Halt and Catch Fire: Something's Coming

"SETI"
Directed by Juan José Campanella
Written by Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers

"New Coke"
Directed by Phil Abraham
Written by Jonathan Lisco

"The Way In"
Directed by Jeff Freilich
Written by Jason Cahill

Let me ask another question.

Where will the future take us?

I'm really asking the big questions, aren't I? This is a hard one to answer, because we are not clairvoyant. Sure, go far enough into our futures, we all know what the end will be. But otherwise, your guess is as good as mine.

I know how this story will end. But I don't know how I will get there. Until I write it down in the future, all I can do is guess.

The past likes to trick us into thinking everything is ordained in an organized way. This is because the way we process the past tends to find order in the chaos. We remember the decisions and can judge them based upon what happened after the fact. We forget the uncertainty of the moment, and how you don't know what will happen when you do it. Actions have consequences, and they must be paid. But we don't know when they'll be paid, and how they'll affect us along the way.

In our story, we've come a long way so far. The Giant was born and released to thundering adequacy. Donna (Kerry Bishé), Cameron (Mackenzie Davis), and a band of rowdy programmers got started building a community at Mutiny. Gordon (Scoot McNairy) looked for what's next. And Joe walked off into the Texas Hill Country, looking for whatever might make him whole.

But you've read my first four chapters of this story. You know this already!

We've got a ways to go yet. So, I better get back to telling the story of Halt and Catch Fire and the eventful year of 1985.

"You made this a place without a boss, and that sounds really nice." - Donna Clark, "SETI"

It was March 1985, and Donna Clark had just arrived at Mutiny to start work. She walked in the door and was immediately met by chaos. Busy chaos, the improvisational and rowdy kind you'd find with a house full of coders, no bosses, and a whole lot of work to get done. Business was good, but that came with its own problems. A bigger network meant more connections, more computers, and more power. All things that needed to be taken care of. But Donna had just arrived, and she hadn't even put her lunch in the fridge yet.

All around her chaos swirled, games were crashing, and coders made tasteless jokes. Donna had wanted this, had chosen it. But this wasn’t getting her hands on metal, it was the necessary yet unpleasant work of management. She did not enjoy this. Nevertheless, it had to be done, and she had to juggle a dozen different things at once. Go, go, do, do, fix, fix. She could rest in twelve hours. Maybe.

She walked by Cameron's office onto the next crisis. But our focus stayed with the founder of Mutiny. Outside, the programmers swirled about like a pizza fueled hurricane. Inside, she was in control, personally helping a Mutiny subscriber who was stuck on a puzzle in "Parallax". Cameron was calm yet firm, helpful, and fully in control. Whatever was going on throughout the rest of the house didn't matter. What mattered was that this interaction, this connection, was made and made right.

Back outside Cameron’s inner sanctum, Donna broke up a fight between Yo-Yo (Cooper Andrews) and Lev (August Emerson) over whether or not Yo-Yo's backgammon was too memory intensive. She found a solution that worked, even if Yo-Yo walked away unhappy. She then walked into Cameron's office and they had a disagreement. Donna wanted to take down the network to fix the power situation; Cameron refused to take the network down. Both were right. It didn't matter, because Yo-Yo angrily tried to play Atari, and accidentally blew the power. Not only to the house, but also to the block.

Later on, the power came back on! Because Cameron directed the programmers to connect extension cords to their neighbors' external outlets. Donna did not agree that this was a solution, and implored Cameron to do her job as de-facto CEO (remember, there were no titles at Mutiny) and actually deal with it for real. Cameron just brushed her off, saying the power company’ll send a bill and they'll pay it. It would take care of itself. But it didn’t take care of itself. It was Donna who would have to fix it. Without trying, Donna had settled into being Mutiny's "mom". She was already a mom at home, why the heck would she want to be a mom at work? Cameron got frustrated at Donna's frustration, telling her if she didn't want to do those things, don't do them. They disagreed, but the work continued, because they were a team.

Later on, Cameron went to meet her XT source, and Donna came to back her up. The "source" turned out to be a skeevy fence named Rick (Niko Nicotera). Cameron just wanted the hardware, but Donna wanted to make sure they were getting what they paid for. But when the guy tried to jack up the price, Cameron held firm. She may not have been on board for due diligence and the boring work of business. But an agreement was an agreement. When Cameron cared about something, she was stubborn as hell. The skeevy fence relented, sleazily hitting on Donna on the way out.

