Halt and Catch Fire Season 4 Episode 8 Review
Halt and Catch Fire is, or was, a drama about the tech industry. Non this calendar week, though. "Goodwill," 1 of the most important and all-time episodes of the entire series, goes by with no tech talk any. The various enterprises that meant so much to the characters, that consumed so much of their lives, are mentioned, in passing, a grand total of three times. The Symphonic, the Giant, Comet — they each go a line or two, all of them vague allusions to something that once happened in the by or might happen in the hereafter. In the end they were just a platform on which something much more important was congenital: life, and the connections the serial' main characters made during its course. For Gordon Clark, that life has run its course. That's all his family, his friends, and the evidence that brought them to us intendance about anymore.
In that light, this epochal episode is a stunt on the order of 1 of Game of Thrones' big boxing setpieces or Breaking Bad's activity and suspense thrillers. Written past Zack Whedon and directed past series co-creator Christopher Cantwell, it's a confident, courageous demonstration of the evidence's strengths, which from effectually the stop of Season 1 onward accept been on display like a product at a computer-industry convention. The tech stuff served as the series' hook, its anchor, and, in the sense that the characters had to navigate the same Scylla-and-Charybdis passage between creativity and commerce equally its creators, its apologue. Now, at Halt's deepest and darkest moment, information technology takes a back seat to the thing at which the show has always proven most adept: depicting the relationships between people who have no more of a straightforward story arc, and no greater supply of easy answers, than any of us watching information technology do.
It shouldn't surprise the states to meet that what happens hither reflects the glow of other highlights from the series' quaternary and terminal flavour. Literally, in one case: the lens-flare glare that marked Gordon's passage is captivated and refracted into the blinding sunlight of the last flashback to a moment in his life when he and Donna nearly parted forever, just didn't, promising in vain that they never would. The near-wordless relay of terrible news from i grapheme to another that characterized the previous episode's stunning concluding minutes gets replayed here, only verbally, as anybody in Gordon'south life — his ex-wife Donna, his children Haley and Joanie, his partner Joe, his friends Cameron and Boz, his girlfriend Katie — deals with his death, or don't.
Moreover, the subject affair of the individual conversations and encounters between the characters gets picked up from previous such exchanges throughout the series and passed around anew. Cam and Tom'south bittersweet adieu to their failed wedlock weeks ago, for case, now reads similar a prologue to Gordon and Donna'south. John Bosworth's tender but determined efforts to strength his devastated friend Joe to tend to his torso's needs, all only tricking him into eating when he has no appetite for life, much less nutrient, is a totally unexpected and achingly powerful echo of the way he parented Cameron when she was looking for a father and he for a child; "he made Joe eat like he's his son," I managed to write in my notes before gasping in pain. And the way Katie, the newest member of the circle, essentially flees the scene rather than succumb to the suffering inherent in loving someone who's lost to you — she can't even bring herself to say goodbye to Gordon's daughters — is a Joe MacMillan cut-and-run replayed every bit tragedy rather than antiheroic farce.
Not all of the resonant notes are ones of discord, however. When Joanie blows up at Donna after her failure to apply to college comes to light as the two of them make clean out her room, it feels like a folio torn from the "everyone yell at everyone else" playbook of the evidence's flawed outset season, simply hither it feels less like cheap heat and more than like the coping mechanism of a broken spirit that information technology really is. Cam and Joanie wind up joking about it, in fact. Her kid sister Haley has been developed during this season into a effigy with Cameron's brilliance and Joe's scarlet letter of potential societal bigotry, but she'south no mere rehash of either of them. When Joe insists that they listen to her presumably wild culling-generation music in the car together on the style to Goodwill to retrieve one of Gordon'due south sweaters (the forced levity of that sequence's resolution is but gutting), it winds up being not some anarchism-grrrl ring she assumed he'd be also old to sympathize and he assumed in plough that their shared status as queer would aid him connect with her over, but the nonetheless weird-sounding novelty hitting "Fish Heads" by Barnes & Barnes. In one of the most unexpectedly funny and unique moments of the night, Joe looks at her similar she'd just grown a fish head the 2nd it comes on.
It'due south an inimitable beat, and that more than annihilation else is what the episode is based on: moments that couldn't be done on any other prove, considering they are so rooted in these characters. The slow arroyo Donna and Cameron make toward one another — illustrated past shots in which the 2 women are never shown face to face, always divided by and seemingly talking correct into foregrounded walls until they finally reach rapprochement, sitting adjacent and facing the same direction, leftward, into the past.
The gutted, exhausted look on Joe's face (courtesy of career-best work from actor Lee Pace) every bit he sits with the remainder of the group at dinner — hollow-eyed, all he can do to express his loss and his desire to do right by his friends is shudder out a non-sequitur apology to Haley that he was unable to call back her father's sweater from Goodwill, and then allow chat to continue effectually him until he finally seems able to truly hear it.
Finally, the flashbacks to Gordon and Donna as young, adorable, struggling newlyweds and new parents that frame the episode — alluded to by Katie in the form of a photo of them from that era that she first resented and and then grew to love, alluded to by the evidence itself concluding week with the paradigm of Donna and baby Joanie that was the last matter he saw before he died, hither revealed to exist what he saw when he returned to them after running out following a brutal fight well-nigh their future. At the time, he regained the forcefulness he needed to commit to their lives together by jumping into the quarry lake only Donna had ever had the guts to swoop into before; he takes the plunge, then goes back to his home and the people who made it. "Don't yous ever practise that to me once more," she tells him as they encompass. "I won't." With that pledge never to leave her, already cleaved in the futurity perfect tense, he leaves united states of america.
Sean T. Collins ( @theseantcollins ) writes about Television for Rolling Stone , Vulture , the Observer , and anyplace that volition have him , really. He and his family live on Long Island.
Where to Stream Halt and Take hold of Fire
Source: https://decider.com/2017/10/09/halt-and-catch-fire-recap-season-four-episode-eight/
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