First things first: FUD, the title of the second episode of Halt and Catch Fire, stands for Fear, uncertainty, and doubt. (Apologies if the FU had you expecting something raunchy.) Its the acronym infamously wielded by another acronym, IBM, to crush its would-be competitors by spooking their opponents potential clients back in the Seventies and Eighties. And that unholy trinity is exactly what the company uses against Cardiff Electronics, when it drops its legal challenge to IBM refugee Joe MacMillans upstart personal-computer division in favor of hitting Cardiff right where it mortally wounds in the pocketbook.
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Coincidentally, fear, uncertainty, and doubt are precisely what this deft second episode does a lot to remove about AMCs new would-be hit series. Halts first proper installment plays in many ways like a response video to the pilot: It does to the pilots hackneyed presentation of alpha-male antihero tropes what Joe apparently did to IBMs data center before he disappeared damage, and lots of it. And just like IBM, who cashed in on an insurance windfall after Joes top-secret rampage, the series emerges from the rubble better off.
This time, we watch Joe reap what hes sown. The smirking, swaggering arrogance that made him so grating in the pilot turns out to be just that grating (and, we find out, unearned) arrogance. Hes so fixated on his grand vision of a new era in personal computing, so focused on coercing and cajoling his underlings and accomplices into playing ball, that he completely misses the totally obvious tools of retaliation at his former employers disposal. We later learn from IBMs chief goon that hes not just overconfident; he may be actually crazy. Hell, the best line in his pep talk, the bit about putting a ding in the universe, is stolen from Steve Jobs. You were just pretending, his mousy engineer Gordon Clark marvels. Youre like one of those guys who goes out and reads The Catcher in the Rye too many times and then decides to shoot a Beatle only in this story, Im the Beatle. This is the show stomping all over its own lead characters sophistry and sociopathy, and its glorious to watch.
The most unexpectedly compelling character, however, remains Joes opposite number, the beleaguered bossman John Bosworth. A lifetime of experience with drawling, balding good ol boys in bad suits has trained us to see him as a villain with no vision, an antagonist and obstacle to the more appealingly reckless creativity of Joe & co. Refreshingly, Halts writers and actor Toby Huss make Bosworth the shows most sympathetic figure. He hates lying to IBM not because hes afraid hell get caught, but because its wrong, and he knows hell have a hard time facing himself afterwards. And hes not just looking out for number one hes genuinely upset that so many people at Cardiff are at risk because of Joes shenanigans.
In fact, IBMs raid on Cardiffs clients is presented primarily as a series of mounting humiliations for Bosworth, from his failed attempts to chat up his buddy at the racquet club (him in awkward tennis whites, his associate fully suited) to his literal begging on the phone for the guy not to take his business elsewhere. Yet Bosworths still able to put his dismay and discomfort aside and sell Joes new leadership to the companys rank and file, knowing that sales job is required if the scheme is to work. Husss quiet Yup as Joe thanks Bosworth for the introduction was the hours most subtly troubling bit of acting.
Subtletys still not the shows strong suit, mind you. The camera work can be quite thoughtful the entire IBM legal-team sequence, for example, seemed to be told through geometric shapes on the screen, from the big rectangular lights and tables to the spreading phalanx of suits as they disperse in the parking lot to the slashing lines of the venetian blinds as our heroes watch them depart. The character work? Not so much. Unnecessarily shouty and strident, Halt exists in that Hollywood world where all business and creative success is echoed by aggression on the part of the successful.
That aggression is often sexual, though thankfully not violently so. From Gordon propping his wife Donna up on the kitchen counter after his big day to Cameron alternating insults and come-ons as she spars with Joe, youre left wondering if people here ever fuck because its a fun way to express affection, or if its always just a way to celebrate a touchdown and/or psych out an opponent. The subplot in which Gordon first lies, then comes clean about Camerons gender to Donna is far more interesting and effective in establishing both intimacy and shifting power dynamics between the couple.
Throughout the hour, the constant, zero-to-60 escalation of personal hostility between the protagonists is the shows least convincing, most annoying trait. Until the climactic parking-lot confrontation: Here, Joe and Gordon physically tussle like theyre in the middle of Mean Streets consciously un-glamorous billiard-parlor brawl. Joe reveals a torso full of scars and delivers a shirtless sob story about getting bullied damn near to death by jocks as a kid. Then he finally sells his compatriots on their shared mission in a way theyll buy: Were all unreasonable people, and progress depends on our changing the world to fit us, not the other way around. Thats a compelling, convincing brand of messianic megalomania, not least because it just might be true.
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But Joes still a salesman, scars or no. The story he spins for Cameron and Gordon is exactly what he told the stereo salesman he was looking for: a pitch that would solve the problems hed failed to anticipate. The tearful tale of getting chased off the roof by bullies brings bullied Gordon back into the fold; the brass balls it took to make it up landed brass-balled Cameron. And after this exponentially better episode, now were sold.
Previously: Abort, Retry, Fail?