Unfortunately, the skeevemaster was a fraud, selling them counterfeit XTs. Since Cameron couldn't code in Chinese, these were useless. Buyer beware. Donna and Cameron went to a dive bar to drink and talk and wait for the fence to show so they could ask for a refund. Here the conversation worked its way around to Donna's need for Cameron to be the boss. As much as a company without a boss sounded nice, there were decisions to make and responsibilities that needed done. Donna didn't sign up to handle all of this; she wanted to work on the things she wanted to work on as well. They agreed that if Cameron would take on some of the management responsibility, Donna could work in the guts of the hardware and also on a new project involving a chat without games. Cameron agreed. And then the fence showed up.

Donna and Cameron were a united front, asking for their money back. The fence slammed Cameron against a column in the bar, Donna de-escalated, and they left. But not before Cameron stole the keys to his van! At first Cameron was just gonna steal their money back, but Donna realized he had two brand new XTs in their boxes. They stole his stolen goods and got away. Donna and Cameron got it done.

Donna returned home that night, tired and probably a little drunk. Eighteen months ago she was working for Texas Instruments in a dead-end job. Now she was breaking into vans to steal servers from a thief. Such was life in a start-up.

She had missed Gordon's big day: He got his big check (over $830,000) from Cardiff being sold. Donna cared about Gordon, and of course she cared about Joanie (Morgan Hinkleman) and Haley (Alana Cavanaugh). But Mutiny was her life now.

Meanwhile, Cameron went on a road trip out into the Texas countryside. Her destination: a prison. She was the ride for the latest prisoner being released there. John "Bos" Bosworth (Toby Huss) was a free man once more.

"You get nothing. Not one red cent." - Nathan Cardiff, "SETI"

Gordon had built the Giant Pro. It was a fine computer. But Nathan Cardiff was ready to sell, to a foreign buyer who only wanted the patents. Cardiff's fifty years came to an end. Gordon was out of a job, but he got a big check as a consolation prize.

Meanwhile, Joe had started a new life. His hike in the Texas hills found Sara Wheeler (Aleksa Palladino). She was a classmate from college, and also the daughter of Jacob Wheeler (James Cromwell), the CEO of oil giant Westgroup and one of the richest men in Texas. Whether a moment of serendipity, or the result of Joe knowing exactly what he was doing, they were happy together. Despite how he left Cardiff, burning the first shipment of Giants being his resignation letter, he would get a payout from the sale as well. He wanted to use the money to start his own company out in Silicon Valley. There he and Sara would make a new life for themselves.

At Cardiff, Gordon and Joe sat with the old men waiting for their payout. Every single shareholder had a larger share than they did, so that left an uncomfortable amount of time for them to talk. Gordon was mad, but then he just started talking to Joe. By the end they almost sounded like friends.

Nathan wasn't happy to see Gordon, but he gave him his check and sent him on his way. For Joe, however, he had special plans. He took the check (minus the amount of the burnt shipment) and tore it up. Joe would get nothing. Why? Nathan was happy to let him know:

You destroy lives. You cost dozens of good, honest people their jobs. You sent my SVP of Sales, my friend John Bosworth to prison, and for what? A doorstop of a computer with a fancy screen and no legacy.

Joe lied to Gordon in the elevator, ashamed to admit the truth. Gordon looked forward to building again, which Joe liked. The Builder was always building, after all.

Gordon was left with a lot of money and had plans to celebrate with Donna and the girls. But Donna was busy at work, in turn arguing with Cameron and stealing XTs from Cameron's "guy". The girls were sad Donna wasn't there to celebrate. At least until Gordon said they could get ice cream at Braum's for dinner. Gordon had won. He talked with the girls about whether or not they were rich, and joked about how you can't just buy one elephant. It was a sweet moment for Gordon the parent. Until his nose started bleeding.

Joe went back to Austin, empty handed. His and Sara's plans for California went up in smoke. He asked if she believed the nice things she had said at their dinner party the night before. She did. He admitted he didn't have the money and asked her to marry him. Despite some reservations, Sara said yes.

