The Satisfying Smallness of ‘Halt and Catch Fire’

Game of Thrones goes to another world. The Handmaid’s Tale goes to another reality. Twin Peaks goes beyond the concept of reality altogether. But as star Mackenzie Davis recently told Vulture, Halt and Catch Fire — returning for its fourth and final season on AMC this Saturday — just keeps going to the same place.

“The show’s been going on four years, and the core cast members haven’t changed at all, and it hasn’t expanded,” she says. “We just shift partnerships all the time.”

Yet within the complicated five-way relationship between the leading players in Halt‘s computer-industry narrative — Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis), Donna Emerson (Kerry Bishé), Gordon Clark (Scott McNairy), John Bosworth (Toby Huss), and Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) — there’s a seemingly inexhaustible amount of compelling dramatic energy. In an era where many of the best TV dramas go big, Halt and Catch Fire stays small, and is all the better for it.

Indeed, Halt‘s tight focus is probably what has kept it on all this time to begin with. Its pilot episode, set at the dawn of the personal-computer age in the ’80s, was by co-creator Chris Rogers’s own admission a by-the-numbers antihero drama centered on Joe MacMillan, then a hard-charging Master of the Universe type with a dark past and a self-destructive streak. The show’s stars seem to agree: “For me, Season One wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to watch,” says Toby Huss; “It’s no secret that the first season was just us all getting our sea legs,” Davis admits.

But before that rocky first season was over, it became clear that in its quintet of lead characters, the show had all the ingredients it needed to all but start over from scratch. Pace’s MacMillan had a softness in his face and voice, as well as a vulnerability in his backstory as a bisexual man in the era of Reagan and AIDS, one that belied his Don Draper/Walter White machismo. So too did his obvious, sincere, and intense affection for Davis’s Howe, a punk-influenced programming wunderkind whose visionary designs for an Apple-style computer user interface and a proto-social network continuously ran into financial obstacles. Howe, in turn, was buoyed by her unlikely friendships with two very different people: Huss’s John “Boz” Bosworth, a wiry old-school Texan who surprisingly responded to MacMillan’s hostile takeover of his electronics company by changing with the times, and Bishé’s Donna (then surnamed Clark), a brilliant programmer in her own right who’d been sidetracked too long by a thankless job and a struggling marriage. That marriage was to McNairy’s Gordon Clark, a twitchy but empathetic engineer who was the necessary component for big thinkers like Joe and Cameron to achieve their dreams, but who was slowly being undone by workplace-incurred illness and the fear of his own shortcomings.

With these complex and endearing character dynamics locked into place, Halt began its years-long process of rearranging them into exciting new configurations with each new season. Season Two saw Cameron and Donna abandon the boys’ club to form Mutiny, a pioneering online service whose chat rooms prefigured the interactive web to come. Season Three saw the entire cast pick up stakes from Texas’s “Silicon Prairie” for Silicon Valley itself, where Mutiny evolved into an attempt at an eBay-style e-commerce site that crashed and burned, costing Cameron both her job and her friendship with Donna. Joe, meanwhile, recreated himself as a Steve Jobs-esque millionaire tech guru, until he deliberately sunk his company’s chances in an IP-theft lawsuit leveled by his former partner Gordon in order to do the right thing and salvage their friendship. An unexpected time jump into the ’90s at the season’s end saw Joe, Gordon, and Cameron reunited to form an early internet service provider; Donna, her relationships with Gordon and Cameron a shambles by now, departed to launch a rival.

Judging from its two-part premiere, Season Four will continue the show’s legacy of bold leaps and imaginative combinations of the key players. And well it should. More than any other drama I’ve ever watched — and I’ve watched a lot — Halt‘s story is one in which few of the difficult choices its characters face have an obvious right or wrong answer.

When Cameron’s reach-for-the-sky concepts clash with Donna’s concern for keeping their employees afloat, or when Boz’s desire to be a part of new and exciting ventures into his old age leave him feeling like a fifth wheel or a lovable grandpa the kids merely tolerate, or when Gordon and Cameron keep returning to the personally and professionally damaging relationships they have with Joe because he’s also capable of bringing out the best in them, and vice versa…who’s to say what’s good and what’s bad in these moments?

It all comes down to the alternately competing and converging needs and desires of the characters — and because they’re so consistently depicted, season after season, we know these needs and desires like we know our own, and empathize with every decision, good or bad. Every episode feels like Bronn facing down Daenerys’s dragon with that gigantic crossbow: Against all odds, you want everyone to succeed, you want every decision to be the right one, though you know it can’t be. Of course, no one’s going to be burned alive or shot down from the sky in this show, but that does nothing to lessen the sense of enormous personal stakes. Halt and Catch Fire‘s smaller playing field makes each move matter. It’s why I’m so excited to press play on the new season, and why I’ll be so sad nine weeks from now, when it’s Game Over.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, the Observer, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Watch new episodes of Halt and Catch Fire on AMC starting on August 19