, but it felt over the top. I think the writers could've shown that Donna was going through a tough time without introducing a pregnancy and abortion.
There were just a lot of people coming and going in this season without seeming to make an impact. For example, Joe and Cameron apparently fell madly in love with Sara and Tom respectively, and yet they both seemed not to have left as big of a mark on Joe and Cameron as their technological endeavours did. Yo-yo left Mutiny because he couldn't handle not having a paycheque, and then he returned as if he had never left, as if none of those who stayed might've felt bitter about his leave.
In last season, the success of the Giant made an impact on all of the four main characters, but it's hard to say that Mutiny did the same in this season, mostly because only Cameron and Donna actively worked at Mutiny. Joe was only sort of connected to Mutiny, and Gordon's story line was mostly concerned with his personal conflicts. I'll talk about these more in the characters section.
At the end of the season, our four main characters all moved to San Francisco, California. Cameron and Donna hired Gordon as they were going to set up their network in California. As for Joe, he used Gordon's anti-virus program to start his new business which would also be situated in California.
Obviously Joe stealing Gordon's idea is going to be a huge point of tension between them. I think that Cameron and Donna are going to continue having conflicts over the way the business is run, though by the end of this season I think it's safe to say that Cameron is no longer as prideful as she once was. Donna basically made Gordon take the Mutiny job to fix their marriage, so we're likely going to see more of them trying to reconcile next season.
Considering Joe set up his own company while the other three are at Mutiny, I wonder if it will be another Joe vs. the world situation, or whether they will end up working under the same umbrella. Frankly, Season 1 was interesting because they were all working together and it was interesting to see how their characters clashed. I'd like to see more of that as opposed to the negotiation that we saw in Season 2.
Production
Style wise, I think Season 1 made a bigger impression on me than Season 2. This included both visuals (sets, costumes, etc.) and music. This season felt a bit too modern for me to believe I was still in the 80s.
The concept of a startup operating out of a house like a nerd frat felt fairly modern, and even the idea of Mutiny being big enough to hold a meetup felt a bit too novel for the 80s.
The wardrobe felt fairly modern too. Even for Cameron's normally grungy outfit, she didn't look like she belonged in the 80s like she did in Season 1.
I don't know if I'm being picky because I just didn't like this season as much and I don't have concrete examples to back myself up though.
Characters
Joseph MacMillan
At the beginning of the season, we were supposed to believe that Joe was madly in love with Sara, which was hard to believe right off the bat, when he found himself out of place at her party, and not being able to mix with his friends. This was further emphasized when Gordon and Donna came to visit and Sara was appalled by this different version of Joe, who was frankly the real Joe. I guess Joe wanted to believe he was madly in love with Sara, but I can't figure out why he so badly wanted to believe that. We know that Sara was the woman he met at the observatory when he went on his backpacking trip, but we don't now much else about how they fell in love.
It's clear that there were cracks in their relationship that both of them chose to ignore. From Joe's perspective, I think he was essentially playing house, just going along with what he thought Sara needed to be happy. He thought he was following the script perfectly well. The problem was that he hadn't had an opportunity to show who he really was until he finally got back to working. That's when he came up with his scheme to lease out the network time on Westgroup's servers.
If this was the old Joe, he would've gone all out, pushed to acquire Mutiny and then taken control. He had brief period when he realized that he hated Jacob Wheeler and what he stood for, and in that moment of weakness, he urged Cameron not to give in to the acquisition agreement.
However, soon after, Cameron gave Joe the virus, which just reverted slightly sentimental Joe back to cutthroat Joe. And his marriage with Sara was over before it even began.
I really felt that this season wasted Joe's character. In Season 1, he was unapologetically portrayed as a psychopath. He was a necessary evil that got the job done. Perhaps after his soul-searching trip, he'd decided he didn't want to be a cutthroat businessman like his father anymore, and tried to settle down and be a good, normal guy, except that didn't make sense, because his mother, whom he loved so much, always encouraged him to reach for the stars. So why did Joe want to be this normal guy so much?
After getting married and divorcing Sara, and becoming disillusioned with Jacob Wheeler and Westgroup, Joe returns to being the same person as he was last season. He was a wrench thrown in Mutiny's operations, but as a character he didn't do anything that I felt made him grow.
Cameron Howe
From the end of last season, I knew that Cameron would have struggles in running Mutiny. She was largely a computers expert and from her interactions with Joe at Cardiff, we could see that she wasn't the most savvy when it came to business operations. She would have great ideas but was not willing to compromise to keep a business afloat. That was what drove her away from Cardiff (because the Giant couldn't keep her OS) and start Mutiny.
