"Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light."
~ Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

Monday, December 24, 2018

Favorite Characters: Joe MacMillan (Halt and Catch Fire)


I’ll be upfront:  I didn’t like Joe at first, despite wanting to.  I’m a fan of Lee Pace, and since his involvement was what led me to the show in the first place, I naturally wanted to like his character.  But Joe didn’t grab me at first.  He struck me as a bargain-bin imitation of the sort of ruthlessly-ambitious antihero type that’s been done much more successfully with characters like Don Draper.  All of which, I know, is a weird way to start a Favorite Characters post, but it’s true.  At the start, Joe didn’t do anything for me at all.  It wasn’t until much later that I started to get more than glimpses of potential in his character (some Joe-related spoilers.)

We’re introduced to Joe, from the beginning, as a shark.  He obviously envisions himself as a visionary of the tech industry, looking to leave his mark in a big way but not having many (any?) scruples about how he accomplishes that.  When he first shows up in Texas and talks his way into Cardiff Electric, he’s already burned his bridges at IBM and absconded with one of their computers, aiming to crack it open, determine precisely how it’s made, and develop a perfect clone for a rival company.  His big ideas, however, are marred by the fact that he actually knows very little about making computers and needs to find engineers and coders in order to make his vision happen.

A huge ego, heaps of deceptive charm, a ton of ambition, wildly flexible morals, a talent for manipulation, and a pesky lack of actual knowhow – all facets of a reasonable cocktail for a compelling character who falls somewhere between antihero and villain, and these traits have been used to good effect on other shows/other characters.  But here, it doesn’t quite work, not at first.  As a character, Joe scrapes by on Lee Pace’s charisma, not bringing enough to the table to be truly engaging in his own right.  His vision is too scattered, constantly changing the specs for the Giant, wanting the impact he’s going to make more so than the thing he’s making to get him there.  His backstory is too mysterious with too little payoff, dabbling in a poor-little-rich-boy angle but not doing much interesting with it.  His machinations are too often pointless, scheming and manipulating almost for the sake of it rather than to further a specific goal.

Again, this kind of character can work very well (and be very popular,) but it never fully works with Joe.  It’s not until the show starts moving him away from that archetype that I start to enjoy him.  It’s in the moments building tooward that transition that I start seeing his potential as a character.  The times when he pushes too hard or his scheming backfires and blows up in his face, when he’s played by a shrewder player than him, when he has to deal with the consequences of betraying his colleagues.  These are the things that begin to change him, being humbled or left out in the cold, and overall, I think the show does a pretty decent job of fostering that change in a way that feels believable.  After the first season, the show spends a lot of time with Joe in his own plots separated from the other main characters, and by the time he works his way back to them, he’s had a number of very rude awakenings and is no longer the same guy.

And the new Joe is someone I like a lot better.  I mean, Joe will be Joe – still chasing the idea that’s beyond the cutting edge (even if he doesn’t know what that is,) still able to turn on the “close the deal” charm with the best of them, still anxious to make his mark – but he’s also a lot more collaborative and more likely to consider others in his decisions.  He’s been through the ringer, largely as a result of his own actions, and he’s come out on the other side ready to do it right this time, or at least less wrong.

On a final note,  I like that Joe is bisexual and that, while his most enduring relationship on the show is with Cameron, the show doesn’t treat his attraction to men differently than his attraction to women.  Even if we don’t see much of it, we do know that he’s had relationships with men that he’s deeply cared about, and his queerness isn’t portrayed as being in any way “tied” to his more villainous tendencies in season 1.  In fact, in the first season, one of his most sympathetic moments comes when he reconnects with Simon and the two hash out what happened between them, an early glimpse of the heart we see more clearly later in the show.

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