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Halt and Catch Fire

Halt and Catch Fire is one of the best shows ever made. Judging from the reaction to its two-part series finale this weekend, that’s uncontroversial now, which is an amazing thing to contemplate. From its rough start in Season One to its skin-of-the-teeth renewals for each subsequent year to its status as a critics’ darling that far too few people other than critics were talking about (and even critics let down the side a bit at the beginning of this season), it felt like the Little Engine That Almost Could. But there’s never been a show like it: generous of spirit toward its characters, yet always ruthless about their shortcomings and never sappy in its optimism that they might overcome them. Rooted in genuine moral dilemmas—not black and white choices, not even the shades of gray “I know it’s not the right thing but kinda I want to” stuff of the best antihero shows, but legitimately difficult choices between two strong options, neither of which is a sure thing. The sense that for all its focus on transformative technological advances and for all its temporal and geographical sweep (its four short seasons began in Texas 1981 and ended in California 1994), it all could have taken place in a single room between five characters. Co-creators Christopher Cantwell & Christopher C. Rogers and actors Kerry Bishé, Mackenzie Davis, Toby Huss, Scoot McNairy, and Lee Pace did what their characters could never quite do but never stopped dreaming of doing: They built something that will last.

Yet first of the finale’s two episodes, “Search,” is an extended meditation on things that don’t last at all. It feels like a shroud hastily tossed over the body of Gordon Clark, even though it’s not about his death the way last week’s masterpiece was. (Aside, perhaps, from a grimly funny headfake about John Bosworth’s health that ends with him striding out of his doctor’s office to Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.”)

Gordon’s ex-wife Donna is stuck in her own uniquely type-A version of limbo, obsessively swimming her in-ground pool as a replacement for drinking and for moving forward in her job, where there’s a managing partnership with her name on it waiting for her if she’ll just say the word. (“I like swimming,” she tells Haley. “I like it too, but Jesus Christ,” her daughter replies, and they both laugh.) She has a hard time letting her older daughter Joanie go backpacking in Southeast Asia, though she doesn’t stand in her way. Perhaps most perniciously, she and her friends Cameron and Joe have cast Haley, the co-founder of Comet with her late dad, in his place, making her sit through an awkward dinner where Gordon might once have sat while the rest of them obliviously make grown-up dinner conversation.

For Haley, who misses her father acutely and has her own personal problems to grapple with, dressing in metaphorical dad drag is unbearable, as is seeing his face (and her own) in the TV commercial Joe plans to run for their search engine. She and her mom may patch things up somewhat, but the personal life where you’d expect her to be able to find real refuge provides none: She asks out the older fast-food server she’s nursed a crush on for months and, in the most painfully recognizable teenager-in-1994 scene I’ve ever watched—seriously, I asked someone out on a date to Natural Born Killer too that summer—gets rejected. (The next time we see her she has a boyfriend, a hilariously unfortunate kid who’s about as useful to her as a vestigial tail.)

But the impact of Gordon’s death does the most damage to Joe and Cameron. Robbed of his best friend and creative sparring partner, Joe continues to push Comet forward, and not in a shitty obsessive way either: His coworkers and friends all seem to like and respect him, and they’re proud of the place. In fact, Cameron has joined in, helping the site get through its elaborate destination-based redesign and pulling strings with her rich young patron Alexa to get early access to Netscape, the coming winner in the browser wars. If she and Joe can optimize Comet for Netscape’s new iteration, they can crush their competition.

Then, in one of the most refreshingly strange reveals I’ve ever seen, the camera slowly pushes in to top of the Netscape browser window as they work on it. It takes a second to even realize what we’re looking for, but there it is, in the toolbar: “Yahoo!” Netscape already picked a winner and gave it unbeatable real estate in the digital and mental landscape of all its users. From there, Comet can only crash and burn.

What I didn’t realize until I was watching it happen is how Joe and Cameron’s relationship would come apart when Comet failed. It served as a stand-in for so much: for the friend they’d lost, for the children they would never have, for the conversation they’d have to have about what that meant for their future but never did. Joe smashes Gordon’s sealed office windows, he and Cam return home and have teary-eyed sex, and the next morning it’s over between them, again, and for good.

But it doesn’t stop there. Despite being named after a tarot card that represents indecision, perhaps making it a better title for the preceding episode than for this one, “Ten of Swords” shows how our heroes all manage to move on. After getting a reading from a psychic played by Carol Kane (!) and nearly getting run over on his way out, Joe bumps into an old colleague from his IBM days, whom we haven’t seen since the first season. The two grab coffee, and Joe learns that despite all his woes (and, by this point in time, IBM’s), his former company had learned to trust his instincts about the future from afar over the years. The next thing we know, Joe is gone, leaving without telling Cameron a word.

Not that Cam had much more of a fanfare planned for her own departure, which comes after she runs her relationship with Alexa into the ground on a disastrous European business trip. She hashes out the decision with her friend and father figure John Bosworth, who describes her beautifully: “You got a lot of love in you, more than anybody I’ve ever met….Overwhelms you, makes you live like you’re ready to explode any minute. They don’t see it. I do. It’s the burden you carry.” Sure enough, Cam decides to leave town mainly to connect with her actual surviving parent, her mother, a recovering alcoholic now living in Florida. John wishes her well on her journey, and leaves her with just one request, one that made me cry: “Don’t let me get old.”

