Halt and Catch Fire: Valley of the Heart's Delight

August 23, 2016 4:12 PM - Season 3, Episode 1

Donna and Cameron explore their options to expand beyond chat. Gordon settles in at Mutiny. Joe launches his latest product.

Review: 'Halt and Catch Fire' upgrades again for season 3 - Alan Sepinwall / HitFix

Halt and Catch Fire: The Most Relevant Show on Television is Set in the 80s - Maureen Herman / boingboing

It's time to catch up on AMC's 'Halt and Catch Fire' - Kelly Lawler / USA Today

Mackenzie Davis, the Girl Genius of Halt and Catch Fire - Ashley Fetters / GQ

Season 3 Original Television Series Soundtrack - Google Play

posted by Pong74LS (3 comments total)

Finally got around to actually watching this. I was ready to give up on this series halfway through the first season, now it's one of my favourite shows currently airing. Not much to add except that the first two episodes continue the quality of season 2. While I appreciate trying to create drama from reverse engineering BIOS ROMs or recovering data from hard disk platters, they ultimately didn't work as a television show. It was when the showrunners started using the technology as a springboard for the character interaction that the show found its groove.

Whoever is doing the graphics is vastly overestimating the capabilities, i.e. colour rendering and animation complexity, of the Commodore 64. Loved the glimpse of the wire wrapped backplane in the IBM mainframe. That amount of dust would be absolute murder on the tape drives or hard drives of the era.
posted by Pong74LS at 11:53 PM on August 27, 2016

We're finally catching up, since season 4 just premiered.

There's so much that's great about this show, but one of the things that keeps blowing me away is the cinematography. It's just outstanding, with some really interesting things going on, but without really calling attention to itself. The people who make this show really seem to care about every aspect of it deeply. I really appreciate it.
posted by under_petticoat_rule at 8:18 PM on August 21, 2017

We somehow missed this show at the time, and are working our way through it now. At the outset of season three, I sincerely wish Joe Macmillan would just die in a car crash, join a commune in Northern California, drive race cars in Utah, or some other Don Draper-derivative contrivance. His character is wholly uninteresting, it does not provide any narrative tension, nor do I give any shits about what happens to him. (I like Lee Pace as an actor, so there's that.)

I also would prefer if Gordon would similarly exit, so we can just spend all of our time with Donna and Cameron and Bosworth.

The Achilles heel is that the writing is just not that good. The writers rush through plot points so that pretty much nothing is believable. Which is a shame because the show clearly has high production values and a lot of heart sunk into it (seconding what under_petticoat_rule says above).
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 6:55 PM on July 7, 2019