Though Cameron and Donna were both technical minds, Donna was far more practical about running a company. At the very least, she was older and had more work experience and understood that there were some administrative tasks that could not be ignored, such as the fact that borrowing a neighbour's bandwidth is not reliable for a business. Donna was willing to compromise in order for Mutiny to stay afloat (such as dealing with Joe MacMillan), and it wasn't until after Mutiny had no options did Cameron understand that compromise was necessary.
I think another rift between Cameron and Donna was the fact that Mutiny Community grew to be more successful than the video game component. Cameron's pride as the leader of Mutiny prevented her from understanding that Community had a much bigger impact and much wider reach than the video games did.
For the most part, I think Tom represented the part of Cameron that was idealistic and wanted to create the best video game ever. But I was confused because Tom kind of flip-flopped between supporting and being against Cameron selling out to Mutiny. At first, he wanted her to consider it after Joe spoke to him. Tom said he didn't care about money...but the fact that he was asking Cameron to consider it spoke of the opposite. And then when Cameron sold their game for money, he got angry at her. I guess I should talk about that more in Tom's section. In any case, Cameron asked Tom to come with her to California, even if they weren't going to work together, but we see that he did not join her. And I think that is a representation of Cameron letting go of the too-idealistic computer genius part of herself.
So all in all, I think Cameron's transformation was from a purely tech mind to one who understood that as a business owner, she had to compromise a product or to sell out to live another day. I think she realized that being too personally wrapped up in products was taxing on her soul. After she sold the game, she said she felt lighter, probably because now she had freedom to start something new. I think it's representative of the idea that you can't start a project with the intent to make it perfect. Instead, you work on many projects over time to build up experience that will enable you to make better and better things.
Gordon Clark
Gordon's struggles in this season were mostly personal as opposed to business related. He learned that he had brain damage, and later mental health issues, and many of the things that happened to him this season were related to that. But now that I'm thinking more about his story line, it's quite messy and doesn't really add up.
Donna was becoming increasingly busier and Gordon felt he had no way to tell her about his health problems. It wasn't until he'd gone to California and come back that he told her. Gordon's trip to California (where he had an affair) was kind of a symptom of his alienation from his wife.
Gordon's failed custom computer business was also a point of stress. He started becoming paranoid that competitors were actually his friends going behind his back and it was the cause of him hurting himself in that parking lot.
By the end of the season, Gordon and Donna felt like their marriage wasn't going to work. But from my perspective as a viewer, I didn't really get the sense that their marriage was in shambles. Perhaps it was because their marriage had been through tough times before. Donna used to be the one bending over backwards for Gordon but this time, it was Donna who was unable to do that for Gordon. That may be why the two felt that their marriage wasn't going to work out.
Donna's proposition was that Gordon would work with Mutiny to salvage their marriage. This sounds weird, but I think it technically works because the way they'd salvage their marriage was always through their mutual love for computers. So by working together, I think Donna figured that they'd find something to bond over again.
As a person, I don't think that Gordon had changed much, but his "quirks" are becoming more apparent. Gordon always had a bit of an ego regarding his work (which is understandable), but now that ego is branching into paranoia as well. He was worried that Stan stole his idea about creating custom computers, and now that Joe had actually stolen his idea, that wouldn't help his paranoia.
Now that I've written it, I do think that Gordon's story was rather weak, mostly because it was due to his personal problems and not his relation to the company in this season's spotlight.
Donna Clark
As I mentioned, Donna was kind of a counterpart against Cameron at Mutiny. She would always urge Cameron to look at things more practically, and Cameron never showed an ounce of gratitude. When Donna tried to pressure Joe into lowering the price for network time and it didn't work, Cameron yelled at her for not doing anything, and Bosworth had to jump in and tell Cameron that she was completely out of line.
Though Cameron did come to see that Donna had good points and that she was blind to them, I can't say that I saw a good working relationship between them even by the end of the season. Maybe it was because it was too late in the season that Cameron started to agree with more practical business practices.
In terms of her relationship with Gordon, there was hardly one for most of the season, because Donna was always busy with Mutiny. So I thought it was a bit of a surprise that she was the one to say that she thought their marriage wasn't working out. If she'd noticed this earlier, I felt like she would've been more proactive to do something to rectify that. In the past, she'd always been the one to bend over backward for Gordon, and I understand why Gordon would feel abandoned. Perhaps it was knowledge of the affair that pushed her over the edge.
The first time I heard Donna's proposition, it sounded kind of weird to me. Why would Gordon accepting a job with Mutiny fix their marriage? But I tried to contextualize it in terms of how Gordon and Donna had always gotten along. They got along best when they were working on a computer together, and I guess that is how Donna figured they'd fix their marriage.
I was glad to see more of Donna doing her own thing in this season, but I guess like Gordon's story, her story was a bit all over the place and not as cohesive because so much of it centered around her marriage with Gordon.
