Collateral attractions: Halt and Catch Fire, episode 8

Not so much to say about Lee Pace by himself in this week’s installment, but I loved this episode. I keep saying, this is the best one yet, but there were so many definitive scenes in this episode, and more than once I whistled when something happened. I think I’m now to the point where I would say that I would be disappointed if this series didn’t continue.

All images from Halt and Catch Fire are taken from material available at AMCTV.com.

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[Left: the Altair 8800, the machine that Donna got Gordon after pawning the decoder engagement ring he’d designed for her. Source: Wikipedia]

The episode starts with the problem of getting the right placement at COMDEX, one of the world’s most important computer trade shows in the 1980s and 90s. (I don’t know anyone who went to one of these, but based on my awareness of its German competitor, they are sort of astounding affairs.) The point here is getting orders for the computer, and we know this is pressing because of the money problems that have plagued the development team for the entire series. Cardiff’s booth will be right next to “Altair” (actually MITS, I assume, which was acquired in 1977 and disappeared) and Tandy. We learn during the episode that Altair sold one of the first electronics kits for building one’s own computer, the Altair 8800, in the 1970s, inspiring Gordon to become a computer engineer. Incidentally, Bill Gates started at MITS before cofounding Microsoft. Nowadays we think of Tandy as Radio Shack, and they don’t make computers anymore, but in addition to our TRS-80 Model III, my brother and I had a Tandy Color Computer in the years roughly parallel to this program and I remember programming it to play a sonata I was learning on my clarinet. For a long time they offered a superior product to the PC and the PC clones, but the color computer was more or less killed by the creation of graphics and sound accelerator cards by competitors; the gaming market was starting to drive sales for computers.

Anyway. Again, not much tech, but you do get to see Gordon disassemble the Giant and in that frame you can see a colossal heat sink very briefly. Like you care. Dad said — Look! The heat sink!

The team gets Booth C23 (you can watch the scene here), talks about the merits of frozen vs fresh shrimp, and Joe complains that the phone is clicking. Viewers of 1980s spy shows will remember what that means — bugged! I’m assuming there’s some connection here to the title of the show (the 214s — which was the Forth Worth area code, designed that way to reduce the number of clicks involved in dialing? But I really don’t know). Bos walks into the meeting after a surprising encounter with Nathan Cardiff, and gives them a pep talk about selling the people who built the machine. Then — oops — the FBI. We think it’s something to do with the ongoing problems with IBM, but no, in fact — it turns out it has to do with hacking. Bosworth has talked Cameron into hacking into a bank computer and transferring money from one Cardiff account to another (this is why Nathan knows about it, apparently). I didn’t completely understand the later explanation of how they did this and I didn’t want to watch the episode again, but it involved a file transfer program in wide use in the 1980s called KERMIT.

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Gordon (Scoot McNairy) disassembles the Giant in order to prevent the FBI from seizing it, in episode 8 of Halt and Catch Fire. Source: AMCTV

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This episode is once again Gordon’s and with good reason — we finally see exactly how badly Gordon wants this to work, and his awareness of the extent to which he’s dependent on especially his wife but also Joe and Cameron, to get it done. From his rage over possibly being excluded from COMDEX, to his stealthy disassembly of the Giant, to breaking into Cardiff to get the pieces, and then driving all over creation (Houston to Austin is not a pleasant drive even now; I’ve done it myself) to get his team back together, to his amazing sales pitch to his wife — Gordon is going to get this done. Of all the characters he probably gets the best lines in this episode.

That said, the best scenes are given to the trio (Donna’s awkward encounter with her boss in the driveway notwithstanding — and did you see her sign his goodbye card with a Bic four-color pen? Do they still make those? I can’t believe I’m turning into such a nostalgist for consumer culture).

Donna has an important conversation with her mother, and Cameron’s closing conversation with Bosworth, in which he suggests to her that he can fake geek-speak enough are excellent, and so is the scene of rapprochement between Gordon and Cameron where they talk about their “first times” (meaning the first computers they took apart — hers was the Apple II, and that was the first computer I encountered in a school setting) and he tells the story of how he and Donna got engaged.

