I think what is keeping me from really connecting with this show is I dislike the main characters. I like Jack and Gordon's wife is okay but I dislike the others. Joe is just psycho nuts and too unrealistic. Gordon started out good but seems to be turning into a huge dick. Cameron is a sterotypical trainwreck. I can't root for or get invested in these characters.

Did you forget our introduction to Gordon? He was introduced in jail evidently for drunkenness, with his wife bailing him out, and him generally being a drunk dick to her in the car after that. He's clearly an alcoholic, with a lot of self pity issues. Part of the show's idea is to try to redeem his dickish qualities with what he does now. He's under a whole lot of pressure in a lot of different ways. I don't really see him becoming more of a dick like you do, but he was never really a nice guy from what I can tell.

I do like Gordon's character, though, and I am rooting for them to win, even though I think they won't. At some point, John needs to pull his head out of his ass and realize that if he doesn't get behind this ragtag bunch of idiots the whole company goes down, and it's what he will be remembered for more than anything else. He got them into this mess in the first place by hiring Joe. It's a high risk high reward scenario, but for him to still be such a petulant dick (to the point of ordering a police beatdown of Joe...lol at that happening in Dallas) about everything is practically ruining the whole idea of what they have to do to survive and potentially thrive as a company.

As a business owner or higher up, if I screwed the pooch, I'm not going to sit around whining about what a bunch of idiots I brought in, I'm going to try solve the problem by getting behind the people to make it work or go down fighting to make it work. He's not acting the way someone would act if they were in his position (absolutely zero pragmatism on his part). He's acting like someone with absolutely no vision of the big picture. If anything, he should have ordered a police beating on himself for being so dumb. In a way, it's kind of funny to see such an awful bully bullied so badly by a true psycho.

I don't think it's clear that Gordon is an alcoholic lol. Not by any means. That's crazy talk. It's clear that he was unhappy and unfulfilled at work, likely feeling trapped. Also that post is way too long for me to read the rest of it.

Expecting John to just suck it up and fall in line while Joe is treating him like a b!tch is asking A LOT for someone like that. They are in a power struggle right now and while it's easy to say just suck it up it's best for the company is much more difficult to put in practice. I think they start getting on the same page now that John has got that out of his system.

I like Gordon and I really like his wife, I think they do have a pretty good marriage and are a good team, they just are working themselves out of a rough stretch. Glad they didn't have them hate each other or having an affair, when they are working together imo those are some good scenes.

Joe is nuts but some of the things he does has a point, creating the drama so they can over come it while the writer was there is hugely dickish but it's press and buzz.

I know posts over 3 sentences are a challenge for you to get through since you have to spend so much time posting everywhere else, so sorry about that. When a character is introduced as being in jail due to intoxication, that's not intended to say, "oh he's just blowing off some steam". What steam was he needing to blow off before meeting Joe? Come on, it's crazy talk to think he's not an alcoholic. What was the thing he did right after his really bad day? He drank a beer, and his wife looked at him like she was very upset about it. He even made the point in one episode of saying "it's a Dr. Pepper". To me, that's clear evidence that the writers are saying he's an alcoholic, or at the very least that he's on the edge of a major drinking problem. But, then again, I only grew up around a bunch of alcoholics and don't drink myself, so I could be wrong...

I agree that a person like John is not one to suck it up, but the company is going down the toilet if he doesn't get on board. You can sit and pout for a week or so if you REALLY want to, but anything else is really counterproductive. This company fails if this product fails, and John's gonna have a hard time latching on somewhere else (at his currently level) because of his mistake. I've watched people sit around all day saying, "What went wrong?", and they're fools. Your job is to figure out how to fix what went wrong when it does, and worry about what went wrong later. Anything else is counterproductive. Of course, now that John essentially ordered a hit on Joe maybe it's out of his system. Joe's just a guy that I would never put that kind of power play on, because I think he's got murder in his blood.

It's probably a good sign that he got the cops to beat Joe up rather than act against him inside the company. He knows he's hitched to that train in the office now.

Do you think John would like Joe more or less based on his publicity stunt, if he knew?

In my post above, I wanted to make it clear that my point is that John has a decidedly low tuning of his own self preservation. I realize that working for a successful company for 22 years, and becoming a higher up turns that off a bit, but as a sales guy, you would think he would be a little more tuned into his own self preservation now that things have changed. He looks like an absolute genius if Joe succeeds, and he can spin what they did however he likes. So, to me, his character isn't written quite right. They have the hard side of it down, but don't have the pragmatism that a guy like him would need to get where he got. He's certainly had to handle failed bad products before in a 22 year run, and has probably had to prop them up while they were failing. This shouldn't be hard for him. I agree that it's probably better that he did his machination outside of company work, but he ultimately did it because of Joe's stunt that he didn't know was a stunt.

I still definitely think he needs to hire someone to kick his own ass, for being so dumb to fall for Joe's spiel. He's the head of sales, and can't do any research? That seems pretty dumb for a higher up inside a tech company.

I don't think John will respect any underhanded dealings like that, and I don't think he's going to be capable of (m)any of his own.

And yes, I agree, you'd expect more pragmatism, but I think getting Joe beaten up rather than getting him into office-trouble is at least showing SOME pragmatism.

Enjoy it, pace is fine imo

That's an interesting thing about the character. I'm not sure what he'd think of the stunt. I can see parts of him hating it, and parts of him loving it.

