Yeah, I wish they would get rid of the health and pregnancy storylines and trust in the plot.

Everything about this show is contrived crap. It has a great setting and characters that "could" be interesting but it just continues to not deliver on almost every level.

lol, it's so funny watching people talk about this show. A perfect summary of the episode is "the plot thickens". What they're doing is intentionally bloating the show before it gets right back to what it was at the start: Joe, Gordon, Cameron, and Donna. I guarantee you the manufactured drama was exactly what AMC asked for. The want something other than the gimmick of "creating history" and this is it.

Is Gordon having brain damage necessary? No. Is Donna being pregnant necessary? No. Is Cameron being with the new guy necessary? No. Is Joe being with Sara necessary? Well, as a plot device it was, but it's good she's about to be gone. The show is a series of wins and a series of growing pains. It's a believable arc in a lot of ways. There's a lot of unnecessary plot related stuff, but it's all about getting to the point of people hiding the things that they should be telling people. This episode was all about secrets and unsaid things along with the consequences of that.

You may not have liked it, but it was a very well developed episode for what it was trying to accomplish. All of the pieces for the rest of the season are set, and just about anything can happen from this point.

I also enjoyed the Judge Roy Scream reference, a local famous rollercoaster to the DFW area at Six Flags.

They didn't have to pile all of it into a single episode. In the scheme of things, one boring episode like this is whatever but following it week to week means giving thoughts on each episode. Plot building or not that **** was boring as hell.

Not sure what was boring, I wasn't bored.

A young Bosworth just popped up dating Elaine on a Seinfeld rerun I'm watching.

Holy ****, he's the Wiz!

He had a several episode practically unrecognizable arc on Mom in between season 1 and 2 of HACF. I think he was on three episodes of it, and was pretty funny. It must have been during the early episodes of last season of Mom, but I can't remember for sure.

OH. MY. GOD. That's amazing.

He is also the voice of Kahn on King of the Hill, believe it or not.

He also sold Rusty his fake ID in Vegas Vacation

Kerry Bishe has been in a bunch of Ed Burns films (as a blonde) and looked pretty good in Nice Guy Johnny:

Minus the affair storyline, I thought that episode was right around the closest it's been to realizing its potential.

I love the character development this season, but I don't get the motivation behind any of the business decisions this episode.

Couldn't Mutiny get a similar network deal anywhere else? Maybe not $3, but they would seem to be an attractive client for another company.

Joe doesn't need to acquire Mutiny to achieve his broadband goal, he just needs to hire a few tech guys away. Acquisition just seems like turning the knife.

It would seem to be a snap call to sell Mutiny and start over, focusing on community with a new company. But Cameron's obsessive attachment to HER company will result in self-destructive behavior... again.

Joe wants to be at the forefront of everything. So, he wants to be the guy who can take the credit when something big happens. That's what's motivating his business decisions. He's a master manipulator/visionary type who sees the best in everyone around him, while using them in really awful ways. He tends to revive burnouts. Gordon never would have have had an 837k cashout from the job he was doing before Joe came in and changed his life.

For Mutiny, they're a fledgling/struggling company, and I doubt they'd be able to get a similar deal anywhere else. Plus, as has already been stated by Mutiny, they are too scared they can't afford the $5 per hour. So, it really was the sweetheart deal with Joe or the company dies.

As we also know, his prediction of broadband making modems obsolete in 10 years was way way off. He is a visionary, but often his visions are a couple of years ahead of the curve, which means the growing pains of trying to be bleeding edge can result in colossal and painful failures. Often the starter doesn't make it, the shaper of that idea in normal time does.

Finally caught up with this season, so I can visit the thread. Before anyone asks, no I'm not in any episodes. Didn't do any background extra work from September to March. I actually grew my hair out again in case there was a good role (I'm more picky now and I don't have as much time) or on the off-chance they want me to be Bill Gates again. The casting company was looking at getting me something in one of the final episodes, but I ended up getting an opportunity to do something on another show for which they cast, so I went with that (it's a big deal, but I can't talk about it - I'm still just an extra, though).

At any rate, I have enjoyed this season. Two things are annoying me, though:

1) The technology/innovations seem to be a little ahead of what they were in real life.
2) Some of the story lines are straight out of the book, Masters of Doom, which is the story of id Software and its founders, John Romero and John Carmack. In their game/tech discussions, Tom Rendon is 100% Carmack and Cameron is 100% Romero. He thinks tech drives the games, she thinks story does. It's straight out of the book.

This is a show where the people typically dream bigger than their abilities or the world's capabilities, so it's not much of a shock that they would make wild predictions that would be happening too early. I'm sure there were tons of people who wanted all the innovations we have today 10 or 15 years ahead of their time, but making the the technology is a lot harder than thinking of it.

