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S03.E01: Valley To The Heart's Delight

Tara Ariano

By Tara Ariano
in Halt And Catch Fire [V]

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Tara Ariano

Tara Ariano

Its official premiere date is August 23, but AMC snuck it on the air after primetime on Sunday, August 21.

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In the third-season premiere, Donna and Cameron explore their options to expand beyond chat. Meanwhile, Gordon settles in at Mutiny; and Joe launches his latest product.

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christinama

christinama

I have the premiere and season scheduled to record and will probably watch it live on Tuesday.  I turned on Talking Dead to keep up with Fear (srsly I don't know what the creators/writers are thinking at this point, it was/is so sloooow) and was pleasantly surprised to catch this first hour!  Just came here to see if anyone else saw it. Still great IMO. I thought new kid Ryan had nefarious intent with his eyes on Cameron/Donna like that, but looks like he may be loyal (I hope).  

  • Love 1
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mjc570

mjc570

I know this episode sort of aired and is available on-demand, but I won't say much except one thing really struck me - the chat room user's expectation of privacy. Ha ha ha!

  • Love 6
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hincandenza

hincandenza

(edited)

So, I watched this yesterday, and when the episode first started with Boz singing, I was thinking "Alright, we got Boz, whoohoo, I'm in for season 3!".  But then... I think this was a bad season opener.  It felt like very well-worn ground being retread again, with people already making mistakes in ways that seem out of character.  Some of the groaners I can recall off the top of my head:

  • The hit-you-over-the-hammer issue of privacy; Cameron was actually dumb enough to not only keep browsing the private chat logs, but let slip about the son in the most ham-fisted, badly written way possible.  Golly, I wonder if that will bite them in the ass at all this season?
  • Cameron continuing to avoid adulthood; at this point in the timeline, she's gotta be in her mid-20's, and is co-founder of an ISP with ~100K users.  She can't earn enough from her stake in that to afford an apartment of her own?  SF real estate in 1986 wasn't what it is today, after all...
  • The obnoxious uber-geek character who was introduced; yet another "Super smart but socially inept coder who will inevitably be a source of friction, probably with Cameron who is more thin-skinned than a soap bubble".  
    • What exactly was that guy's job at Mutiny?  You'd think by now the company- certainly Donna and Cameron- would learn to stop shooting down ideas in the incubation stage.  Why not simply tell him "Huh, not sure I followed all of that, but how quickly could you create a proof-of-concept?"?  Instead, he'll clearly drift away from Mutiny because of ideological reasons, the privacy issue will blow up, aaaaaand... conflict!
  • The preternatural inventiveness of these people is almost to Sorkin's "Newsroom" levels of 20/20 hindsight.  I know it's time-jumped to 1986, but I'm pretty sure that guy just invented Tor or possibly BitTorrent on the whiteboard, and Cameron/Donna invented either Craigslist or eBay.
  • Joe once again being all smarm, but this time he's apparently McAfee rich and cutting a Jobs-like figure.  Awesome, it's nice to see the least likable character is the most successful.
    • At least this is somewhat historically accurate; the real-life McAfee may actually be crazy; he spent several years in some gun-and-drug filled compound in Central America, convinced the government was trying to assassinate him.  If you've never seen it, this is actually him in a video on how to uninstall McAfee antivirus (not quite safe for work, but somewhat amusing).
  • Sad sack Gordon!!!  I'm sooo tired of this.  The Mutiny people treat him like dogshit- even though their company doesn't exist without him and the money he earned on the Giant- and even give him crap about missing out on the Joe gravy train.  What's a little mocking of someone having their multimillion dollar idea being stolen, while suffering from a debilitating neurological disorder for spending so much time around computer machinery, among friends? 
    • That's all on Donna, who as an emotionally abusive spouse has henpecked and threatened him into not only blowing their family's nest egg on her quixotic dream, making him move to another state, forced him to accept an unpleasant woman as housemate for two years, and keeping him as a hired grunt toiling away in a moldy, dusty cellar while everyone parties upstairs.  Free Gordon!!!