But that night, as she slept, Joe logged on to Mutiny. With a generic handle (USER85), he engaged in a game of Tank Battle with CAMHOWE. They chatted for a bit, Cameron unaware who she was talking to the whole time.

"Success is no Sunday drive. It's not another to-do tacked to the fridge." - Timothy Bondham, "New Coke"

Since Cameron had founded it, Mutiny had grown and developed a loyal audience for their games. But they had plateaued, and to continue to grow they needed to get serious about their business. Donna and Cameron had already come to an agreement for sharing the load of leadership. And Cameron tapped Bos to help take care of business as well. That would help the situation. But the network was strained and needed to be expanded. Which meant money. A lot of money, more even than what Gordon had available. Mutiny would have to find a venture capitalist (VC).

They met with one, Timothy Bondham. He was not impressed. Mutiny had only developed two games over its lifetime (Tank Battle and the multi-chapter Parallax). They were also limited primarily to Commodore systems. And online gaming appeared to be a tiny market. After all, only a fraction of Americans even owned a computer in 1985. And only a fraction of them had modems and were on networks. Online games could be the future, sure, but having potential is not a guarantee.

Bondham wasn't just resistant because of the numbers. He went beyond that, asking Cameron and Donna about kids. Specifically, if they wanted them. It wasn’t the kind of question he would have asked, for example, Joe and Gordon. It was clear he had no intention of funding a company run by women. Mutiny would have to find another option.

What's more, Cameron's decision to hire Bos to help out with the business wasn't going as she had planned. Bos appreciated the offer and was trying to help out. But the programmers were being annoying, leaving license plates and soap in his seat, and reading his last letter to Cameron from prison as a joke. Ordinarily, Bos could tolerate this kind of shit, even give back good-naturedly. But he needed some time to try to get back into being a free man and to see if there was anything in his life before Cameron that he could salvage.

Gordon, meanwhile, had a lot of money, and a lot of time on his hands. He built a hell of a command center, with one brand new Atari computer and also a brand-new Commodore. He also had a book to help him learn C. He was set to get to work. But had no idea which way to go. He chose more cocaine, and logged on to Mutiny.

There he found that there was a problem with Tank Battle. It didn't matter who shot first, who was destroyed was pretty much random. In a cocaine fueled mania, he went over to let the Mutiny team know he had a solution. He asked Stan (Randy Havens) to pick up the girls. His solution was actually brilliant; his decision to send Stan without letting the school know less so. They called Donna at Mutiny saying someone had tried to kidnap the girls. Gordon took care of it and bribed the Mutiny team with all the pizza and soda they could order for a month.

Fresh off their fruitless VC mission, Donna and Cameron had to deal with another issue. Someone had taken their Parallax code and made an improved version with color and better graphics! The culprit was easy to find, as he signed his code: a programmer named Tom Rendon (Mark O'Brien).

Donna and Cameron went to confront Tom, who freely admitted what he did, and offered to tell them how he did it. He was a firm believer in an open coding community, where it was a virtue to take existing code and improve upon it. Donna disagreed on business grounds. Cameron disagreed because she didn't like people taking her creations.

Later on, both Gordon and the Mutiny team realized that Tom had been busy in another way. He had created a software Private Branch Exchange (PBX) to allow multiple modems to connect to Mutiny through one phone line. Mutiny had a freeloader problem. Donna moved to planning a legal strategy against Tom. Cameron tried another way: she offered Tom a job. And by offered, I mean hired, without letting Donna know. Donna had wasted her afternoon on a now meaningless legal strategy. She agreed to Cameron's decision but told her to bid $20k instead of the $25k Cameron offered. And made it clear that if Cameron refused, she could use Donna's salary because she would be done. The partnership held, but barely.

Gordon, meanwhile, took the PBX revelation and ran with that. Without Donna asking him, and without Cameron's knowledge, he decided he was gonna map Mutiny's network, to find everyone (legit or not) who was on it. A real idea in place, Gordon was ready to do what he did. He built, learning how to code C along the way. The cocaine went into the trash; only Jolt Cola, the music of 10cc, and his sense of purpose would fuel him from now on.

