Collateral attractions: Halt and Catch Fire, episode 9

You may be aware that Lee Pace joined Twitter this week, and if you look at his TL, he live tweeted his way through tonight’s episode. You can interact with him there (he asks for opinions). Sorry, Mr. Pace, I was busy watching the episode and — HP touch screen prototype available in 1983 or not — I’m still too low tech to enjoy talking about something on my computer while I am watching it!

All pictures from the show were taken from media available at the series website at AMCTV.com.

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Penultimate episode. My, this has gone by quickly. I’m thinking this series will be a strong candidate for binge watching among anyone who didn’t see it. Not a lot to say technologically, although we laughed at the DMP (dot matrix printer) — laser printers were already in wide use in industry in 1983 and affordable ones for personal computers would be on business desktops within the next year (also an HP product, the LaserJet). Those bearded birthday card developers were unbelievably behind the market — which made them an easy target for Joe, as they must have known themselves. We also hear musings about (Microsoft) Windows, an operating system most of us have used — they would have seen Windows 1.0 (Windows 2.1 was the first version I used, in a computer lab a few years later); and at the end of the episode Joe sees the prototype of an Apple Macintosh, which was released in January 1984. This was the first computer I encountered in college. I worked as a computer lab assistant and that machine (at left) populated about half the labs. Those were tough, sweet little computers and my experiences with them were the main reason that the first new computer I bought, in the fall of 1991, was a Mac Classic (then a retro model) with a personal laser printer. I wrote my M.A. thesis on that machine. So you see, the computer nostalgia continues unabated chez Servetus. And the episode makes the right point (no matter how we feel about it) — in the short run, the race for business went to machines that were cheap and compatible and not expensive and original. Mac OS took over the educational market, but the machines were too expensive and too “incompatible” to take over the business market, which went to PC compatibles, where price and compatibility were more important than the easier-to-use interface and interactivity that went with a Mac. The public has always had a fascination with the innovativeness of the Mac but the affordability of its competitors has constantly been decisive. (I’m writing this on a MacBook Pro, incidentally.)

Tech aside, the real meat of this episode lies almost entirely in its dramatic conflicts. The episode has a weird energy — as a viewer I experienced an odd tension between the fast pace of the convention floor scenes and the backed off tempo of the intimate scenes and conversations in the hotel suite. I’m not sure how I feel about this decision on the part of the writers / editors, because I was expecting something more fast-paced throughout after the opening prelude in the dark car. That darkness was supposed to open up to an explosion in the next sections of the episode.

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Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) is annoyed by the ketchup Cameron smears on his sales script, in episode 9 of Halt and Catch Fire. I’m going to say nothing else about this because I felt it was another example of heavy-handed symbolism. Source: My screencap of material from AMCTV.com

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We can say that each of the main characters — Joe, Cameron, Donna, and Gordon — come fully into his/her own in this episode, with each of them contributing to the full extent of their capacities to make things work. We see this effect at different times, but it starts with Gordon masterminding the group’s manipulation to get the suite they need for their presentation when Joe can’t do it (scene here) and continues with Cameron’s expert sales pitch (this girl never misses a beat — in the previous scene Gordon tells her it’s all about using the booth to get the buyers to their suite, and boy does she deliver).

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Gordon (Scoot McNairy) tells Donna to get a booth no matter what, in episode 9 of Halt and Catch Fire.

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It continues with Joe’s amazing pornographic party sales pitch to the visitors to the suite when the Giant won’t boot. This is the kind of pitch that we’re used to seeing from Joe — the pie in the sky, flattering, in this case explicitly pandering flirting with the crowd. Even Donna, who despises Joe, is laughing.

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Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) shows the Cardiff Giant to the visitors to the Cardiff party, in episode 9 of Halt and Catch Fire. Source: My screencap from AMCTV.com

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I’m not thrilled by the scenes AMC chose to share with us for free this week — I don’t think they were the best ones. One of the better ones comes when Joe observes Cameron talking to Heath, Mr. Sincere-potentially-emo-high-tech-OOP-programmer from Silicon Valley and then deciding to go out for pancakes with him.

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Cameron (Mackenzie Davis) interacts with someone whom she’s got more in common with than Joe in episode 9 of Halt and Catch Fire.