I like this show and want to care, but I'm now very worried we're going to see a lot of very familiar stories and behavior.

Edited by hincandenza
  • Love 8
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Whimsy

Whimsy

I only watch this show because I have a major soft spot for Gordon, love Donna and will follow Lee Pace to the depths of hell.  But, I've really been mostly bored by it since the middle of season 1.  There will be a few scenes here or there that I really like but it's just not super exciting to me.  I agree with all of the above that @hincandenza wrote.  These people are continuously making dumb mistakes or decisions over and over and it's just to propel the storyline.  It gets to be a bit frustrating.

  • Love 2
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qtpye

qtpye

Quote

Sad sack Gordon!!!  I'm sooo tired of this.  The Mutiny people treat him like dogshit- even though their company doesn't exist without him and the money he earned on the Giant- and even give him crap about missing out on the Joe gravy train.  What's a little mocking of someone having their multimillion dollar idea being stolen, while suffering from a debilitating neurological disorder for spending so much time around computer machinery, among friends? 

That's all on Donna, who as an emotionally abusive spouse has henpecked and threatened him into not only blowing their family's nest egg on her quixotic dream, making him move to another state, forced him to accept an unpleasant woman as housemate for two years, and keeping him as a hired grunt toiling away in a moldy, dusty cellar while everyone parties upstairs.  Free Gordon!!!

Why are the Mutiny employees such giant assholes?  They treat both Gordon and Boz like total shit, for no reason.  Are they trying to emulate Cameron and think they are all genius coding special snow flakes, who are too cool for school?  I hate all of them  at this point and am almost rooting for these jerks to fail, so these coders can realize how "not great" they really are.

Donna and Gordon's marriage is one spouse being a total jerk and the other suffering.  They take turns on who gets to be the jerk and it's starting to become exhausting.

Why is Donna risking so much if Cam still owns ninety five percent of the company?  They made a special point of showing us that last year, when that guy wanted to buy Mutiny?

The interior of Donna and Gordon's SF home is much nicer then their Texas home.  That home looked very seventies and this one almost looks nineties...lol.

  • Love 7
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scowl

scowl

3 hours ago, qtpye said:

Why are the Mutiny employees such giant assholes?  They treat both Gordon and Boz like total shit, for no reason.  Are they trying to emulate Cameron and think they are all genius coding special snow flakes, who are too cool for school?  I hate all of them  at this point and am almost rooting for these jerks to fail, so these coders can realize how "not great" they really are.

That's exactly the feeling I always get with this show -- I hate the whole lot of them. I had this problem in the final seasons of Mad Men too. I wanted every single one of them to end up living in a cardboard box on the street.

The coders aren't the nice introverted ones I know but are more like the frat boys who beat up nerds. Throw a firecracker at me and you won't get my help with any of your projects. Do these guys do any work?

Cameron is more tolerable this season (so far) and seems more diplomatic and responsible (so far). Good because Mackenzie Davis looks great in a tank top.

I kind of like Bosworth but I still hear Khan and Cotton Hill every time he speaks.

Gordon is just too self-destructive for me to root for.

Joe's character is now over the top for me. I was waiting for him to shout "Get down on thy knees and worship me as your new god!" at his stalker who wanted to work for him. In the first season I laughed because he was the epitome of the worst manager in software, one that gives you impossible specs to code to then every week he changes everything in the product except the delivery date. Now he's just some lunatic behind a desk. What does he do? 

Technical stuff: this show is still a joke. A mainframe with wire wrap? The last mainframe I saw that had been wire wrapped was a CDC system built in 1968 as it was being wheeled off to the landfill. And IBM mainframes did not run freaking MS-DOS! 

  • Love 2
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dubbel zout

dubbel zout

8 hours ago, qtpye said:

Donna and Gordon's marriage is one spouse being a total jerk and the other suffering.  They take turns on who gets to be the jerk and it's starting to become exhausting.