"Drake or Hen, your choice." - Eugene Bowditch, "New Coke"

His California dreams dashed, Joe had to find a plan B. And he had to do it with a work history where in his last two jobs he had destroyed a server room and burnt a truck full of new computers. It wasn't gonna be easy. Fortunately, Jacob was willing to give him a job. With no other real option to get back to work, Joe took it. He shed his more casual look and returned to a suit. He was back in Dallas and on his way...to the basement to join the Westgroup Data Entry team. His manager Eugene Bowditch (James DuMont) watched his personal phone usage and touted the department hunting decoy painting contest. It was enough for him, but not for Joe.

Apparently, Joe getting sent to the basement was because of Sara's first husband named Peter. He had gotten Jacob into some bad business deals and then fled town when they went south. Jacob did not want to make that mistake again. He wanted to see what Joe was made of. So, he made sure he had the most soul-crushing job Joe could imagine. Joe tried to make the best of it, but enough was enough. He called Jacob's secretary and scheduled a meeting, never breaking eye contact with Eugene when he did it. Joe's great idea: Combine Data Entry and Analytics. Jacob agreed immediately; Joe could have asked for so much more.

While Joe was reporting daily to his very own purgatory, Gordon was in heaven, working hard on his mapping project. He'd get up, drink Jolt Cola, code, and go to bed. He took care of the girls as well, because Donna was constantly at work dealing with Mutiny. He had some issues with his hands, at times unable to grasp anything with any strength. But all in all, he was doing great.

Joe and Sara decided they wanted to throw a dinner party, now that they were settled in Dallas. Sara would invite a couple of her friends, and Joe could invite his Dallas friends. Gordon was the closest thing to a friend Joe had in Dallas, in the sense that he would still talk to him. So, Joe invited him and Donna. Donna had no intention of going. But Gordon was receptive to it. They set plans as they contemplated exactly what kind of woman Joe's fiancée would be.

Bos took time away from Mutiny to try to get back to normal. He stopped by Barry's (Mike Pniewski) to pick up his Mustang. And he met his ex-wife Ginny (Andrea Powelli) in a motel to have sex. It looked like he might be able to rebuild his life as he knew it.

But it turned out that there was no chance at getting back together with Ginny. And worse, she had met him to soften the blow that she didn't want him at their son James' (Ross Philips) rehearsal dinner and wedding. The days of Genni and James being satellites orbiting the "big man" were over.

He went to Galveston, but stayed parked across the street in his Mustang. James came over to talk to him, and he was able to give his planned rehearsal dinner speech to him there. When James and his soon to be wife Lisa (Gabrielle Byndloss) came to the valet for their car, Bos had left them the Mustang. He'd return to Dallas by bus. There was no return to his past life available.

Meanwhile, the dinner party happened, and Donna and Gordon met Sara. She was nothing like how they pictured, meaning she was actually a genuinely impressive person to them. The dinner was awkward but not that awkward. Joe kept playing a character that Sara didn't recognize, trying to impress Gordon. Gordon, for his part, was being the know-it-all he sometimes liked to play. He asked Joe why he was holding out on Sara about the money. Joe admitted he didn't get any money.

From there nothing particularly important happened. Joe got up to answer the phone at one point; the line was silent on the other end. Joe and Gordon drank some Sancerre after dinner and talked. Gordon said Joe should have said something about the money. He wouldn't have given Joe any of his, but he would have talked to Nathan. The conversation felt loose, as loose as Joe could ever feel. It felt like two friends talking. The party was then broken up a bit early by Donna. The babysitter had called and said Mutiny was having a major issue.

"This is your job, Donna... I'm here" - Cameron Howe, "The Way In"

Tom's start at Mutiny was a little rocky. He and Cameron both tried to connect, but they were just not finding the right wavelength to do so. What's more, Tom had his own ideas about what made a great game. He was more focused on the technical improvements one could show off with a game, whereas Cameron was more focused on telling a story with the game. This resulted in friction, as the rest of the programmers typically let Cameron run things and tell them what to do.

Furthermore, Tom didn't jibe with how Cameron handled the team meetings. This came to a head during the team feedback session on the latest chapter of Parallax. Whereas the other programmers just mumbled their assent to her work or found something they could compliment (without discussing the story or gameplay), he told the truth. He felt the chapter was just a mashup of two prior chapters and that he wanted to be doing anything else than playing it. Cameron probably should have taken his suggestion to tell her all of this in private.