Sara Wheeler
I think Sara always sensed that she and Joe weren't compatible. If it wasn't obvious from the dinner party, it had to have been obvious when Joe invited Gordon and Donna over and became a person that Sara couldn't recognize. And yet Sara still went on believing that Joe was the one. I think Sara was desperate to get married again to erase her last marriage. She felt infantilized by her father interfering in her love life because she felt that she could handle it on her own.
And yet, the marriage fell apart before it even began because Sara was so eager to make it work. Ironic, but it's a truth that's hard to swallow.
Jacob Wheeler
I'm still not quite sure why Joe came to hate Jacob. I guess Joe didn't have Jacob's personality, he just hated that Jacob was trying to take over his project, which was to manage Mutiny. And by breaking Mutiny's trust and cloning Mutiny Community, Jacob jeopardized any chances of working with Mutiny in the future.
I don't think it bothered Joe too much that Jacob was interfering with his marriage with Sara. Sara hated it, but to Joe, I think he just saw it as an administrative hurdle.
In the end, Jacob was ousted as CEO after WestNet was hit with the virus, but I doubt he's hurting too much.
John Bosworth
After leaving prison, Bosworth worked for Mutiny because Donna insisted that they needed business personnel to take away the burden from Cameron and Donna (though mostly Donna). However, Bosworth only seemed to have so much influence as most decisions were made unilaterally by Cameron anyway. Instead, Bosworth helped to smooth out business relations, whether with customers or with potential buyers of their gamse.
For a short period of time, Bosworth worked for the company his son was working for, but I guess he found that it was too impersonal, and not something he was interested in anymore, so he rejoined Mutiny when they moved to California.
I appreciated that Bosworth was the one person that Cameron would listen to when she wouldn't listen to anyone else. Not that he had any technical knowledge, but he had great managing skills. He was a combination of believing in the future with a set of fine-tuned old-school skills. I'm glad that Season 2 brought him back because I quite enjoyed his character,
Tom Rendon
So as I mentioned, I think Tom sort of represented the side of Cameron that was idealistic, and him not going to California represented Cameron realizing that she couldn't always make a perfect product.
So I was a bit confused when Tom was convinced by Joe to convince Cameron to sell to Westgroup. Tom insisted it wasn't for the money, but he went to lengths to describe the low income his family was struggling with. And then at the end, he became angry at Cameron for selling a game? I just felt his writing could've been smoother.
As a character, I didn't love Tom either. There was nothing about him that was interesting. Even Sara was interesting because she was flawed in a consistent way. But Tom was just a bunch of mild character traits thrown together wrapped up in a semi-good looking man to pose as Cameron's love interest for the current season, because I guess all main characters need love interests. Tom and Cameron bonded because they had similar interests, but I don't know what Tom brought to Mutiny that Cameron couldn't do as well.
Themes
Community
A point was made about how so many people found friends through Community. I felt that this concept was a bit too modern for the 80s. I don't know if such technology was widely used at that time, but the internet wasn't used by normal folks until like the 90s.
I thought it was a bit cringy when Mutiny had that meetup party and the girl told Cameron about how much Mutiny Community meant to her. I thought there could've been a more natural way of showing that to Cameron other than someone literally saying it to her. Speaking of that party, Donna had mentioned that someone had proposed to a person they'd met on Mutiny Community, and that also felt like too modern of a concept to really fit in with the 80s.
I was surprised by that subplot about Lev meeting someone on Community and wanting to meet up with them. First of all, the show made such a big deal about Lev being gay, and I guess it was for woke points, but it could've been handled a bit more gracefully in my opinion. Anyway, Lev met up with his friend but instead got jumped. I thought Mutiny was going to address it by introducing more features to make Community safer, but that was never addressed and never brought up again.
So even though community through this phone line system was a consistent theme, I felt that it was clumsily executed.
Selling out
Cameron had a huge thing against selling out, as do many geniuses. They have a vision and they refuse to let anybody touch it. Actually, this was how Cameron handled Mutiny as well. She hated that Bosworth and Donna had input on how she ran her company, but ignored the fact that employees were there to give opinions on how to better run her company.
I already covered most of this in Cameron's section, but it was only when she was cornered and Mutiny was going to die, that she realized she had to sell some of their assets to stay afloat and to live another day. Donna was surprised that Cameron would think this way, but I guess Cameron knew it all along, and was just too stubborn to give in until now.
Overall
So yeah, I was disappointed with Season 2. The story was weaker and less cohesive from Season 1. Too many subplots about personal relationships were added in, instead of focusing more on one company. As well, the season didn't feel as 80s as Season 1 did. I'm still going to keep watching because according to Rotten Tomatoes, the ratings keep going higher, but I feel like I have to temper my expectations now.