Halt’s first proper installment plays in many ways like a response video to the pilot: It does to the pilot’s hackneyed presentation of alpha-male antihero tropes what Joe apparently did to IBM’s data center before he disappeared — damage, and lots of it. And just like IBM, who cashed in on an insurance windfall after Joe’s top-secret rampage, the series emerges from the rubble better off.
This time, we watch Joe reap what he’s sown. The smirking, swaggering arrogance that made him so grating in the pilot turns out to be just that – grating (and, we find out, unearned) arrogance. He’s so fixated on his grand vision of a new era in personal computing, so focused on coercing and cajoling his underlings and accomplices into playing ball, that he completely misses the totally obvious tools of retaliation at his former employer’s disposal. We later learn from IBM’s chief goon that he’s not just overconfident; he may be actually crazy. Hell, the best line in his pep talk, the bit about putting a ding in the universe, is stolen from Steve Jobs. “You were just pretending,” his mousy engineer Gordon Clark marvels. “You’re like one of those guys who goes out and reads The Catcher in the Rye too many times and then decides to shoot a Beatle — only in this story, I’m the Beatle.” This is the show stomping all over its own lead character’s sophistry and sociopathy, and it’s glorious to watch.
I reviewed last night’s Halt and Catch Fire for Rolling Stone. I liked it a lot more than the pilot.
Tags: halt and catch fire, reviews, Rolling Stone, TV, TV reviews