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Joe retreats to the bedroom and falls into bed as Gordon and Donna use the Giant interface to flirt with each other. And we see this terrible look of pain on Joe’s face — a really hallmark moment for Pace’s acting skills in this show, I find. That expression is just visceral — it cut straight through to my stomach. It’s one of the few moments of true genuineness we get from this character, and now, I finally believe, perhaps Joe has changed. And when Cameron comes back — after apparently stealing some debris from the Hoover Dam — it’s interesting, the level of Joe’s non-belief, his renewed unwillingness to be vulnerable, and the way that Pace makes that play out on Joe’s face.

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Joe (Lee Pace) wakes up as Cameron returns from her night of partying, in episode 9 of Halt and Catch Fire.

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A second of these definitive, unforgettable scenes is the interaction between Donna and Gordon after the group realizes that Hunt and the nasty fired neighbor have stolen the idea behind the Giant and have a working prototype. (I totally did not see this coming, although dad said he did.) That, in combination with the previous scene in bed, where Gordon reveals that he didn’t believe that Donna would “jump” with him, represents simply excellent writing that lays the fault lines in their marriage completely bare, even apart from the impactful acting by Bishé and McNairy. Nice job, too, of not making it someone’s fault — it’s not only Gordon’s insecurities, but also his absolute incapacity to give Donna what she needs even as she holds the family afloat, and her inability to assert herself or believe that he will pay attention if she does. I’ve felt off and on like the Donna story line was only there for political reasons, and has been neglected in just the ways that the problem itself was neglected in the 1980s, but when she says, I was exhausted and miserable, I finally felt myself nodding with her.

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Donna (Kelly Bishé) tells Gordon (Scoot McNairy) that she should have had an affair with Hunt, in episode 9 of Halt and Catch Fire.

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And the final one of those definitive scenes occurs when Joe — his world sort of falling apart around him in a series of stunning moments: the computer stolen; the encounter with Hunt (in which we learn just how bad Joe’s temper can be); the discovery that Gordon has re-engineered the computer at an amazing rate in order to increase the speed and cut the price (both achieved by removing the additional memory needed to run the system’s interactive features) while removing Cameron’s interactive interface …

***Joe (Lee Pace) reacts to Cameron’s discovery that her interface has been eliminated, in episode 9 of Halt and Catch Fire.

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Cameron’s insistence that if Joe wants her on the floor he has to put the interface back, and Joe’s response that this is about survival …

Joe (Lee Pace) tells Cameron (Mackenzie Davis) what’s at stake at the moment, in episode 9 of Halt and Catch Fire.

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and then his reaction as Cameron gives him an ultimatum that he simply cannot fulfill, and the elevator doors close behind her …

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— Joe just sucks up all that pain and channels it into one of the most brutal sales presentations I’ve ever witnessed. That is the episode that AMCTV should have given us to re-watch because it is simply stunning — Joe doing what he had prepared to do, what he is meant to do, the sales pitch above all. Uniqueness be damned — the computer is an employee that is to do what it does without hesitation.

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Caps of Joe’s sales pitch in episode 9 of Halt and Catch Fire. One thing I’ve really appreciated about this particular episode is how it shows that sales are not casual — the effective salesman thinks about how he wishes to appear in any given context.

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And he delivers in spades. At the end of the episode we learn it’s successful. Joe has an order for 70,000 units — and no Cameron.

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Joe (Lee Pace) after they open the bottle of champagne to celebrate their “victory” over the slingshot, in episode 9 of Halt and Catch Fire.

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So I ask, ceterum censeo, HAS JOE REALLY CHANGED?

Pace keeps us guessing. Because as I read this performance, Joe’s sorry about the loss of Cameron but the manipulation game for the success of the project (even as he sees that Macintosh and realizes that he and Gordon have ultimately NOT done what he keeps talking about — becoming a visionary creator) is what’s still lies the base of his personality, is in fact the foundation of that personality. It’s still all that Joe really knows how to do. At the beginning of the show I was asking myself whether I felt that Joe needed to have an inner life, or simply be a character whom I recognize — and now I think I have an answer, insofar as if he has an inner life, it seems to be largely meaningless to him in the ways that count to most humans.

Fantastic episode, despite my unease at the tempo changes. Great acting from especially: Pace, McNairy, Bishé.

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De rigueur nowadays, since we may have little opportunity to continue observing this, the Lee Pace hands. Note that Pace says one of the more interesting things he’s said about the series in this piece — that he’s convinced that one of the defining questions of the show is the problem of whether there’s a soul in the machine. The question is of course not only whether there’s a soul in the machine — but whether there’s a soul in Joe MacMillan.

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~ by Servetus on July 28, 2014.