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haltandcatchfiretothemax · 7 years

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Mystery and Misery: "I/O" and Cameron and Donna's roles therein (or, a sort of/inverse H&CF recap)

The first thing I noticed when I put on the pilot of Halt and Catch Fire for this dedicated rewatch is that it’s long for an hour of network television, at 47 minutes. It didn't feel long though, probably because it doesn't waste a single frame or second, and thusly manages to cover a lot of ground. Rather than merely setting up the premise of the show it effectively establishes it, including the characters, most of their relationships and dynamics, and their relationships to the places and locations in the show; there is nothing tentative or conveniently ambiguous about it. It is an incredibly ambitious introductory hour of television, which is appropriate for a show about what turns out to be a group of very ambitious individuals.

The second thing I noticed is that "I/O" feels more like a movie than a television episode, and that if it were a bit longer, it probably could be. I don't know if it would be possible or worthwhile to make a two hour movie about the entire process of designing the Giant, but I think it could work as a feature film about facing off against IBM (though not necessarily an interesting one, but either way, the pensive legal drama about one young male lawyer's ethical struggle is a thing, is it not?). All you'd really have to do is draw out and really dramatize all the IBM/deposition stuff -- and fill in all the 'missing' scenes of Cameron and Donna that are curiously absent.

Based on the rest of the series but against my better judgment, I'm going to give the showrunners the benefit of the doubt and say that Cameron and Donna appear sparingly in the pilot for good reason. It's easy to read their limited presence as a quiet commentary on how both fictional and real women are frequently sidelined in television and in life, and as a set up meant to surprise the viewer with how essential they both quickly become to the plot, though just writing this out makes it feel overdone. (And if I remember right, a lot of critics and recappers weren't feeling it either.) But it makes sense if you look at Cameron and Donna's roles in "I/O" separately.

Cameron appears in the opening scenes of the pilot, and then returns at the end of it. This is partly because she's still four hours away from the action for most of the show, but the show could have cut back to her life at school -- it doesn't. When we do see her again, getting (physically) thrown out of an arcade, you get the sense that this isn't because her life as a student is typical or easily guessed at; the arcade fight suggests pretty strongly that she hasn't been hanging out on the quad with her friends or planning parties with her sorority sisters. Her absence cultivates genuine mystery and a dark but not so much sinister as sad gut feeling around everything we don't know about this strange, aggressive girl. It might not read for 'normal' viewers, but real life 'strange' girls, orphans, throwaways, gay and trans feminine women, disabled, cr*zy, and especially non-white otherwise marginalized social misfits will understand that people like Cameron are hidden from view because their experiences are not positive or 'normal' by mainstream society's standards, and are not understood or valued. Cameron isn't in most of the first episode because she is truly Unknowable, and literally doesn't fit in with the rest of our characters.

The opposite seems to be true of Donna, who appears here and there in the pilot, but only in scenes with Gordon. This episode doesn't cut to Donna or her life outside of Gordon, either, and she seemingly only pops up to 'nag' Gordon, if by 'nagging' one means dragging Gordon back to the present and/or reality. We get a real sense of what their marriage really feels like, but mostly of what it feels like for Gordon, who unsurprisingly seems to think he's the main character in his marriage. We eventually learn that Donna doesn't seem like she's getting drinks with friends after work or lunching with her sorority sisters either, but by contrast, her daily life isn't shown because it is entirely 'normal', an iteration of womanhood, marriage and working motherhood, based around constantly and silently performing an incredible amount of domestic and emotional labor so taken for granted that it's invisible. Cameron's life is hidden from view, while Donna is practically erased and redrawn as a mean, miserable wife right in front of us.

Until we get our emotional climax toward the end of the pilot, and Gordon realizes that Donna has been right all along. After 30+ minutes of J*e, Gordon, the weird dance they do at Cardiff, and the consummation of their relationship via their illicit 3-day weekend of successful reverse engineering, Donna comes home to a tidy living room, where Gordon is happily engaging with their two young daughters. Thinking that this is the result when Gordon is allowed to pursue his dream, Donna tells him, "Whatever you're dreaming of, build it, I know you can make it great," and Gordon tells her what she's needed to hear, and what he's needed to say, which is simply that their family is more important to him than a pc clone. They make a deal that Donna thinks will make her happy: she will fully support Gordon's pursuit of this project so long as he prioritizes her and the girls.

