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.

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.

Halt and Catch Fire (2014-2017)

Halt and Catch Fire ended last year after four seasons.  It’s not a show I’ve talked about much on the blog (just gave a shoutout to Donna in a Top Five post of actors I’ve had to reevaluate,) but I really did love it.  It’s a bit of a sneak-attack show.  It starts rather unevenly – I stuck it out through most of season 1 largely because I’m a Lee Pace fan – but somewhere along the way, it evolved into a truly rich show with interesting subject matter, complex characters, and rewarding themes (a few spoilers.)

In the early ‘80s, a Houston electronics company is rocked by the arrival of Joe, a mercurial maverick with big ideas about the future of personal computing.  Joe has a lot of vision but little knowhow to back it up, so he enlists engineers and coders both within and outside the company to help him in his goal of revolutionizing the industry.  Over the course of the show, the characters all go on their own journeys trying to stay at the forefront of the rapidly-changing world of computers.

Like I said, the first season can be hit-or-miss.  There’s a lot of focus on Joe’s particularly Machiavellian way of conducting business, and it feels a little Don Draper redux.  The other characters are still finding their footing, especially engineer Gordon and coder Cameron.  It’s all very dysfunctional but without anything genuinely compelling to back it up.

As time goes on, however, the show gets pretty awesome.  I especially love the threads that follow Donna and Cameron as women in tech building their own company and getting involved in some really innovative things.  The more stock interactions of the earlier episodes get fleshed out as the characters build history with one another.  Because of course, that’s what the show really hinges on, more than any work crisis or technological advancement.  As Joe says, “Computers aren’t the thing.  They’re the thing that gets you to the thing.”  He’s talking about computers as a means rather than an end, but the same holds true for the show as well.  This backdrop, this world, is just our jumping-off point to examing these messy, flawed, talented individuals as they chase ideas no one’s had yet, separately and together.

I also want to note that this is a show that manages time jumps very effectively in my book.  There are a few at different points throughout the series, which makes sense from a nuts-and-bolts perspective, since the show would want to cover some of the different leaps in the tech industry between the ‘80s and early ‘90s.  But, critically, with each jump, we feel the effects of the time lapse with the characters and their relationships.  It’s not like Downton Abbey or The Assets where the show jumps ahead for the sake of the history but leaves the plots in limbo for the interim.  Here, things have happened, lives have changed, and you see the effects of those changes playing out onscreen.

As with any strong character-driven show, acting is critical, and Halt and Catch Fire definitely delivers on that front.  Like I said, I came to the show for Lee Pace, and while Joe doesn’t do much for me early on, the series does a lot of work with his character, and by the last season, I like him a lot.  The show was my introduction to Scoot McNairy, Mackenzie Davis, and Toby Huss, and as Gordon, Cameron, and Bos, they embody their characters to a T.  But for me, the series MVP is Kerry Bishé’s terrific performance as Donna.  I am an unabashed Donna fan, and even when the character loses her way and does things I don’t like, Bishé knocks it clean out of the park every time.

Warnings

Language, sexual content, drinking/some drug use, a few scenes of violence, and thematic elements (including suicide.)