Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Spoilers for Season 4 of Halt and Catch Fire ahead.
We’ve reached the end for Halt and Catch Fire, AMC’s drama series about the dawn of the personal-computing/internet age. What began as a low-rated failure has become a low-rated cult success, and this Saturday’s two-part finale will get a chance to send the show off satisfyingly. But I’m just here to tell you, “satisfyingly” is going to mean that Donna comes out on top, or else there is going to be HELL TO PAY.
Okay, perhaps that’s too strong a statement, but this is important. Halt and Catch Fire has always been a four-character ensemble (with Bos as the fifth Beatle, sure), but those characters have never been treated equally. The first season centered on Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) and Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy), who teamed up to take down IBM or some such, recruiting Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis) as the wunderkind programmer. Donna (Kerry Bishé) was Gordon’s wife, and though she had a job working for Texas Instruments and sometimes helped Gordon with problem-solving on his own project, she was very much sidelined as the Wife of the main character.
The much-celebrated pivot of the series as it entered Season 2 changed everything, Donna quit her job at TI and instead of accepting a job at her husband’s new venture, she and Cameron broke off to start their own gaming company, Mutiny. This is where Halt and Catch Fire not only got good but where it established its emotional baselines for the rest of the series. Donna and Cameron were oddly matched — the former was business-oriented; the latter an emotional wild card — but made for an exciting team as they both grabbed at power and control for the first time in their careers. Mutiny was a scrappy underdog that season, and it was easy to root for them to pull it all together.
By the end of the third season, however, the churning gears of plot had brought things around full circle. Donna and Cameron had developed mistrust over some business decisions; Joe had rehabilitated his image and earned back the trust of Gordon (whose marriage to Donna had ended) and Cameron. The upshot, in a devastating series of events as Season 3 ended, was that Joe, Gordon, and Cameron went into business together, leaving Donna out in the cold.
Season 4 has been a rough one for Donna. The flash forward in time revealed a Donna who had been marinating in her bitterness for a while, having become a merciless and difficult-to-please venture capitalist. As she played into and fought against the stereotype of the ball-busting businesswoman, Donna had to basically stare in through the church-glass window at her former friends and business partners as they all more or less re-formed the family unit without her. This got further complicated by the fact that her one daughter maintained a close friendship with Cameron while the other eventually went to go work for Gordon and Joe’s company. Donna had successfully been cast into the role of the wicked witch, and the injustice of it all felt palpable. The season couldn’t end with Donna drunk, nasty, and ostracized, could it?
This was where I became determined: either Halt and Catch Fire ends with Donna on top, or else. Circumstances seemed to be on my side. For one thing, Halt and Catch Fire has always been cyclical, with certain characters riding high only to suffer a fall, and vice versa. Donna reaching her low point — pulled over for drunk driving and kicked off her company’s web-browser project — at mid-season felt like the perfect setup for a comeback story.
But the twist in the last couple episodes might change things. Gordon’s death — a not entirely unexpected but still very sad development — has thrust Donna back into a role she’s often struggled against: the good wife and dutiful mother. Which isn’t to say Donna is a bad mom; she’s actually a pretty great mom. But as the flashback scenes in the most recent episode reminded us, Donna had to fight hard to keep from being sidelined by the fact that she was expected to raise the kids while Gordon worked. They made such a good team when they worked together! But the social order was stacked up against Donna from the beginning.
In the wake of Gordon’s death, we saw Donna once again thrust into the role of mother first. Comforting her daughters, then fighting with them, all while cleaning out Gordon’s home in order to put everything back in order. The way Halt and Catch Fire often leaps into the future, I have no doubt that this weekend’s finale may well find Donna and her girls well past the grieving process, giving Donna an opportunity for professional success. Certainly her and Cameron’s reconciliation opened that door.
If Halt and Catch Fire, which began so rockily with a Joe/Gordon/Cameron partnership can end — even bittersweetly — on a Donna/Cameron/Joe partnership, it would put a button on one of the best character evolutions on TV in a while.