I also don’t want to neglect to mention Joe’s encounter with his father — both because it follows that strand that we are inclined to follow ourselves, that IBM is responsible for the newest assault on Cardiff, and because Joe breaks his baseball bat before he makes his way to New York, and because we see Joe negotiating to work for IBM again — and yet again I wonder, who do I believe here? Is this the boy who cried wolf again? It’s also crushing to learn what Joe’s father did both to him and his mother — apparently telling him that she died twenty-three years before she did. Wow. Why does Joe trust this man at all? And I admit, I whistled out loud when Joe responded to his father’s suggestion that he come back to IBM that he needed to be in charge of the development of the portable computer that he’s heard the rumor of. That took me quite a bit aback. We see repeatedly in this show that Joe’s still got guts (as when he tries to sell Giants ahead of COMDEX and gets the news about IBM’s product lines).

[Right: the first IBM portable PC. Source: wikipedia]

But my most important reason for mentioning that moment is again technical, because, indeed, IBM was developing a portable product at the time: the machine that became the IBM Portable PC Computer 5155 model 68. It was not the first portable — that honor went to Compaq, which doesn’t get mentioned in this episode. But this machine holds a special place in my heart because it was the first one I ever bought with my own money. “Portable” was stretching it; it weighed 30 lbs (double what the Giant is supposed to weigh) and was essentially an XT that weighed two pounds less, lacked an internal harddrive and had a huge metal handle welded onto the back. Its power supply rating meant that it could be taken to Europe and used on 240V grids. And it (like Cardiff’s Giant) had an 8088 chip with an estimated operating speed of 4.77 Mhz. I bought mine in 1987 used, three years old, just after IBM had discontinued it, and used it for most of college — after which I bought a Mac Classic (but that is a long, stupid story).

What I’m enjoying about the tech aspect of this series is not that they get every detail right — but rather that they find a way to get enough of it right to make it plausible. I admit that last week I was thinking, why don’t they explain why the thermodynamics problem is such a big deal? But this week I found myself very much plunged into my memories of the 1980s with just the right amount of detail to make it work for me.

Anyway. Sorry. Got off track again.

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Cameron (Mackenzie Davis) learns that Joe (Lee Pace) sabotaged her work on the BIOS, in episode 8 of Halt and Catch Fire. Source: AMCTV

This episode has, I believe, two of the best scenes I have noticed in the series so far — really excellent writing, fantastic energy on the parts of the actors, and simply very raw, visceral, convincing drama. The first of these is the scene where Cameron, Joe and Gordon gather in Gordon’s garage to reconnoiter, Cameron reveals that she and Bosworth were hacking into Cardiff’s bank accounts, and Gordon, convinced that Joe was in on it somehow, reveals to Cameron that Joe was responsible for her data “loss.” The tension here is deftly constructed (even if it took us a long time to get here, plot-wise) with every character’s rationale for their feelings of distrust for the others now perfectly laid out. And the acting is snappy — ending with the not-unanticipated punch to Joe’s jaw and Cameron rolling out of Gordon’s garage to run away.

The other one — which occurs after Donna’s dilemma (very moving, her finding the ring), Joe’s trip to see his father, Gordon’s trip to Austin to convince Cameron to come back (and excellent manipulation of her; we see how he’s been maneuvering his wife all these years); the scene where Cameron and Gordon “tell all” — is the scene close to the end where Gordon maneuvers Joe away from his plans to work for IBM and toward a run at COMDEX. You can watch it here. Gordon baits Joe into showing how much he cares about his own self-image if nothing else, and into demonstrating how much energy he might have to sell the Giant after all. It’s Gordon turning the sales tools he’s learned from Joe right back at him. And it stings and pleases all at the same time.

***Gordon (Scoot McNairy) baits Joe (Lee Pace) into demonstrating his level of emotional involvement in episode 8 of Halt and Catch Fire. Source: AMCTV

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Again, this is a scene in which a million impressions from the last two months seem to pile up in the minds of the characters to make both the manipulation (and the fact that Joe seems to be manipulated) work so effectively on us. We see just how exactly Gordon both cares, and knows how to make people move (and has been doing so all along — is it Joe who’s inspiring Gordon, as he now insists, or the other way around?). And we see, after weeks of watching all the things that do seem to matter to Joe pile up, just how vulnerable he himself is to a certain kind of pitch. Really masterfully written and acted.

The show ends with preparations for a road trip — Donna has decided to give Gordon another chance; Joe sells his Porsche for a station wagon; Bosworth reveals himself as prepared to fend off prosecution for Cameron; and they all get into the car together.

But it’s next week that will be the big crisis. I can hardly wait!

[ETA: oh yeah — Joe and Cameron have sex which seems a bit pasted in there.]

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As has become our custom: screencaps of the distractingly entrancing hands of Mr. Pace, may his tribe increase.

~ by Servetus on July 21, 2014.