Halt and Catch Fire: Adventure
June 30, 2014 9:47 AM - Season 1, Episode 5 - Subscribe
Cameron bristles under a new manager.
Already deleted the episode from my DVR, but I think the car smash was at the car show the coders were talking about rather than a company picnic.
posted by Ranucci at 4:55 PM on June 30, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by Ranucci at 4:55 PM on June 30, 2014 [1 favorite]
I gotta say, I'm glad I hung in there. It seems like this show is turning around a bit. Very few, "Nobody would ever say that or act that way!" moments in this one. Especially compared to the last episode.
posted by ob1quixote at 7:14 PM on June 30, 2014
posted by ob1quixote at 7:14 PM on June 30, 2014
Hey, everyone who's quit watching this show but is still reading: This is the episode where you tune back in!
Up to now I've been wallpapering over the mediocre parts because HCF nailed the occasional quirky detail. Not now -- this one not only got every bit of technobabble realistic, and meaningful to those familiar with the subject* , they got the bigger picture right. That is what it felt like to work as a coder at a small tech company in the mid-80s.
There was a point, I think it was when all the weirdos were at work late at night playing the game, that I got so verklempt with nostalgia I had to stop the show and text an old friend. He'd looked an awful lot like Yoyo, as I'd looked like Scrawny Geek Boy, and we fought many a low-res monster together.
If this is what they were leading up to, a chance to tell all those great stories from the early days of PCs, then it was worth the first four episodes. I'm sure these characters will still act like goddam fools when the whims of the writer call for it. But in this episode, even the idiotic behavior was consistent with what we've come to know about their flaws.
* Well not quite. Flood Control Dam #3 was in ZORK, not ADVENTURE.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 12:42 AM on July 1, 2014 [8 favorites]
Up to now I've been wallpapering over the mediocre parts because HCF nailed the occasional quirky detail. Not now -- this one not only got every bit of technobabble realistic, and meaningful to those familiar with the subject
There was a point, I think it was when all the weirdos were at work late at night playing the game, that I got so verklempt with nostalgia I had to stop the show and text an old friend. He'd looked an awful lot like Yoyo, as I'd looked like Scrawny Geek Boy, and we fought many a low-res monster together.
If this is what they were leading up to, a chance to tell all those great stories from the early days of PCs, then it was worth the first four episodes. I'm sure these characters will still act like goddam fools when the whims of the writer call for it. But in this episode, even the idiotic behavior was consistent with what we've come to know about their flaws.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 12:42 AM on July 1, 2014 [8 favorites]
Yeah, I let these just kind of hang on my DVR for the last three weeks and binged them all today, and I'm back. If I'd been watching them individually, I would have given up after either Ep 3 or 4, but this one... it somehow worked, even if only by showing that Lee Pace just doesn't actually have a master plan. He's just good at making it look like he has a master plan by occasionally saying, "Yes, I meant for that to happen, plebes."
posted by Etrigan at 11:39 AM on July 2, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by Etrigan at 11:39 AM on July 2, 2014 [1 favorite]
This is probably my favorite episode so far, though it does seem like a chunk of story in missing between it and the previous episode.
posted by drezdn at 8:05 AM on July 3, 2014
posted by drezdn at 8:05 AM on July 3, 2014
Yeah, I'm finally not annoyed after an episode of HACF.
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:21 AM on July 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by Pope Guilty at 12:21 AM on July 4, 2014 [1 favorite]
I guess it's good you folks are seeing something new and great in here. I'm not!
Cameron and Joe's Dad giving a master class in the HaCF school of anti-life weird acting choices... Gordon who has been carefully painted as a meek awkward guy who always wants to be in another room suddenly becoming some kind of shoulder-clapping super chum when the plot needed it... and the quirky programmers! Hey, meet my man YO YO! He always got a YO YO!
I like this show because they play some Gary Numan jams and the whole thing is like a dare. I'm not really seeing the improvements and I'm kind of glad because at this point that's not what I want out of this bizarre lump of a show.
posted by SharkParty at 8:13 PM on July 6, 2014
Cameron and Joe's Dad giving a master class in the HaCF school of anti-life weird acting choices... Gordon who has been carefully painted as a meek awkward guy who always wants to be in another room suddenly becoming some kind of shoulder-clapping super chum when the plot needed it... and the quirky programmers! Hey, meet my man YO YO! He always got a YO YO!
I like this show because they play some Gary Numan jams and the whole thing is like a dare. I'm not really seeing the improvements and I'm kind of glad because at this point that's not what I want out of this bizarre lump of a show.
posted by SharkParty at 8:13 PM on July 6, 2014
I think Donna is pretty amazing. The generic "wife" character for a show like this would be an unsupportive shrew who didn't know computers from cannoli. Instead, they made her this textured, intelligent person who believes in her husband and wants him to have the intellectual outlet he sorely needs, but is a functional grownup enough to see the risks this entails and how crazy the people he has hitched their wagon to really are.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:59 AM on July 28, 2014 [4 favorites]
posted by DirtyOldTown at 6:59 AM on July 28, 2014 [4 favorites]
Maybe I'm overly forgiving, but this show, for me, is not tracking as a series of inexplicable acting/writing choices, so much as it is a show about three deeply inexplicable people.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:19 AM on July 28, 2014
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:19 AM on July 28, 2014
I'm here in these dusty halls.
I'm out of sync with the consensus it seems.. I actually did not like this episode because it seemed pretty goofy, but also because it did not really resolve all the annoying tensions of the previous episodes and it felt like a writer reboot.
Though I'm glad other people agree that Cameron is rendered kind of annoyingly by like a dumb idea of what punk is. OTOH the emotional maturity levels are extremely low for everyone except Donna who is likable but so predictable. (Also she and Joe and Cameron's actors are all distractingly mega-skinny lithe.)
Of course I try to keep my expectations low because this is an AMC show and even though I watched all of Mad Men I really grew to hate its dramatic bullshit and its bucket of tropes that so many people just gobbled up because of the sprinkle of social commentary... Writing that is both obviously smart, but also so manipulative, and therefore so fucking aggravatingly dumb so often. As bad as this show is though it is not as disgustingly fucking coy as Mad Men got.
Definitely not missing the AMC era of television.
posted by fleacircus at 6:36 PM on July 20, 2021
I'm out of sync with the consensus it seems.. I actually did not like this episode because it seemed pretty goofy, but also because it did not really resolve all the annoying tensions of the previous episodes and it felt like a writer reboot.
Though I'm glad other people agree that Cameron is rendered kind of annoyingly by like a dumb idea of what punk is. OTOH the emotional maturity levels are extremely low for everyone except Donna who is likable but so predictable. (Also she and Joe and Cameron's actors are all distractingly mega-skinny lithe.)
Of course I try to keep my expectations low because this is an AMC show and even though I watched all of Mad Men I really grew to hate its dramatic bullshit and its bucket of tropes that so many people just gobbled up because of the sprinkle of social commentary... Writing that is both obviously smart, but also so manipulative, and therefore so fucking aggravatingly dumb so often. As bad as this show is though it is not as disgustingly fucking coy as Mad Men got.
Definitely not missing the AMC era of television.
posted by fleacircus at 6:36 PM on July 20, 2021
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And thank goodness Cameron gets to interact with people other than Joe now. The other coders seem like much healthier companions than those punks.
posted by Small Dollar at 2:36 PM on June 30, 2014