Halt and Catch Fire: You Are Not Safe

October 4, 2016 9:25 PM - Season 3, Episode 8

Diane, Bos and Donna hit the road in hopes of building support for Mutiny. Everyone else awaits the big day. Joe approaches Cam for a favor.
posted by Pong74LS (10 comments total)

Remember when people said Mad Men would end in a downer? Even with two episodes left, I feel I should go watch kittens chasing lasers or something.
posted by lmfsilva at 3:20 AM on October 5, 2016

The suicide came as a surprise for the timing--I was thinking about Ryan being arrested when he visited Joe--but not for the act itself, as his character has been sending up signal flares of instability all season. I don't know if it was psychologically consistent, but it seemed dramatically earned.

On the upside, Joe is looking really human these days.
posted by cardboard at 6:26 AM on October 5, 2016

Has it been announced that this is the final season?
posted by fuse theorem at 8:37 AM on October 5, 2016

Not yet, but this episode confused me. It feels like it is a downer of a series finale, but I wonder if next week they're trying to salvage plotlines in case it gets renewed, or prevent the series from ending in such a grim fashion.
posted by lmfsilva at 1:32 PM on October 5, 2016

FWIW, it looks as though next Tuesday will bring a two-part finale for the season. I haven't read one way or another about the show being renewed for another season after that. Personally I hope it is, since this season seems like a big improvement over the melodrama of the previous two to me.
posted by whir at 10:09 PM on October 5, 2016

Technically, this episode stood right on the border of my willing suspension of disbelief. Ryan uses FTP, I guess over a modem connection to McMillan? Then he downloads the source code (written in BASIC) for their antivirus software, and publishes it... where? On the internet that he and Joe McMillan are about to apparently invent? On Mutiny? Did he just put it on floppy disks and mail it to a bunch of people? Also, he's been reading Joe's email, I guess on Mutiny or something because he wrote the email code? Why is Joe using Mutiny to send email?
posted by whir at 10:17 PM on October 5, 2016

There wasn't one scene that was as intense as last week's boardroom scene, but about 75% of the entire episode was gripping and tense as hell. Totally didn't see the Ryan suicide coming, despite the clues that had been (in hindsite) scattered through the season. The season's Joe-redemption arc is unbelievably believable.

God I hope this gets picked up for at least another season. It's firing on all cylinders now, and the past two episodes have been basically the best television I've seen since probably Ozymandias or The Suitcase.
posted by General Malaise at 9:12 AM on October 6, 2016

Halt and Catch Fire Renewed for Fourth and Final Season.
posted by lmfsilva at 2:50 AM on October 11, 2016 [2 favorites]

Technically, this episode stood right on the border of my willing suspension of disbelief. Ryan uses FTP, I guess over a modem connection to McMillan? Then he downloads the source code (written in BASIC) for their antivirus software, and publishes it... where? On the internet that he and Joe McMillan are about to apparently invent?

ARPAnet already existed, NSFnet existed. FTP actually predates TCP/IP, it was created to work under NCP, Network Control Protocol. NCP only allowed unidirectional traffic so you needed a control channel on one port & a data channel on another. And then firewalls came along & the need for PASV mode arose. Just a bit of history for you.

So the code could have been dropped into open FTP sites on ARPAnet which would be about all of them.
posted by scalefree at 4:18 PM on October 15, 2016 [1 favorite]

Like the Bitter Empire recap author Chelsea Spear, I cannot see this arc without seeing it through the lens of the actual history of Aaron Swartz's life and death. This hit really hard.
posted by brainwane at 11:36 AM on July 8, 2018 [1 favorite]