Halt and Catch Fire: Is Anybody Out There?

When I wrote my original schedule for this project, Season 3 was supposed to be done by now. Of course, that didn't happen. There's a lot of reasons why it didn't happen. I've talked about many of them in my frequent delay posts I've made. They for sure played a role in the delays.

But they delayed this piece so well because of the single biggest reason. You see, I'm stuck and not sure how to kick off season three. Why? Isn't season three of Halt and Catch Fire arguably my second favorite season of TV ever*. It, and season four, are exactly why I wanted to write about this show. I should be excited to share my words with you all.

But you see, all of the things I really want to talk about, to give them my words finally after all these years, happen in last seven episodes of the season. It's why those episodes have an average of one piece per episode scheduled. However, to get to those episodes, in and of themselves a challenge I've yet to figure out how to tackle, I have to get through this piece, about the first three episodes. And I am stuck.

That isn't to say these are bad episodes. They are quite good, with some beautiful shots and a lot of excellent work being done to set up the greatness later in the season. They also aren't boring or mere place setting. A lot happens in the episodes. Two new characters, Ryan Ray (Manish Dayal) and Diane Gould (Annabeth Gish) are introduced. They are important to where the show is going and are a big part of what makes these seasons so great. I'm well aware of the quality of these episodes. I just can't find the words that I'm satisfied with and stick with in.

I tried. I wrote 1600 words in a similar vein to the voice I used for my pieces about the first two seasons. You know, open with a question, do a subtle thing with recursion, and then jump right in. There was a whole thing playing off the title of the first episode of season three, "Valley of the Heart's Delight" and talking about the progression of Silicon Valley from bountiful farmland through being a site for military industrial projects and then of course Hewlett Packard->Intel->Apple history with the garages and all of that bullshit. It was going okay, I guess. But I didn't really feel it. So, I scrapped it.

The second attempt I tried this past weekend. I wrote about 2500 words in an afternoon, maybe 60% of what I planned to write for the whole piece! There was a whole earthquake interruption, a cutesy thing involving red images with white text saying, "WHERE IS JOE?", I was gonna make it give Gordon (Scoot McNairy) a bit of a short shrift until the end because that plays out like that in the episodes. I had some fun with it. But in the end, it didn't feel right.

I thought about delaying again, going into September without starting the season. But I'm not gonna do that. This is the piece that will be for these episodes. I'm sorry, it's not what I was writing before. But it's what I feel like writing right now.

The simple fact is it's unreasonable to expect myself to write regularly as if this were a thing I was doing as a job. Because it's not a job. For one thing, if this were a job, I hope I wouldn't be writing 4000, 5000, even 8000-word pieces every week. Unless that was my thing, I guess? I'm not sure I want it to be my thing. This is a thing I do because I can't not write things. Would I turn down writing this project if money was on the table? No, if it was worth my time to write it, I would certainly do that. But there is no money on the table. I do this because I want to do it, and I don't want to write something, I shouldn't expect myself to write it. The only person in charge of writing about these episodes is me. And she can stuff it.

Okay, that's unfair to myself. Because I am writing about these episodes. Just not in the way that I would have tried to. Before I get into it, I have just one more thing to say. Writing about three episodes (or God help me, four) episodes of this show at once is a nightmare. It's a fairly contained cast, with storylines focusing on somewhere around a half dozen characters. But the interactions and ground covered, the intricate connections and ebbs and flows of relationships and plot happenings and all of that is a lot to keep track of. Sure, I wrote about 2-4 episodes every week when I wrote about Andor. And that show was a sprawling show that spanned a galaxy. However, the nature of the show meant that I was more concerned with worrying about themes, and the overarching story.

There is just too much to talk about, too many little things that I just want to give their due, and I can't because to do that means writing 10,000 words. It's bad enough for one episode or two episodes. But three just is too much. Thankfully, this is the last three-episode piece I have in the series.

Again, if I were writing this for a website that wasn't my own, I could find something. I would have to find something. I have the luxury of not having to find that through line and write a fully coherent piece that sticks to the show. Instead, I can ramble on and write a thousand words about how I can't write about these episodes.

So, about the episodes. Mutiny moved to California due to Cameron's (Mackenzie Davis) wild-ass idea to build their company around a creaky old mainframe in a rusty old building somewhere in or near Silicon Valley**. They were able to do this because Gordon sunk the rest of his Giant money into the scheme while joining the company to rebuild the mainframe with Donna (Kerry Bishé). It was the deal they made to try to save their marriage. Mutiny was doing well. The Clark marriage was a much more complicated question.

