Halt and Catch Fire: Miscellaneous
August 28, 2017 10:48 AM - Season 4, Episode 3 - Subscribe

Gordon gives Joe an eerily prescient lecture about train safety and Joe one to Cameron about tidyness. As CalNect is faced with no room to grow and losing theirs to AOL, Joe and Gordon sell and make their next move, and have a first taste of what the internet is about to become. Cameron gets bad news from Atari and the gaming industry in general. Donna struggles with a casual dinner and the development (and implications) of their web-crawler.
posted by lmfsilva (8 comments total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I had a feeling in the season opener that Cameron was not telling the whole truth about Tom and it's looking more that way. That's a sad story for all involved and it's being told well.

The game sounds like Tomb Raider now which is what I thought when they showed clips earlier. It looked like Lara Croft plopped into Myst. Cameron's line about adding a big-titted mercenary after she lost the game reminded me of that.

I am not a Donna fan lately (though Kerry Bishé is playing her really well) and I hope she takes the high road on the competition with her ex and daughter. That dinner party was hard to watch. Did she call it her famous salad?

Cameron and Gordon are good together and are probably the only two people on the show who give to and receive from each other equally. I like any scene with just the two of them. I also like that Gordon seems to be doing better medically which is nice, but at least it was mentioned instead of the whole thing just being gone magically.
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 9:11 PM on August 28, 2017


Cameron and Gordon are more or less like siblings at this point. Gordon seems to know very well how to cheer her up (Too drunk? Mario Kart. Too pissed at modern games? Doom deathmatch)
I don't think Donna can afford to take the high road, because of office politics (and Diane already made it clear she needs business), so it it will break at one point, be it at the family or business ends.

I don't think by 1993 the "heroine with big tits" was already a thing. Other than fighting and adventures games, action games were mostly sausage fest or characterless shooters or antro mascot platformers. The earliest screenshots from Tomb Raider appeared late in 1995. It sounded a bit too prescient, but HCF has always been about that (and I'm sure by then Cameron already saw Mai in Fatal Fury 2).
posted by lmfsilva at 11:01 AM on August 29, 2017 [2 favorites]


Gordon and Cam's friendship is such an unexpected delight to me, but just like everything else the seeds have been planted so well from that day they spent together two seasons ago. They've all known each other for almost a decade now, right? This show is so good at making long relationships feel lived-in and real even with all the time skips which is really hard to do.

(It's probably time to lock Cam and Donna in the office and just make them hash it out over video games though.)
posted by colorblock sock at 2:53 PM on August 29, 2017


I think Donna was sporting a Topsy Tail do in her dinner with Gordon!

Donna's partner-nemesis is smarter and meaner than I thought at first. Tripp isn't going to be the lucky/dumb kid that I thought.

I don't care about Cameron and Joe; I'm far more invested in Donna and Cam finding a way to be friends again. If Gordon and Joe could manage it, then they can too. I really don't want the series to end with Donna and Cam still hating each other.
posted by gladly at 6:17 PM on August 29, 2017


I loved the negotiation scene with Haley. More of that please!

All of the Donna stuff is killing me. She seems to be losing her way, so I hope a major arc is her finding something to be passionate about again. And let's hope it brings her and Cameron back together. Yes, she's good at business, but as she reminded her team, she is an engineer too. Let Donna make things again!
posted by wsquared at 8:00 PM on August 29, 2017 [1 favorite]


Donna's dinner party scene was amazing. It was so uncomfortable, and I kept putting myself in the shoes of the employees she had previously yelled at, and how they must feel. Then, when she realized she made the biggest mistake of them all, she actually went back in time and told a story they could relate to, from when she was a human being with feelings.
posted by destructive cactus at 10:54 PM on August 30, 2017 [2 favorites]


This is where I complain it's a farce Kerry Bishé was not nominated for an Emmy ?


(also, the Emmys need a best ensemble award. Plenty of shows get a lot of mileage without having to rely on the lead - secondary dynamics)
posted by lmfsilva at 8:07 AM on August 31, 2017


It seems like Comet is Yahoo and the venture-funded web crawler is a proto-google. We all know how that turned out, but when I put together my first website in 1999, my big goal was to get it indexed on Yahoo--that was how I'd know my site had "arrived." All of which is to say that the two projects wouldn't necessarily be direct competitors, at least not for a while.
posted by mabelstreet at 10:49 PM on September 14, 2021


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