Critics everywhere felt that Halt and Catch Fire rounded a corner in its second season, and it's easy to see why. A lot of the issues Season 1 had - namely, that it looked and felt like a very inferior Mad Men clone - were solved by refocusing and rebooting.
Gone already in the premiere is Cardiff Electric, the company that all four of the main characters worked at throughout a solid but tropey first season. Now each of the four is off doing their own thing - and importantly, the two women are doing the same thing, which is running a computer game company in the mid-'80s and kinda sorta building or at least discovering the foundation of the modern Internet in the process. ("These people, when they're done playing their games with each other, they'll stay connected for half an hour and just... chat!")
Punted off to the margins of their story is Donna's husband, Gordon, who made all kinds of money from Cardiff but finds himself without a new passion project. He's a hardware guy in an increasingly software-oriented world. The writers solved this issue by having him futz around with a brief obsession with solving lag issues in multiplayer gaming for a while before getting diagnosed with - hang on, looking it up - yeah, toxic encephalopathy. He's been huffing so much solder over the years that his neurons and brain are failing - how convenient, now our hardware guy doesn't need to come up with an interesting new project! Hey, writers' room - I can see you back there.
And then off on his own separate adventure entirely for almost the entire season is Joe, the central character from the first season, the Don Draper guy with a mystery to hide and no love lost for his business partners. However much time has jumped between seasons, Joe suddenly has a fiance we've never seen before and he's given a shitty job by his future father-in-law doing data entry. And then he turns the data entry job into a data processing job, then has an epiphany about renting out the company's computers after hours (and in doing so he ends up solving a processing power problem for Cameron and Donna back at their gaming company, Mutiny). And then by the season's end, in just a supreme dick move, he's infecting people's computers with viruses and selling them anti-virus software. He's a phenomenally shitty guy, but at the same time he's just a businessman in the '80s.
Anyway, I found the season - when binged, years later - really not actually any better than Season 1, and possibly less interesting. Even while I can see exactly why viewers in real time were much more into it. I think it has to do with hype and trust affecting a hindsight viewer like me. I can trust that the show is good, since people whose opinions I trust have said so, which helps me get through a perfectly ordinary first season and just enjoy the characters as I come to know them instead of worrying about where the plot is heading. And hype, on the other hand, might mean I'm looking for a drastic improvement in Season 2 and I'm disappointed I'm not really seeing one. Does that make sense? I hope it does!
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