Halt and Catch Fire - Close to the Metal - Review

For several weeks now, we’ve seen Cardiff Electric’s PC development team overcome obstacles including hardware limitations, hard business realities, funding problems, legal issue, and creative blocks. Crunched for time and desperate for results, the fourth episode of AMC’s summer series that takes us back to the 1980s PC-market wars, featured a heroic endeavor to conquer their newest obstacle – the dreaded computer crash and loss of unsaved data – right when they seem to be destined for greatness.

They did succeed, amongst sacrifice, bonding, and all of the other criteria required for a proper heroes’ story. Except if you’ve been paying attention, you’ve realized by now that there’s something very wrong with this tale. As the plot of this episode progresses, we learn this crash and the loss of data has all been a set up on the part of Joe MacMillan, who wanted to get the attention of a reporter visiting the office. But on a larger scale, the whole mission seems to be based on avarice, insecurity, and every other character flaw that brings traditional heroes in literature to unfortunate ends.

The quest for this mid-level computer company to become a player in the PC market was launched by deception. Its champion, MacMillan, is a man who it’s been hinted at has some serious mental stability issues. Our hero, Gordon Clark, is an average Joe, a man with a wife he doesn’t deserve, two good kids and a good life, but he can’t get past his own ego to put his family first for once. And in a shocking twist, John Bosworth, a man who seemed to be a truly innocent victim in all of this, orchestrated a brutal beating of MacMillan, blending the boundaries between right and wrong and making MacMillan the sympathetic one. 

The two characters who truly seem to be the most principled are the two regular females in the story. The first is Cameron Howe – whose life, on the surface, seems the most messed up. The sometimes homeless, punk-rock, 20-something overcame her hurt from learning that Gordon had joked about her being “white trash” and stepped back before vandalizing his home. Donna, Gordon’s wife, who had reason to be angry at Cameron for scaring and abandoning her kids, reached out to Cameron, and praised and comforted her in what was one of the more touching scenes from this episode.

The voice of perspective came in the form of an outsider – a reporter invited to write a piece on the company and an audience for the apparent near catastrophe. The reporter, Ron Cane, puts the odds of this group succeeding in becoming a serious PC competitor, at about the same as the guy who fixes his washer and dryer.

While I’ll admit I’ve struggled a little with this series keeping my attention – maybe I’m too used to 21st century landscapes and technology to go back to a world where computer backups were kept on floppy disks – the strength of the series is the depth of the character writing, and this is turning out to be an enjoyable summer story. And as the show progresses and the plot deepens, the series has been continuing to become a little more engrossing each week. So have you been watching the series?  If yes, what did you think of this episode? Sound off in the comments.