Halt and Catch Fire, Ep. 1.03, “High Plains Hardware” takes place in Dallas, but does it want to be ‘Dallas’?
Is this show getting silly or is this show getting silly? I’ve been optimistic about Halt and Catch Fire based more on its potential than its first two episodes, which have been pretty inconsistent. It has a fantastic setting and shows a slice of recent history that hasn’t been depicted very often on screen. It features some great music and some good acting. And dramatizing the dawn of the computers is not an easy task. To take a subject this intricate and specialized, a subject few are conversant in even as we use the machines themselves almost constantly, the writers seem to have two choices. They must either commit to exploring the actual process of building a PC, which is a tall order, but if done well could be really rewarding and unlike anything else on television. Or they can use the setting as merely background to tell a story about these characters and their relationships with each other. Unfortunately, they aren’t doing a very good job of either.