Right before Gordon and Donna (who had not told Cameron who she was having dinner with) left for Joe and Sara's, Gordon had started his mapping project running. Named Sonaris, he was excited to see what it would turn up, and how it would help Mutiny (and Donna) out. He would run it while they were gone because it wouldn't interrupt his important work. Nothing ever goes wrong with unsupervised and untested code, right?

Cameron was sitting in her office, thinking about what Tom had said when Yo-Yo walked in with bad news: Something was up on the Mutiny network, and they needed her right now. She had to handle it, because Donna was at dinner and her office was also her home. Somebody had uploaded code to the network, and it was attacking both Mutiny and all of its users, writing over their files. It was destroying games and users' files at an alarmingly fast rate. Tom suggested they quarantine all remaining unaffected systems, but Cameron did not want the network to go down. One of the programmers was able to find a name for the program causing the havoc: Sonaris. She called Donna's house, but the babysitter wouldn't give her the number of where she was. After pressing, the babysitter gave the number to her. She called. Joe answered. She couldn't say anything and hung up. With no choice, she made the tough call to take the network down.

Later, Tom was giving Cameron the situation. It was bad. Most of Parallax was gone. The other games had been overwritten as well. Each game would have to be rebuilt, and new disks would have to be sent out before the network could be put back up. Just then, a van door could be heard out front of the house. Donna (and Gordon) were here.

Donna walked up and Cameron stormed out, angry and upset. And that was before Gordon admitted he wrote Sonaris. And that he had secretly been paying Mutiny's bills (at Donna's request) while they were short on money. Gordon offered to help, but understandably Cameron refused. Donna told him to go home. He'd done enough already. When he got back, he started unplugging his command center. However, his hands would not cooperate, and he knocked the Commodore over in frustration.

Donna and Cameron, meanwhile, had a talk. Cameron was angry at Gordon for destroying her network. But she was also angry at Donna for not telling her what Gordon was doing. And for not telling her that Donna was having Gordon pay bills behind her back. But most of all, she was angry at Donna for not telling her that the dinner party was with Joe. Donna pushed back on that, telling Cameron directly that she didn't tell her because she knew she'd hold it against her.

Cameron was angry about those things at Donna. But she was mostly frustrated with the fact that as committed to Mutiny Donna was, she had her own life. A dumbass husband, children, and a house to go home to after work. Cameron had...Mutiny. And Gordon might have blown that up. She told Donna to go home to her husband. Donna almost did but instead walked back into Mutiny and asked Lev what she can do to help. Only later, after the sun rose, did she go home, falling asleep as she clutched the Mutiny chat logs to her chest.

While the rest of the programmers crashed where they were after the long night, Cameron was still awake. She looked at the admin console for Mutiny. What had been full of dozens upon dozens of users just a day earlier had zeroes across the board. It was all too much; Cameron had a panic attack. Tom walked in and immediately knew what to do. He reminded her to breathe and asked her questions about one of the early chapters of Parallax. She focused on answering the questions and slowly started breathing again. Tom didn't hate Parallax, he loved it, and he loved the work Cameron did. And he knew she'd do great work again. In one of the worst moments of Cameron's life, Tom was there for her.

"A way in" - Joe MacMillan, "The Way In"

When Joe clocked in and saw the unpainted hunting decoy on his desk, which he had been given despite not asking to be a part of the contest, Joe knew it was time. He told Eugene to meet him in the server room. Joe had a plan, and it was time to put it into place. He'd get rid of Eugene, consolidate Data Entry and Analytics, and build out his own team deep in the headquarters of Westgroup. It wasn't the heights of what Joe had dreamed, but it was an honest project with the blessing of Jacob. And it was about to begin.

He walked into the server room and the clock ticked over to 9:00AM. Right on cue, the mainframes all whirred to life. Turns out all of this very expensive machinery ran on the same hours as the Data Entry team: 9-5. That left 16 hours a day they weren't being used!

Joe went back to work. Eugene Bowditch earned a stay of execution that day. Forget the old plan. Joe had a new plan.

It was his way in.

Next week: Cameron has a great idea, Gordon visits his brother, and Donna sings Haley to sleep.

I'll be running a weekly piece on Halt and Catch Fire every Thursday until November. If you enjoyed this piece, share it with a friend!

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