Cameron’s farewell to Donna and Haley is more prolonged. Stopping by literally on her way out of town, she winds up staying overnight, trying to help repair a broken hard drive that contains a semester’s worth of Haley’s work on a project. She bonds with the teen over Joe, who’d sent her a letter from new home—Armonk, which was his old home (and IBM’s) too.

She watches Donna, who’s so resplendent in her red evening gown that Cam actually gasps “Jesus” when she walks in the room, deliver a heartbreakingly relevant speech to the guests at a party she’s hosting for women in tech. It’s an event, she says, she hopes women in the future will no longer need to have “to remind themselves that they’re actually here.” This sadly unfulfilled prophecy precedes an eloquent exploration of the compulsive need to do the next thing, the price you pay for it, and the people who make it worth paying. As if to illustrate the concept, Cameron waves a little goodbye, turns to leave during the applause, and falls directly into the swimming pool.

The scene that follows is one of the most memorable in the show’s history. Earlier that evening, Cam had impulsively pitched her old friend on working together again, and was quietly crushed when Donna couldn’t bring herself to say yes. Now, just for fun, they take a trip to the old office space where Mutiny, CalNect, and Comet were all headquartered. They start talking about the company they might have founded together if Donna had decided to take Cam up on her offer earlier that night; Phoenix, they’d call it, as they start hashing out its imaginary history.

Then the camera cuts away, and there’s a neon light with the Phoenix logo above them in the otherwise empty office space. Holy shit, I thought. Did the show just make one last time jump, to a point after the rise and fall of this new company? Are they jokingly telling a story that actually happened? No—it’s just a fantasy so fulfilling to them both that they conjured the Phoenix light into existence. They’ve struggled with and overcome so many institutional obstacles in the past—you think they’re gonna let the realism of their own show off the hook? “It was a pleasure working with you at Phoenix.” “I loved every minute of it.”

It’s a tremendous imaginative leap, and it paves the way for the three final scenes that follow. Staring at a blank screen, Haley listens to one of her late father’s self-affirmation tapes. They encourage her to embrace feeling weird, since that’s how you know you’re alive; to keep problems in perspective; to look up from the computer once in a while. As if in answer, Donna has a breakthrough the next morning when she looks around the diner where she and Cameron grab one last breakfast; “I have an idea,” she tells her friend as the last song starts to play.

That song is “Solsbury Hill” by Peter Gabriel. It’s easily the biggest music cue in the show’s history, and the one freighted with the most pop-cultural weight, to the point that it’s literally a joke. Attempting not only to reclaim it but use it as the summary statement for the series is a quixotic move perfectly in keeping with what these characters, with their big dreams and big risks, would do. And like everything else Halt and Catch Fire has done, it works. We learn that despite his expensive clothes and car, Joe hasn’t gone back to IBM—he teaches the humanities, ensconced in an office filled with artifacts and mementos of all the people he, and we, loved. In the series’ final shot he looks at his students, smiles, and repeats his first line from the pilot: “Let me start by asking a question.” Like Haley’s blank page and the imaginary Phoenix that Cam and Donna dreamed up, it’s an indicator that while the show is over, these lives aren’t. They could go anywhere from here. They might fall on the way, but they could try. “I know it doesn’t feel like it now,” Joe tells Gordon in a flashback at the beginning of the episode in the aftermath of one of their many failures, “but this is the start of something.” Despite it all, he’s still right.

I had another TV dream. They don’t happen frequently, but when they do they’re usually about a show that’s got me on the edge of my seat with anticipation for its next episode—a season finale, say, or the next installment in a particularly momentous stretch of the story. When they happen, my brain will conjure up an entire imaginary episode from the ether and play it for me, start to finish, as I “watch.” This has happened to me with shows I loved: The Sopranos, Mad Men, Battlestar Galactica, Lost. It’s happened with shows I didn’t love, too: True Detective Season One was never one of my favorites, but I dreamed not one but two separate terrifying season finales in a single night, so it must have done something right.

But this one was unlike the others. It happened after I’d watched “Search” and “Ten of Swords,” the two-part series finale of Halt and Catch Fire. I went to bed late that night—early that morning, really—and dreamed I was at a cafeteria in midtown Manhattan. I was getting lunch with old friends, beloved coworkers from a job I had ten years ago, who were in town for a convention. Our awful old boss was there too, I guess because we couldn’t think of a way to get rid of him.

Suddenly I feel a tap on the shoulder and hear a cheerful greeting, I turn to my left and see Scoot McNairy and Lee Pace from Halt and Catch Fire sitting down to join me. It’s after the finale aired, and they’re all smiles. They just wanted to thank me for my writing about the show over the years. I turn to hug Scoot and congratulate him on the work they’d all done, then reach across him to shake Lee’s hand; the handshake gets weirdly botched and we joke about it as we try again. Turning to my coworkers (and studiously avoiding my old awful boss) I gesture to the two actors. “These are my friends,” I say.

Then I woke up.