Things aren't helped by the fact that Cameron, Donna and Gordon work together, and Cameron, Donna, and Gordon live together. What's weirder, even though Donna and Cameron are the bosses at the office, Cameron falls into something more akin to "Cool Aunt"/"Cool Big Sister" to Haley (Alana Cavanaugh) and Joanie (Morgan Hinkleman) at home. It's a weird dynamic that doesn't allow any of them to find any distance from each other. It was a perfect recipe for friction.

Mutiny was in a good place. That doesn't mean it was safe for years to come. Mutiny isn't the only network, and some big companies, like Sears and IBM and others, have their sights on being in the game. They knew they had to find something new.

Ryan, a programmer they hired after they moved to California, had great ideas he wanted to share. For one, he had an idea how to fix the fact that Mutiny's private chats weren't private. He tried to share his big idea with Donna and Cameron. All he did was annoy and confuse Donna and piss off Cameron. Ryan was adamant he be given the work to make the chats actually private. Cameron, who famously got her boss fired because she didn't want to do the work she was assigned to do, told him tough shit, and asked him to do the work assigned to him. And then she had the audacity to ask Bos (Toby Huss) to give him a raise. Ryan thanked Bos for that by insulting him. He avoided getting his ass kicked by an old man because of Gordon.

Gordon was frustrated with his life. His marriage didn't really feel any more solid than it had in Texas, and the programmers he worked with didn't really respect his role in the company. The living situation sucked, he still had CTE, and nobody was using ham radios anymore. Bos getting sick of dealing with the programmers was his opportunity to fix one of those things.

Haley and Joanie hated California. They hated the earthquakes, and they hated that the only lives they knew had been uprooted and placed half a continent away from their grandpa and grandma Emerson, and their NES. And Family Circus still sucked. Haley dealt with by being a rock to her parents and not causing trouble. Joanie dealt with it by getting in a fight with that jerk Jennifer.

Jennifer's mom was Diane Gould. She was charming, but straight to the point. And seemed to be very busy. She was played by Annabeth Gish, so of course she will show up again. But not yet.

Cameron met a guy to exchange some equipment for his dead son's joystick. She let slip information she only knew because she had looked at the private chat logs Ryan had printed off. She did not get her joystick and lied about why not to Donna. Nevertheless, the clear demand they saw for exchanges to be a real part of Mutiny from the chat logs gave them their next big idea. They'd have to patch the whole that helped them, of course. But they had their idea. Now they just needed money.

Up and down, up and down, up and down Sandhill Road they shuffled, visiting VC firm after VC firm, all of whom turned them down. The last of the major firms liked what they heard. They (Doug Savant and Gary Weeks) asked them to meet them for dinner to discuss terms! The terms were much less than they had planned to spend to do the expansion they needed to do. And also, they were contingent upon Donn and Cameron sleeping with the guy and his toady. They did not accept the offer.

Being a woman in the tech world sucks ass. I've never been propositioned at a dinner with a VC. And since I transitioned, I've been lucky to work with teams full of men who generally have treated me with respect. But at times I've certainly been spoken over in meetings, or the points I've raised have been ignored where before they wouldn't have been. And in the current brutal ass job market, I'm pretty certain if I were using my deadname, I'd have a better chance getting interviews than I do as Amy. And were I to try to do the VC game at some point, even today, four decades later, I am sure being a woman (and a trans one at that) wouldn't do me any favors, particularly in the shithead climate Silicon Valley is stewing in right now. Okay, I'm off my soapbox, I'll continue.

What a relief it was to Donna and Cameron, then, when they went into the office of Amador Gould Gilson for their next meeting, and realized the Gould was Diane. Certainly, that would give them a leg up, right? Diane and her partner Elias (David Mackey) ended the meeting before Donna and Cameron had even gotten started.

Donna assumed it was because of some sort of personal grudge by Diane, perhaps over Jennifer and Joanie fighting. Cameron spent a lot of time working, as Joanie watched, trying to figure out what exactly was wrong with their pitch that caused Diane to pass almost immediately. She bribed Joanie to invite Jennifer (and thus, Diane) to her birthday party. Joanie had a shitty time while Jennifer was the life of the party, but Donna and Cameron got some answers from Diane, so it was a wash, right? Diane gave them an answer: it wasn't a grudge, and it wasn't something Mutiny did wrong, and it wasn't because Elias was a chud. It was because someone else already had their marketplace idea and a headstart. Donna and Cameron weren't deterred, as they went to Diane and suggested Mutiny, with AGG's help, buy out SwapMeet.

Meanwhile, Gordon tried to be a mentor to Ryan. He saw himself in the frustrated and ambitious programmer. He knew what it was like to feel as if he were the smartest in the room, and he also knew how acting like that often doesn't convince anyone of anything besides that you're an asshole. He had a great idea how to implement Ryan's fix using existing, but well thought out, coding.