In the following scenes, Cameron is convinced to drop out of school, move to Dallas, and write the BIOS code for this project. She is both guileless and completely unbeguiled by J*e and his slick charm, but has no immunity when he switches over to warm, not overly paternal approval, and tells her, "See? Now you're thinking like a professional." You can see his manipulation start to finally work on her after he says this, and the way her eyes and face go from tough to perilously vulnerable here is quietly devastating. She finally arrives at Cardiff Electric, where she integrates swiftly into the action around the hasty legitimization of the presently illegal Cardiff pc project, even if she still doesn't exactly blend in. Cameron is immediately taken into a solo meeting (deposition?) with Cardiff's lawyer, where she quickly catches onto and gets on board with the deceptive legal maneuvering that this whole thing is apparently going to require.

As Cameron answers Barry the lawyer's questions and allows him to coach her into saying that no, she has not ever attempted to disassemble or reverse engineer any products manufactured by IBM, we hear his voice over Donna's last scene of the episode, in which she goes out into her garage and gazes at several tables' worth of evidence of the illegal reverse engineering Gordon did just days prior. We unexpectedly cut to her, gazing at various hardware with concern, or is it envy? She's in the garage where Gordon and J*e really bonded over the very laborious process of figuring out an IBM boot code (…or something? And probably other stuff I don't actually know about? sorry), by herself. She's too late, either to stop it or get in on it.

But, she's there, finally, and so is Cameron. Their positions haven't changed much (yet); Cameron is still a true and genuinely unknown quantity and outsider, and Donna is still a long-suffering wife, mother, and some kind of employee at Texas Instruments. But now, we can see them, at least.

Other notes:

I blog for the people who had no idea that "i/o" is short for input/output and had to google it (which I did when I rewatched s1 early last year). No judgment, friends.

The focus on J*e and Gordon feels how I remember it feeling: like a very intentionally hollow version of Mad Men, where J*e's 'charm' and speechfying are barely tolerated by the people most affected by him. Literally everyone sees through him, and we see them see through him.

The thing though, and what makes this series resonate with me personally, is that seeing through someone isn't always enough to protect you from them. Gordon and Cameron are both smarter than Joe, but they both desperately need to be seen by someone, and so his attention works powerfully on them. Donna and Bos are both savvier than J*e, but they’re caught off guard by him, and unprepared to even try to anticipate his calculations.

Still, Gordon recognizes that J*e's enthusiasm is one of the few authentic things about him. He relates to it, and defends him when Donna (not unreasonably?!) identifies J*e's showing up at the movie theater as "cr*zy" ("He's just keyed up, is all")

J*e's whole shtick feels especially and deliciously phony when compared to the visceral and organic-feeling air/stormcloud of 'WHO IS SHE???' that Cameron generates when she's literally just sitting and doing nothing.

NB: there is obviously nothing wrong with having sorority sisters! Just saying that Cameron and Donna are really friendless, and that it’s painfully real. Cameron doesn’t have enough chill for them, Donna doesn’t have the time, and they probably both have trouble relating to other people who aren’t engineers.

My favorite non-Donna/Cameron scene is the sales call-lunch thing. "I'm not going to apologize for caring about your business" is J*e's "I'm not here to tell you about Jesus" moment, but the whole thing, his whole "pitch” where he is so clearly talking to Gordon -- "You can be more; you want to be more, don't you?" -- is like some kind of next level, Don Draper-meets-Tyler Durden shit. Good thing Cameron will be there to keep them from turning into fascists.

The title "Mystery and Misery" is taken from a song/band I love too much to not link to, even if they have nothing to do with any of this.

#...this got v long and is also a day late sorry #& also isn't behind a cut for accessibility #pls enjoy tho!#cameron howe #donna clark #donna emerson #halt and catch fire s1 #1x01 #i/o #the h&cf rewatch #hacf to the max original recaps #halt and catch fire to the max originals!

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