The process of building an innovative new personal computer isn’t the easiest thing to dramatize, so the writers behind the series “Halt and Catch Fire” have staging their own crises along the way.
Similarly, Joe MacMillan, the big dreaming, cheerleading promo man at the center of the series, who has been urging on the new course for the Texas company, concocted his own drama in Sunday’s episode to make the stakes at Cardiff Electric look more life and death.
To keep a visiting writer from the Wall Street Quarterly from leaving without writing about their project, he sabotaged Cameron’s code writing and basked in the panic that made it look like all her work had been fried in a power surge.
The furious rebuilding of what seemed lost, much of it done by Gordon’s brilliant wife Donna, who works for a competitor, provided drama for both the magazine writer and for the episode.
Joe didn’t seem fazed when Donna discovered that it was all a setup. If it resulted in big press (and what could be bigger than the Wall Street Quarterly?), it was all worth it.
But when Donna told Gordon they had been had as well, he wasn’t outraged. Maybe he was used to such behavior by then. No, Gordon’s main question was whether it worked – did magazine writer stick around to do the story?
The episode gave more time to the undervalued actress Kerry Bishe who plays Donna. The balance of careers and family likely derived from real moments from the lives of similarly overworked writers that likely resonated with stretched parents in the modern era, 30 years later.
There were also some worthy woman-to-woman moments between Donna and Cameron that spoke to mutual distrust as females found new roles in the workplace.
Finally some shadings came for Cameron’s generally one-note punk rebel character. She can play well with kids, for one thing, at least until one of them blurts what their parents have been saying about her.
Joe’s relationship with his boss Bosworth was another thread in the episode. The rancher and money man behind the company wants to know who’s really in charge; Joe is failing to show Bosworth how spending so much money in trying to make their product is exciting.
In the end, without much explanation, Bosworth uses his local connections to make a point – the local cops can stop and beat up Joe at any time simply to show who’s really on top.
Technologically, progress at the company is being made – the slimmed down engineering staff has surpassed a desired speed at which a computer responds. Anything less than 400 milliseconds, and the user will stay engaged and transfixed; the Cardiff gang just broke 396.
Time for celebrations and pep talks, which Joe is all about.
And to end it with a flourish, he puts a match to one of the old binders of code, as if to show their breakthrough to the future.
Through the flames, he looks a little like the devil as he stares at Bosworth.
But more important than that, he’s finally putting actually fire into a show called “Halt and Catch Fire.”