the future of the past

I had to find you
Tell you I need you
Tell you I set you apart

Tell me your secrets
Ask me your questions
Oh, let’s go back to the start

Questions of science
Science and progress
Do not speak as loud as my heart

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In Halt and Catch Fire’s first season, Joe famously said that computers aren’t the thing, they’re the thing that gets us to the thing, hinting at the potential for connection that the internet would bring years later. For Halt itself, computers, online connectivity, the World Wide Web, have never been the thing; they’ve always just been the thing that get the show to the thing of the connections in its characters’ lives, the questions of if, why, and how they want to connect with each other. Here, Joe is talking about the technology trade show around him, those matters of science and progress, but really, he’s talking about his life, Cameron’s life, the connection between them, the time that has passed.

This penultimate episode of Halt and Catch Fire’s penultimate season takes a bold step, jumping forward four years from the conclusion of the previous episode. We’re now in 1990, the future of the past.

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It’s an episode about reconnecting, about mending the mistakes of the past. Time has slipped away from these characters but they’re lucky, it’s not too late. They can still mend. Repair. Fix what they’ve fucked up.

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That’s Donna, trying to mend things with Cameron. Meanwhile Joe has also come to COMDEX to reconnect with Cameron.

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I love the way these characters look at each other. I could look at them look at each other all day. The way they fully exist in each other’s eyes. The way they see each other clearly and know each other. The way they set each other apart. The way they see in each other something rare, something worth reaching out for and holding on to. The way that, through each other’s eyes, they can each see themselves and their own value a little more clearly. 

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In this featurette about the episode, actor Lee Pace says of Joe’s motivation for going to COMDEX, “I just want to lay my eyes on her. I want to see her. It’s really simple from Joe’s point of view. He just wants to be near her.” Sometimes it is that simple, and sometimes we make it so much more complicated.

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Of course the slogan, the joke, is that what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. But the question for these people–and sometimes for some of us–is, can they, can we, take what a particular moment in a particular place with a particular person gives us, and carry it over into the rest of our lives? If we’re even lucky enough to get such moments in the first place.