Joe's prediction about broadband was completely laughable. I remember in 2000 saying that broadband wouldn't even become viable until its basic service was around the cost of a monthly unlimited AOL plan. It's the same with basically any bleeding edge technology. Until the cost comes down enough for most consumers to want it, it will always only be early adopters paying a fortune (technology can't become cheaper without a lot of people buying it obviously). HD didn't become relatively pervasive until HD sets were cheaper than CRTs, and I think I was largely correct about my prediction about broadband.

In the very recent modern world the biggest product mistake I can think of is Blu-ray, a product that was developed at least 3 or 4 years too soon, and changed the industry in a lot of painful ways. It also made consumers realize what a huge mistake it had been to be purchasing all the DVDs they had been.

Just as a "funny" aside, think of this. Around 2002, I remember being enormously excited at my job when we got a 1TB hard drive to back up the enormous amount of audio work we were doing. It was liberating. The drive cost about $5k. A 7200RPM 6TB hard drive I bought last year was under $500. There have been amazing tech advances in the last 13 years...amazing. Blu-ray wasn't one of them.

Not as big of a mistake as DIVX! Man, when that came out, I knew there was no way it would work. I guess that was a little before Blu-Ray though.

I remember buying (or having my dad buy) a 130MB HD when I was high school for $400. I just built a new computer earlier this year and I refuse to look at the prices parts have probably already fallen to.

I think DIVX was right at the early stages of DVD, and yeah, disaster. Blu-ray probably won the HDDVD vs. Blu-ray war at some point in 2006 (going off the top of my head so it could have been slightly earlier or later than that). DVD was a massive cash cow for the studios from 2002-2005 (possibly saved them), when they started trying to move to an HD format. The very first HD project I ever did was out of necessity on the Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban DVD in 2004 (was routinely working in HD by 2005). DVD was still powering through when they decided to try to exploit an HD format, despite hardly anyone having HDTVs, and HDTVs were still super expensive then.

The biggest market for DVDs was for pre-1990 movies that didn't often have awesome presentations to begin with. The biggest market for Blu-ray were event pictures and blockbusters. Most classic movies were harmed by Blu-ray and it really changed the business because so many older titles still hadn't been exploited (Blu-ray made that just plain stop). Of course, now everything's about to move to digital delivery, which I think is better for the future of the industry.

Huh? I got my first cable modem in mid 1999 when I got my first apartment, and my friend had it even sooner. It was cheaper then than it is now, like $35/month (now $45 alone or $40 with TV I think). More than an AOL account was then, but not by much, only $10.

We got it at work sooner too, and even though the cable company would not install it at a business, I got them to install it at an employees apartment which was about 20 feet behind our building, and I ran a coax network cable across the gap. Since I didn't have it at home yet, I used to stay after work and play Half-Life deathmatch. It was pretty painful to play that over dial-up.

The point of my statement was that Joe said in 1985 that broadband would make modems obsolete in 10 years. As a wide adoption to the point of making modems obsolete, broadband absolutely was not viable anywhere near that "prediction". I don't feel like doing the research, but I'm guessing broadband didn't become widespread until 2003 or 2004 at the earliest outside of businesses and early adopters like you and your friends, and dial up was still around long after that (not sure how long).

That was a good one, lots of drama, good scenes. Joe at his most formidable, then changing his mind!

Maybe I am just being a nit, but I don't understand why Cameron wouldn't golden parachute her way out of Mutiny for $4.5mm (Owning 90% and selling for $5mm) and start a properly funded new company.

The oil company only wants community, they were going to drop games anyway.

5 million was A LOT of money in 1985. Highest paid athletes in 1985: MLB, Mike Schmidt $2mm, NBA Magic Johnson $2.5mm, USFL Steve Young $2.5mm.

Yup. It was up and down in terms of quality in season 1, but this season has been quite good overall. It's turned into a very solid show.

I've been saying it all season, but unless the bottom falls out, this is officially a very good show now. There are a couple of unnecessary things going on still, but the interesting stuff far outweighs the not interesting stuff.

Lee Pace must have been pissed when he read that script. The whole time he probably thought he was playing Sara...lol. His performance in the earlier episodes spoke to the idea that something wasn't quite right with him and her. Then, in this episode he realizes that she's the real thing to him. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

It's never been about the money for Cameron, it's always been about her vision. When she had her melt down in season 1, it was because her interface idea was changed. Without games, she has nothing. And she's not enough of a visionary to start over the right way. I don't think she could have gotten out of the company quickly, and a dispirited Cameron is worse than an angry Cameron. Joe telling her not to sell was easily the best thing he's ever done in the show, because he knew how much it would ultimately crush her.

Of course, Joe now set back AOL by 8 years or so.