Yeah, the blame for their marriage is on both of them. 

I don't get why Donna and Cameron were so dismissive of that employee, either. Especially since Cam seemed to realize he had something special (she told Bos to give him a raise). He said there were others who could do what he does at Mutiny, so why not give him some time to do his own thing for a bit?

  • Love 3
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orza

orza

Donna was interested in Ryan's idea but Cameron blew him off. I thought it was because he found Cameron's back door and framed it as a bug, which pissed her off, but he hadn't figured out yet that she put in the back door. She didn't want him looking any closer at it, maybe out of embarrassment and he would realize she was also hacking into private conversations.

  • Love 4
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thuganomics85

thuganomics85

Finally getting around to the premiere.  Maybe the change to California was just too jarring, but while I enjoyed the acting as always and some of the plots, other stuff just felt kind of off for some reason.  The biggest one was the Mutiny coders in general.  I remember them always being juvenile and goofy, but they seemed decent enough, but they really kind of came off like jerks and bullies in this one, especially with Gordon.  And I just can't figure out why neither Donna or Cameron are taking a harder stance on them.  I have to think tossing firecrackers around computers is just a bad idea on any level.  Maybe the change of scenery is just bringing out the worst in everyone.

And then their is just the treatment of Gordon in general.  Yeah, he annoyed the hell out of me last season and him cheating on Donna was an all-time low for him, but it isn't any better watching him get crap piled upon him by the guys and obviously be stuck in a mainly loveless marriage, unless they happen to be high at the time.  Maybe the somewhat random introduction of this other mother going through a divorce is setting up those two possibly ending it.  They just don't seem happy anymore.

John continues to be awesome.  Never change, Mr. Bosworth!

Cameron was actually more mature then normal compared to past episodes, but still has her occasional bad moments like ignoring the newbie's advice about security and then end up having it blow in her face with that guy who lost his son.

Barely any Joe, only for him to show up at the end as some kind of cross between Steve Jobs and McAfee, I see.  He's kind of gone past just a Don Draper knock-off do a Bond villain.  That speech and the reveal of free security to everyone really sounds like a beginning of an action flick, where the main villain is beginning his dastardly plan.  What are you up to, Joe? 

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Kel Varnsen

Kel Varnsen

On 29/08/2016 at 0:07 AM, femmefan1946 said:

"I kind of like Bosworth but I still hear Khan and Cotton Hill every time he speaks. "

I wish they had kept the shooting game plotline so Bos could comment about how he killed fity men.

As for the episode i was kind of wondering how Joe could go about giving away his software in 1986. I imagine it wasn't feasible to download it, and I can't see stores carrying something they can't charge for. So would itbe like an aol thing where it disks show up in magazines?

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orza

orza

I remember some stores having little racks or baskets near the cash register with AOL disks in them. They also came in the mail along with the other junk mail.

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dubbel zout

dubbel zout

(edited)

I felt like I was getting an AOL disk in the mail every week. And of course once it was installed, it was impossible to completely remove. As soon as I switched ISPs, I had software problems that took forever to resolve.

Edited by dubbel zout
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ganesh

ganesh

I don't really have a problem with the premiere. I wish this was more of a summer show because I feel like there's going to be too much demand on it now to be A Show. It's a good show. I enjoy the ride. They haven't gotten the tech right since S1. They're not going to start now. I'm not watching for that anyway so it doesn't bother me. They never pretended they were the 80s version of Mr. Robot, in terms of accuracy. 

On 8/25/2016 at 7:42 AM, qtpye said:

Why are the Mutiny employees such giant assholes?  They treat both Gordon and Boz like total shit, for no reason.

Not to be a jerk, but it's a room full of 20 something boys together for 8+ hours a day. No one was coding back then. Of course they think they're better than everyone. 

I liked that Donna didn't rip Gordon for getting high. "Tandy-Shandy?" 

I always like Joe's huge speeches about nothing. 

  • Love 2
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