Halt and Catch Fire: Season 3

It's been a real delight to spend January digging through the sizable but not daunting 40-episode series of Halt and Catch Fire, a blindspot of mine when it aired not all that long ago at all. It's not that the show is profound or amazing or even exceedingly memorable. Rather, the longer it goes - the more time passes on the show, the more time you get to spend with these four characters - the more immersive and real it all feels. One of the coolest parts about Mad Men was seeing these characters in 1960, products of the 1950s and the very conservative America they'd been successful in, and then seeing who they had become by 1971 after enduring not just ten years of age and experience, but specifically enduring the 1960s.

Where am I going with all of this? Halt and Catch Fire did something extremely cool in Season 3, which is a mid-season four-year time jump. Not enough shows do time jumps at all, and when they do it's almost always between seasons. I get it - seasons have narrative arcs that the time between seasons can easily ignore. It was just so bold and refreshing to see this AMC show decide that it didn't need all ten episodes of its third season to conclude its third season arc, and to go ahead and let the final two stand as a weird preview of sorts for the fourth and final season.

Specifically, the show jumps from 1986 to 1990, and in doing so leaves all of its computer hardware and software development storylines in the dust to prepare to tackle the early years of the Internet. Four years isn't a massive jump - they had to recast Gordon and Donna's daughters, but little else - but it's a massive jump from one "era" of the information revolution to another. In just two and a half seasons, the show had brought us from the proto-PC days of 1983 to the arrival of the NES in 1986. Why bother keeping up that same pace just to mull around in the late '80s instead of jumping all the way ahead for some more big innovations? (One can almost envision the show's hypothetical fifth and sixth seasons involving an MP3 player in 2001 and a smart phone in 2007. Why not?)

I'm also a sucker for era-appropriate details, and just as I loved the way Mad Men picked character-appropriate wardrobe evolutions, I mean, let me take a minute just to compare what the four main characters looked like in Season 1's 1983 -

- and what they looked like by Season 3's 1990 -

I mean, this is perfect. Joe the salesman goes from being a run-of-the-mill '80s "suit" to having the distinguished "tech guy" glasses-and-beard look in 1990, almost ahead of his time. This is the exact opposite of what's happened to the nerdier engineer Gordon, who had the very 1970s-appropriate glasses and beard in the early '80s but by 1990 has caught up with the late '80s "sitcom dad" look - glasses-free, clean shave, and plain haircut. Meanwhile, Donna - a housewife in 1983 who'd left a promising career behind in order to, uh, home-make, is just the absolute image of old-school maternal, looking older than her years with the pastel colors and big bow on her blouse - a sharp contrast to young punk-anarchist Cameron with the short hair and military-cut sweaters. But by 1990, Cameron is a slightly mellowed out married woman, and her wardrobe is very much that of a typical thirty-ish woman in 1990, while Donna is all the way back in the game, earth tones and short hair and an overall "power woman" look, very much no longer a housewife, or even a wife at all.

So in short, Joe and Gordon have switched looks, but Joe remains about ten years ahead of Gordon the whole way through the reversal, and Donna has sharpened up on her way out of a marriage while Cameron is softening out on her way into one.

You know, reading that back - that doesn't even begin to summarize the depths of Donna, Cameron, or their complicated and increasingly show-centric relationship. It's not enough to define these women in 1983 and 1990 by their marital status. Instead here are four stills of the pair of them that, I mean, a picture is worth a thousand words, right?

Season 1, first meeting (early 1983):


Season 2 premiere (late 1984 or early 1985):


Season 3 premiere (1986?):


Season 3 finale (1990):

Does this make more sense? Do you get a sense now of how Donna used to feel threatened by, or jealous of, the younger and edgier Cameron? How she used to see in her, perhaps, a vision of who she once was, and could still be? And how Cameron saw Donna, perhaps, as a future road she didn't want to go down? But how after years of working together, they've almost switched places in terms of who's wielding power over who, and which one feels more threatened by the other, and how much of that growth and change is conveyed in wardrobe decisions, but how the fashion still feels authentic to the time period on each character at all times? Yeah, I love that shit.

Anyway, this show isn't Mad Men, but I completely understand now what people meant when they said "it became the new Mad Men once it stopped trying to be Mad Men."