But Ryan was already out the door. You see, he had caught Joe MacMillan's big announcement that MacMillan Utility was releasing a consumer version of its antivirus software (which was built from Gordon's rekajiggered Sonaris code that he had given Joe as a gift). And he wasn't gonna charge anything for it. In announcing this, Joe had done his whole Joe thing. Ryan was hooked, and he knew whatever future he had was working with Joe.

He tracked Joe down while he was surfing and hacked into Joe's schedule to set up meetings at 9:00 am every day of the week. Ryan could feel something big was coming, and he figured Joe felt it as well. He couldn't articulate it, but he wanted to be a part of it. And since it wasn't about adding more hats to the Mutiny avatars, he knew it wasn't happening with Donna and Cameron. Ryan thought he had blown his shot, but Joe called him, and told him to tell Gordon to (in less vulgar words) go fuck himself, he was gonna work for Joe MacMillan. Did I mention that Gordon was currently suing Joe over his taking Tabula Rasa and building a company from it. Despite Joe having offered him 50% of the business after he sold it to that VC back in Texas? And Joe offered Gordon a majority stake when he barged in to a deposition hearing? Because that all happened. Gordon and Joe were no longer friends, and this time it looked permanent.

Donna felt sorry for Gordon, and decided to involve him in the big senior leadership meeting they had every week. The first time he showed up, it went so well Donna and Gordon got in a fight because Donna was trying to protect Cameron's feelings about Tom, and Gordon didn't realize what the hell was going on, and blurted out the whole thing about him having an affair with his brother's ex-girlfriend, something that was new information to Cameron and (probably) Bos.

Meanwhile, Bos and Diane met to give the formal offer sheet to Doug (Joe Massingill) and Craig (Joe Dinicol) at SwapMeet. She did this because she wanted to get to know Bos, and she found out that Cameron and Donna weren't delivering the letter over a cocktail infused lunch with Donna. Turns out SwapMeet wasn't in as good of shape as they had tried to say they were, and they were way the hell out of their league with Bos and Diane. Bos led the way, tearing up the offer sheet, and Diane played along, ultimately getting SwapMeet to agree to a price a quarter million dollars lower than what had been offered. Diane enjoyed herself, even if it quite possibly could have backfired. Bos may have left his life behind in Texas, but he still had game.

Mutiny had a way forward, and they had more resources and developers to build it. So naturally, Cameron, who already had too much to do, decided she would write the code to patch the hole in private chat. Gordon didn't care for Cameron's inability to delegate, and yet another meeting of the senior leaders of Mutiny descended into squabbling. Meanwhile, at home, Cameron kept logging on to Mutiny to check if TRENDON was online. Also, Gordon found somebody to talk to on his radio, but was the radio actually plugged in? Donna took another drink, and Bos thought about his new grandson Samuel John***, who he had yet to meet.

As for Ryan, he tried to help out with Citadel, but Joe didn't want him working on the Antivirus code. Ryan was confused and wondered why Joe hired him. Joe brought him to one of his big Bruce Wayne style debauched parties at his San Francisco penthouse. There Ryan was surrounded by queer people and cocaine and art scene assholes and Ken (Matthew Lillard), who was part of Joe's board at MacMillan Utility. He was all smiles and support for Joe, while making sure Joe did exactly what he wanted him to do. Which meant eventually abandoning this idea of a free version of Citadel. Joe brought Ryan to the meeting where this was decided, and Ryan went along. Because of course he did. He was in his first week or two of work, why the hell would he have spoken up in that meeting?

Ryan was sure he was about to get fired by Joe. After all, he hadn't done anything yet. And sure enough, Joe showed up and told him to pack his things he was leaving...to work with Joe from Joe's penthouse. They were gonna figure out a new revenue stream to replace the money MacMillan Utility would lose by Citadel staying free. Joe exited the building as "Burning Down the House" played. Was it an incredibly on-the-nose music cue? Yes, but who cares. Ain't no way we get out of this show without "Burning Down the House" and Joe MacMillan occupying the same space. Sometimes you just need to be as subtle as a sledgehammer.

Next Week: Bos and Cameron take a trip back to Texas, and Gordon and Donna don't go camping.

Footnotes

* The only reason it is number 2 is because season four is #1.
** Judging from where the mainframe they were discussing in Season two was located, it's Daly City. Not sure this ever comes up again on the show.
*** Samuel John would have turned 40 a couple months ago if he were a real baby in 1986. This footnote brought to you by the unstoppable march of time.