Agree that it's nice that he finally turned to passive aggression outside of business practices vs. pure aggression inside them.

not sure the show runners know what they're doing

cameron is like a 2d character, she's beautiful, she's brilliant, she's independent, she's a rebel, she somehow doesn't need help with anything and her problems can be resolved with sex or drug alcohol parties. we know cos the show has people telling us so

same with lee pace character, like he is literally not human just a bunch of random sociopath actions.

decent 3 episodes so far

4, looks like you have some catching up to do.

Caught up with this. Getting kind of Americans vibe although they're not really alike. From what I've seen I doubt this turns out to be anything other than mediocre at best, but will stick by. I do like the overall premise, and this is AMC afterall.

Ok, now tonight's episode was quite good. Best of the season imo. Storylines advanced very nicely.

I may be a quick blur in next week's episode. If there's a toy store scene, I might show up for a split second.

That episode kicked ass. They're on their way. It's rocket time baby.

I sure hope Gordon's wife doesn't cheat on him.

Wild Cameron's climbing the corporate ladder!

Wow, what a difference a good director makes. I had flagged that I thought Ed Bianchi was the best director on the show very early on, and this was his episode. That got the show firmly on the right track, and nearly everything about it was very tightly directed and edited. It even got us somewhere with Cameron, which was really good.

LOL@that last scene, though. They clearly ran out of script, and came up with something entertaining on the fly. It was much better than watching a bunch of wastoids dancing in slo mo in a hotel room.

I hope the show stays at this level. This was what I was hoping to see after watching the first episode.

kioshk, still think Gordon doesn't have some kind of drinking problem? He got plastered at an extremely important business meeting, and his wife is now thinking of cheating on him because she knows what an azz he is when drunk. I also hope she doesn't cheat, but they've been sowing the seeds on that for awhile.

http://www.computerhistory.org/babbage/adalovelace/
https://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/lovelace.html

I had never heard of Ada Lovelace.

This was the best episode of the season.

She definitely had a good episode and is climbing on the likeablity scale. Overall a very good episode but it's still hard to find anyone to root for as Joe and Gordon are both unlikeable. The wife straying would be one more person to dislike.

Maybe the creators got made fun of by IT guys one time too many, and this was their response.

I was thinking, "What if the coders who didn't hack the game just wanted to play the game?"

I disagree that Gordon is unlikable. He's very easy to relate to. Aside from his apparent way, way, above average intelligence, he's basically an everyman. He's a dude who feels stuck in life, with the feeling that he could and should be so much more than he is. He failed once already and now, even though he still has dreams of greatness, he has sacrificed his personal potential for his family. Most people who have been married with kids have felt at least a little like him at some point, even if it's not to the extent it looks like with Gordon. Trapped in a job you are better than, feeling slowed down by your family, just stuck in life.

He's also very much your typical geek who feels totally inadequate next to good looking, slick talking guys like Joe who always seem to get whatever they want. On top of it, he has a drinking problem (or at least he has problems when he drinks).

Yeah, I think it's important that Gordon has a fatal flaw or potentially fatal flaw (drinking is what I think they have set up), that typically dooms anything big he works on. The fact that Gordon can show up at his in-laws house and the first thing the wife says is "he's drunk" shows that his drinking is an issue and is easily recognized by outsiders. It's why his wife was so aloof when talking on the phone with him. For her, it's to the point where she thinks it's worthless to even tell him that if he stopped being a drunk idiot, he wouldn't do things like that (not to mention that he's a bad enough drunk to end up in jail). That phone call almost seemed like it could have been a tie in to her looking in the window and seeing him drinking during the bird kill scene. She has lost her ability to pity him, and she doesn't want to enable him by false encouraging him. That's a dangerous combination in a marriage.

Most people probably forget that Walter White was a chronic underachiever, a guy who was smart enough to dream the biggest dreams and get there, but just didn't want to put in the work or couldn't handle the pressure. He also had major pride issues.

In a way, Halt and Catch Fire has created the anti-Walter White with Gordon. He's a guy who knows he has flaws, sees the flaws, dreams big but isn't sure he can achieve them. Then when things go wrong, he feels sorry for himself and retreats into the bottle. That also happens when things aren't going wrong. Ultimately, as shown by the scene with his father-in-law, he has almost no pride. Gordon is a really well thought out character, and he is absolutely who we're supposed to be rooting for in the show. Regardless of what Joe says to him, he really likes Gordon so much that he scouted him to be the guy that shows his dad who's boss. He didn't know anything about his personality, but he could relate to his dreams. He just didn't realize he was dealing with an already broken man, who out of his own failure has become the Walter White of the computer industry (a lowly engineer, who could be doing so much more).

As dlk says, he is a very relatable character to a ton of people, especially to anyone who has ever "dared" to dream for more not knowing if they can reach it. You don't have to like him, but he is a great character for TV. He's one of the guys that actually makes you mad when you see him making the wrong decision, because you want him to do well (the touching scenes and talking in the bathroom scene were just absolutely horrific to watch).

I really do think good directing (not some of the art house b.s. that's gone on in some of the episodes) could turn this into a really good show, easily a top 10 show in quality. I don't think the script for episode 5 was much better than the others, but its execution was clearly better. They even still vamped in this episode, but it didn't matter, some things got done (meeting with retailers, the LCD, the humanizing and the getting on board of John finally, and ultimately Cameron's team being put together), and it felt like it was moving forward. In good TV, you have the illusion of propulsion, even if it's not happening. A good director can make propulsion feel like it's happening even in a set up episode where it's just positioning the pieces for the forward attack.

I like Gordon ok, he's just mopey sometimes. Seeing Joe's father gave me more empathy for Joe's weirdness. This show is definitely on the right track imo.

Cameron is way hotter with a little makeup.

this show should be renewed just off its title sequence

Is that game they were playing based off a famous or well known one?