![]() ![]() ![]() Her crushed expression is absolutely the face of a young girl who thinks she caused her daddy’s heart attack - completely persuasive, even if I wish Cameron’s story had more backbone. It’s an immaturity that stems from the story, but so much of it also comes from Mackenzie Davis’s remarkably convincing performance. “I was mean,” she tells Donna, grasping for reassurance. The kid who comes weeping into the hospital waiting room, sure that Bos’s collapse is her fault. No, this is Cameron as the kid who ran away from home and isn’t sure how to come back. Not childishness in a self-absorbed way, although an inability to see other perspectives has always been one of Cameron’s struggles. Instead of motivated, enthusiastic, and impolite Cameron, we have a Cameron who’s almost entirely reduced to that other constant element of her character: childishness. She’s in an ideological argument with Joe about the future of search, but it’s all so unspoken and underground that they’re hardly communicating at all. She’s finally signed the divorce papers with Tom. She’s helped Bos, but that magical code fix for Rover is not enough, and he’s back to ask for help again. Right now, though, it’s frustrating that Cameron’s out in the wilderness, waiting for I’m not sure what. You can feel it in Donna’s absorption with Cameron’s unplayable game, and you can feel it in Cameron’s confession to Joe. The show has always worked best when each of them has a little bit of all of those qualities. Over time, Donna’s competitiveness got added into the mix and those various drives got rebalanced. At the start, Halt and Catch Fire was driven by the competing impulses of Joe’s ambition, Cameron’s idealism, and Gordon’s practicality. But this is the first episode where Cameron’s isolation really feels like a liability for the balance of the show. ![]() I understand why she’s out in the Airstream reading Stephen King and trying to block out the world. Last week, I wrote that it makes absolute sense for Cameron to be where she is: Though she truly believes Rover is the future, Joe is Team Comet and she’s estranged from Donna. But my problems with “Nowhere Man” have less to do with the sudden tone shift and more to do with my frustration with Donna and Cameron. It’s hard to go from the giddy highs of teams competing to win the golden surfboard, all the way down to Joe in a funk and Cameron and Tom having a long conversation about a parrot. It’s less like the bottom suddenly fell out from under Comet, and more like they’re walking around with a death sentence and don’t realize it yet. But in “Nowhere Man,” Donna and Joe are the only ones who can see Comet has been hobbled. It was a huge moment, culminating in Joe’s F-bomb cut to black. Rover and Comet have been playing a frantic game of musical chairs, and the end of episode four felt like someone suddenly swept out Comet’s legs, finally giving Rover a big advantage. It’s not hard to see why it might struggle a little, especially after “Tonya and Nancy” rode on such a high. I’ll just come right out with it: This is the first episode of season four that I didn’t love. Like Don Draper, he is a compulsive liar, but whereas Hamm’s charisma made this somewhat forgivable, Pace is all bluster.Ĭompared to the subdued McNairy, who has nailed a fine line in supporting performances in everything from Fargo to True Detective, Pace doesn’t so much as chew the scenery, he literally takes a baseball bat and smashes windows.Photo: Bob Mahoney/AMC Networks Entertainment LLC. He has little to no regard for others and his mysterious backstory is more annoying than intriguing. Like Mad Men, it’s art directed to perfection –1980s Texas couldn’t be more daggy with its brown houses, brown skirts, yellow shirts, dorky wire-rimmed glasses and big hair for the ladies (except for Cameron, who, of course, shows off her outsider status by not wearing a bra).īut where Mad Men had the charming Don Draper (Jon Hamm) at its centre, Pace’s Joe MacMillan is, well, a douche-bag. In one sense, AMC got what they needed, as Halt and Catch Fire ticks many of Mad Men’s boxes – it’s a period workplace drama with an egotistical leading man and women fighting to be recognised for their abilities. The show is a product of prestige US cable network AMC, who made their mark with Mad Men and were looking for something to fill the gap when the critically acclaimed advertising drama finished in 2015.
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