11/5/2023 0 Comments Halt and catch fire seriesBut if I were to show you my notes from those scenes - up to and including the moment in the finale where Donna pauses too long after Cameron suggests they work together again - they would look like the all-caps rantings of a dangerous individual. (*) It speaks to how invested I’ve become in the show - a level of investment I never could have imagined even circa the COMDEX trip at the end of season one - that I would be that crazy in so many moments. Having them not be on speaking terms for so long (and much longer for the characters than for us) was painful, and every time there was a moment this season where an opportunity presented itself for them to reconnect, it was all I could do to not shout at the screen something like, “Call Cameron right now! Tell her that you beat her game! Tell her her game is amazing!”(*) Their partnership was the heart of seasons two and three, and their schism across the last ten episodes or so has been painful to endure, because the writers and directors and Mackenzie Davis and Kerry Bishé had done such amazing work at portraying these two women and what their bond meant to one another. Well, I knew I needed Cameron and Donna to reconnect. To instead build almost an entire finale - really, in hindsight, the majority of a series - around two friends realizing they want to work together again and create something? And to create something that we will never know anything about, other than that Donna was inspired to do it in that diner? That’s both new and entirely the whole point of this wonderful show, and I didn’t realize how badly I needed it until it happened. There have been many great endings to TV dramas involving death, or incarceration, or - as Cameron seems on the verge of doing before Donna has her brainstorm - characters heading off in search of fresh starts. It seems, even vaguely, like it will be traveling territory other shows have already staked out as their own, only to steer sharply into an area that is uniquely, marvelously, Halt‘s and Halt‘s alone, in a way that makes you wonder how anyone could have compared it to another show to begin with. Okay, maybe he was at times like Don Draper, but for the most part, the comparisons to past classics became an easy stick with which to beat a show that was still figuring itself out, and which conveniently was building its entire first season around its heroes building a thinly-veiled copy of someone else’s creation.īut I’m glad The Sopranos finale occurred to me when I watched Donna looking around that diner, not because it made me worried that some guy with a Members Only jacket was going to walk past her and generate 20,000 internet theories, but because it turned out to be the ideal setup for one of the most beautiful and original final exchanges between two main characters I’ve ever seen, these eight simple, magical words:Īnd that, my friends, is the story of Halt and Catch Fire in a nutshell, both within and without. The resemblance between the two diner scenes was superficial at best, just as Gordon was never much like Walter White (though his facial hair morphed several times), even as Joe was never really like Don Draper. That’s not really a fair parallel now, and it probably wasn’t even back then. Remember that when Halt premiered, many critics - myself included - dismissed it as Quality Drama karaoke, claiming bits and pieces of prior classics ( Mad Men, primarily) rather than bringing enough ideas of its own to the table, so it felt both surprising and weirdly apropos for one of its concluding moments to resemble Tony Soprano eating onion rings while Meadow parked her car outside. Late in Ten of Swords, the final episode of what has turned out to be a great, great series, I couldn’t help but laugh for a moment when the action paused so that Donna could look around at the customers of the diner where she and Cameron had eaten, while Cameron was outside getting something out of her truck. That always comes with a price, but I did them.” -Donna Halt and Catch Fire has come to an end, and I have many thoughts on the two-hour series finale, coming up just as soon as I bribe you with Centipede…
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