Halt and Catch Fire: The Drawbridge is Lowered

Note: For the next three posts in this series I'm doing things a little differently. Rather than focusing on 1-3 episodes, I'm writing about different aspects of two episodes. Today I'll be talking about Mutiny, Donna and Cameron, Gordon and Donna, and Bos in "Rules of Honorable Play". Next time I'll continue with all of the Mutiny gang in "Yerba Buena". Finally, in the third part I'll focus on Joe and Ryan's storyline in both episodes. I'll also throw a little bit in about Joe and Gordon, because why not.

"Rules of Honorable Play"
Directed by Jake Paltrow
Written by Alison Tatlock

Why did Donna (Kerry Bishé) and Cameron (Mackenzie Davis) move Mutiny to California? Like, I know why they did, I watched the season two finale. I'm asking again to remind us why they did. After all, it wasn't because they had to. Despite the WestNet screwjob almost killing the company, they rebounded and were growing pretty steadily. A solid argument could have been made that they play the game with network providers, continue to grow, and stayed a solid, if relatively small, network for years. Maybe they turn into an ISP when the Internet becomes a thing, squeezing out a few more years of existence before AOL or the cable giants selling broadband killed their market. Maybe they pivot to browsers or search engines and ultimately plug along as some sort of internet-based company well into the 21st century. Maybe they fold up business sometime in 1988 and all go their separate ways. There's a lot of ways it could have gone if the company stayed in Texas, they weren't in a move or die situation.

No, the reasons they moved were not existential. More importantly, they weren't the same for both of them. For Cameron, it was about control. She was tired of her company constantly having to deal with being at the whims of their network providers. Mutiny was her creation, her community, and she wasn't gonna let Joe MacMillan or Jacob Wheeler or Telenet (not Telnet) or anyone else tell her what to do. She would have preferred to stay in the crowded house full of coders, growing slowly and never losing that community feel that she had instilled in the place. But the mainframe wasn't in Dallas, it was in Daly City, and the only solution she could find was to go to it. So, she convinced Donna to go along with the plan. That Donna brought Gordon and his expertise (and money) along to pull off the plan helped.

Donna, meanwhile, didn't care so much about control. She demanded to be an equal with Cameron and wanted the company to grow and succeed. But she was much more willing to accept a lack of control on some things for the good of the company's future. She had been opposed to Cameron's big plan until her marriage with Gordon finally reached a breaking point. To her, California was not just a chance for Mutiny to control their destiny for a while. It was a fresh start for her marriage and her family.

The decision seemed to work out for Mutiny. They crossed the 100,000-user mark right about the same time they finally got on to their own network. With Mutiny Exchange, Donna and Cameron had figured out the next big thing. They even had broken through with a VC, working with Diane Gould (Annabeth Gish) to purchase SwapMeet, a competitor. Mutiny was doing well.

But what about the reasons they moved? As much as their own mainframe increased control for Mutiny, it meant Cameron had to give up a piece of the company to Gordon thanks to the capital he injected to pull off the move. And to get funded and build Exchange, Cameron had to give up even more of the company to Diane, as well as Doug (Joe Massingill) and Craig (Joe Dinicol), the founders of SwapMeet. What had started as her thing, her community, had become her and Donna's thing. And she was fine with that. But ever since then more and more pieces were cut away to give to other people. She still had plenty of control of Mutiny. After all, she was the single largest shareholder. She only needed one other shareholder on her side to win any votes. And, c'mon, Bos (Toby Huss) was an automatic vote with her. She wasn't gonna lose. But that didn't mean it felt like that to her.

As for Donna and Gordon's marriage, how was it going? Well, it was still a thing, so that wasn't nothing. But it didn't feel like they were getting any closer, despite being physically closer during the workday. She realized Gordon was starting to feel a bit superfluous at Mutiny after the completion of the mainframe, so she asked him to join her, Cameron, and Bos at the weekly progress meeting. He immediately took to playing a role, effectively pushing back at Cameron's stubborn need to write all of the code, and Donna's frequent defenses of Cameron's stubbornness. He was kind of an ass at times and wasn't always right. But he wasn't always wrong either.

After all, Cameron did have trouble delegating. Seeing her unwilling to find a replacement for Ryan, to farm out the code work to the team, or to utilize the brand-new additional team of developers from SwapMeet, I felt for her. There have been times throughout my career I've made the exact same excuse she did, that trying to teach someone else about the code I wrote was just adding more work. And it's not without some truth. When a team is understaffed and there are so many fires to put out, taking the time to bring someone else up to speed can be a tough thing to do, even if it would make things better in the long run. But it almost always isn't the best case.

Especially when the programmer is also the CEO, like Cameron was. Like it or not, she had a lot more duties to attend to, and most of them involved work that wasn't in the code. It didn't help that Doug had little respect for her code. He was a C++ developer, and perfectly comfortable with Object Oriented Programming. Cameron's code was functional code and sounded brilliant, albeit also virtually unreadable unless you were Cameron. He wasn't wrong about this. But he was an asshole.

Craig, for his part, was far more diplomatic. Rather than impugning Cameron's coding ability, and thus putting her on the defensive, he went to her alone and apologized for his friend. He tried to connect Cameron's defensiveness about her work with their own. And he seemed genuinely curious as to why she cared so much about this code. Cameron finally let him know it was the last piece of Mutiny that she had written when Mutiny was just her. It was her creation, and hers alone. It appeared she had made a genuine connection with Craig over this. The connection felt even clearer after she received a call from her stepdad. He called to tell her he and her mom were selling their house and moving to a condo in Florida. This meant they were gonna sell and/or get rid of all of Cameron's dad's things. Including his motorcycle, one of the few direct things Cameron ties to her memories of her dad from before he died in Vietnam. It was a rare moment of openness from Cameron, even rarer because she shared it with someone other than Donna, Bos, or Tom. Craig had made a connection, would she finally let him and Doug in and work with them?

The next morning, Cameron told Donna she wanted to fire Doug and Craig. Donna was shocked and tried to talk her out of it. But Cameron was insistent. Later, at lunch with Diane, Donna brought this up. Diane was also shocked and wasn't super keen on the idea. But she agreed to the move, showing her willingness to eat the cost of getting rid of both of them so soon after their acquisition. It would be a hit to the company, but if it kept Cameron happy, it might be worth it.

Donna went back to Mutiny, where Cameron was waiting to hear what Diane said. Donna lied to her, saying that Diane said that Cameron would just have to work it out with Doug and Craig. Cameron wasn't happy about this, but she trusted that Donna had made the best case she could and trusted that her friend and partner hadn't lied to her. She'd do her best to make peace with Doug and Craig, and to work with Donna to figure out how to handle cash transactions. When she got back on Monday after a trip back to Texas with Bos over the long 4th of July weekend.

What had Bos been up to? Well, it turns out that he was growing tired of the same old, same old. He was getting fed up with doing the usual shitkicker routines, both at work and at parties. He wished to be a part of his son and his grandson's life, but that wasn't the whole of it. He wanted something more than all of that. His only real confidant in all of this was Diane. Even if he sort of missed the signs that she was interested in getting to know him better. He was tired, but he was gonna go back to Texas for some real barbecue, and to meet lil' Samuel John.

Next time: Bos screws up by being too helpful, Cameron meets someone for dinner, and Gordon and Donna fail to go camping.

Sorry for the abrupt cut in half for this piece, but it was the only way this was getting out this week, already a week late. Sorry, it couldn't be helped!

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