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Halt and Catch Fire

Halt and Catch Fire is upgrading. Again. If Season Two and Season Three premieres of Halt and Catch Fire were, famously, successful reboots of what had come before, then “So It Goes” and “Signal to Noise,” the back-to-back episodes comprising the debut of the show’s fourth and final season, are more like a software update. After all, the most recent hard reset of the show’s status quo came within Season Three, when a sudden time jump brought the show and its cast of characters — Donna Emerson (Kerry Bishé), Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis), John Bosworth (Toby Huss), Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy), and Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) — from the Big ‘80s into the grunge-and-internet ‘90s. It’s true that by the time the opening sequence of the Season Four premiere is over, another three years have passed, but it’s done in a seamless montage centered on Gordon, who watches the people, business, and technology around him change in a single unbroken stream of consciousness. It’s a clever way to show that Halt is building on, not breaking from, the creative success it now seems comfortable to claim.

After this whirlwind opening, we settle into the new normal. Though Gordon and Joe’s internet service provider CalNect has become a great success, there are shadows on the horizon. Big players like AOL and the telecom company upon which they rely for data transmission are encroaching on their territory. Joe has been too busy in the literal basement of the company in a quixotic quest to build a competitive web browser, though he’s amassed more post-it notes for the project than users of it. And Cameron has become a silent partner in a literal sense: Instead of helping Joe build the browser, she’s working remotely from Japan to avoid any romantic entanglements, leading to multiple-month spans where she’s entirely incommunicado.

Donna’s new life apart from the rest of the group seems relatively stable and smooth. She’s a shot caller at the firm she shares with Diane Gould, Mutiny’s former financial backer, a position that enables her to combine her formidable business and technological acumen while leaving no doubt who’s in charge in the minds of any of the tech-wiz wannabes who come to her for funding. Donna’s office seems perpetually bathed in golden sunlight, the better to accentuate her godlike status. And in a memorably glamorous montage set with delicious incongruity to “Doll Parts” by Hole, Donna is shown hosting a lavish dinner party at her home, effectively hand-selecting the male guest she’ll be sleeping with that night. As they have sex, she’s shown eyes open, beaming with delight. Professionally, intellectually, financially, socially, she’s living a life I don’t think she even dared dream of before. To paraphrase Courtney Love unironically, she is girl with the most cake.

The most troubled members of the core quintet are Cameron and her former father figure John Bosworth. Boz keeps popping up on the periphery, attending Gordon’s big 40th birthday blowout with Diane, pitching a GPS start-up to Donna, etc.; no one seems able to tell whether he’s serious about any of it or just bored by retirement. He only reveals the truth to Gordon: He desperately needs money to replace the small fortune he secretly blew behind Diane’s back in a real-estate venture gone south. With Donna refusing to back his half-assed start-up scheme and Gordon reluctant to give him any cash for fear of running afoul with Donna and Diane, the usually cheery Boz is left lonely and desperate. “You don’t know what it’s like being retired,” he tells Gordon, whom he says has any number of tricks left up his sleeve. “I’m sixty-five. This can’t be my last thing.” In the end, Boz is brought aboard a new project by Donna, not out of charity or even real need for his talents, but in order to preserve her autonomy in her still-sexist firm when her partners spike her plan to promote her executive assistant Tanya to head the project instead. (Tanya just so happens to be a black woman, which I’m sure has nothing to do with their skepticism.)

Meanwhile, despite the smash success of her innovative Space Bike, Cameron’s career as an auteurist game designer is stalling out; her new puzzle-based dreamscape of a game is too difficult and too esoteric for the Mortal Kombat generation, who roundly reject it during American user testing. You and I may know Myst is on the way IRL, so her fortunes may change, but for now her dream project’s being put on hold. Meanwhile, her husband Tom — to whom she confessed her one-night stand with Joe toward the end of last season, leading to her work-from-Japan arrangement — has left her for another woman, leaving her stranded in the States with both her personal and professional lives in limbo. As a viewer, I’ll say is a bit of a shame, since Mackenzie Davis and Mark O’Brien, the actor who played Tom, had real chemistry. But given where the story heads from there, I get why they made the decision.

Where does the story go from there? Naturally, Cameron turns to Joe, with whom she patches things up. First, after showing up unexpectedly to Gordon’s big 40th birthday blowout, she completes her work on their browser, and lights a fire under Joe’s ass to do something even more ambitious. His idea, basically a proto-Google, will soon be swiped by Donna thanks to an off-the-cuff conversation over dinner with Gordon, with whom she’s still friendly as they co-parent their wayward teen daughters; Gordon’s too busy venting over Cameron steering Joe back into Visionary-Land just when he’d agreed to give up on the browser and help run the ISP proper to notice.

Second, in the centerpiece sequence of the doubled-up premiere’s second episode, she calls Joe from her hotel and has a conversation with him that lasts a full 24 hours, including a lengthy period where she falls asleep and he simply keeps the phone on so she won’t be alone. They discuss all manner of things over the course of the phonecall — their lives, their jobs, spirituality, their childhoods (Cameron was forced by her mom to do beauty pageants, part of why she’s glad she and Tom couldn’t have kids despite trying), various ‘90s news and culture touchstones Joe rattles off in a hilariously clunky way, and so on.

Yet the content is less important than the nature of the call itself. Many viewers may be too young to remember, but I’ve never seen a show capture the almost literally intoxicating nature of an hours-long phone call with a person you’re falling for the way this does. A staple of the personal and romantic lives of pretty much everyone who came of age in the ‘80s or ‘90s, it’s now been supplanted by texts and DMs, but good god do those memories remain. (Does it help that Pace and Davis, like Bishé, have never looked more beautiful? Frankly, yes!)

So many shows coast on cheap nostalgia — some clothes, some music cues, some funny fonts, boom, collect your paycheck. Halt is certainly not above peppering these episodes with Clinton-era pop-culture ephemera: Zima, Mario Kart, the Blue Man Group, AOL floppy-disk promos, James’s “Laid.” But it’s incredibly satisfying, even moving, to see one attempt and succeed in recreating something you can’t simply ape from watching an I Love the ‘90s special. I never knew how much I missed falling into that lovestruck telephone k-hole until Halt reminded me. That’s the power of a show rooted so deeply in the truth of human interaction. It can remind you how it feels to be human.

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.