Favorite Characters: Donna Clark (Halt and Catch Fire)

I came to Halt and Catch Fire for Lee Pace, but Donna is the biggest reason I stayed through the rocky first season.  I just love this character, beautifully played by Kerry Bishé, and even when Donna loses her way a bit, I still root for her to find her way back (some Donna-related spoilers.)

At the start of the series, Cardiff Electric has the most dysfunctional dream team ever in Joe, Gordon, and Cameron – there’s plenty of talent and knowhow there, but their interpersonal relations are a mess, and it’s a wonder they get anything done at all in Cardiff’s venture to expand into personal computing.  As they careen from crisis to crisis in developing the Giant, it becomes clear that the real lynchpin of the project is someone who doesn’t even work for Cardiff:  Gordon’s wife Donna.  A Texas Instruments engineer working well below her potential, Donna envies Gordon’s talk of the inventive and challenging work he’s doing at Cardiff.  Where he sees roadblocks, Donna sees opportunities for innovation.

Donna’s creativity is instrumental in bringing about one of the Giant’s important design features.  Her technical skills and attention to detail is also valuable – when a major meltdown threatens the computer’s OS, Donna is literally called in to save the day, retrieving vital data in a painstakingly meticulous process.  There’s no way the Giant could reach fruition without Donna.

As the show goes on and Donna gets more involved in working with the other characters, she finds herself taking on another essential, albeit undesirable, role:  that of team mom.  In a crew of mavericks with more talent than sense, tons of important-but-mundane things would get dropped completely if it weren’t for Donna cleaning up after everyone.  This is especially true when she and Cameron get their own gaming operation, Mutiny, off the ground.  While Cameron creates, it often falls to Donna to put out fires, manage the staff, and keep the lights on.  It’s admittedly a role she does well – as a working mom with two young daughters and a pretty immature husband, she’s no stranger to having to be the responsible one.

But even though she’s good at juggling all these demands that wouldn’t get done without her, Donna chafes under this role.  It’s a thankless one, and she’s done enough of that in her life already – Mutiny was supposed to be about doing exciting, creative work, something she hasn’t had much of a chance to do, and instead being forced to spend a lot of her time cleaning up other people’s messes feels like more of the same old thing. 

It’s far from the only conflict that arises between Donna and Cameron over Mutiny, but it’s a major one, this idea that Cameron can wholeheartedly chase creative innovation without having to worry about “the little things” because Donna will take care of that.  It fuels resentment in Donna and makes her feel possessive of the company that she knows couldn’t survive without her.  As things implode between the two women, it gets ugly, but even as some of Donna’s actions make me want to cover my eyes, I get where those feelings are coming from, what’s driving them.  And as Donna gets more and more isolated from the crew, going down some unnecessary rabbit holes in search of what she really wants to do, I watch and wait for her to find it.