Halt and Catch Fire's final season inspires nostalgia for the early days of the internet

It made me sentimental for landline telephones, Doom, and the screech of modems.

The long cords extend from the phones they’re attached to, spiraling in neat little curves. The people talking on those phones have to always be conscious of them, to navigate them as they chat for hours on end.

I kept thinking if the individual shots of this conversation could be stacked side to side, the phone cord would exit the right side of the screen in one and seem to re-enter the screen in the same position on the left. There was something so tangible about it. It ran from them, into the phone, into the wall, out across wires, then back down toward their conversational companion. That cord, slight though it is, represented connection, as if you could tug on it and pull your loved one to you, across the miles.

Halt and Catch Fire doesn’t just depict connection. It is, especially in this fourth and final season, when its characters are scattered every which way but always on each other’s minds, about connection. It exists at the point in history when it ceased to be a mystery when somebody was, somehow, in constant contact and started to become a mystery when they weren’t; when you couldn’t instantly ping them via text or instant messaging or any number of apps.

It takes place at the very dawn of the internet, and it made me feel an intense nostalgia — not just for its vision of the early days of search engines, or for the video games and music of the era, or even for those landline telephones. No, it made me feel nostalgia most intensely for a time when the internet still seemed like it had the potential to completely remake a species and a planet, instead of squeezing us dry.

In its own way, then, Halt and Catch Fire’s final season acts as a mirror version of The Leftovers’ final sequence. Where that HBO series captured our current apocalyptic fervor, Halt wonders if we mightn’t start over and do things better this time. We still have the tools. Maybe now we know how to use them.

Halt and Catch Fire endlessly reinvents and reboots itself, but its characters can’t escape themselves

By now, I’ve hopefully ranted at you enough times about the greatness of Halt and Catch Fire that I don’t need to repeat myself. The drama, set in the tech world, has become one of TV’s best series about how we use electronic means both to draw others closer and to push them further away. As such, it makes sense that the series sets its final season in the early days of the internet, when the very idea of indexing it, so it could be searched, seemed like a half-crazy, out-there notion.

One of the things that has held Halt and Catch Fire back from the sort of massive audience that might have let it run seven or eight years has been that it refuses to show off. It’s one of the best made series on TV, in terms of writing, performance, and direction, but it rarely bothers with anything that would immediately call attention to itself.

Take, for instance, one of the show’s rare moments of playing at being a showman, an extended sequence that opens the fourth season. Structured to look like a single shot (though it will quickly become clear this effect was achieved through clever editing), the sequence follows Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy), a tech genius whom life keeps dealing bum hands, as he builds an internet service provider from the ground up, even as his friend and colleague Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) dissolves in a stew of regret in the building’s basement.

The sequence encompasses three years in less than 10 minutes of screen time, and it not only captures the way Gordon has to wait for the internet to become a going concern in American homes, but also the way that Joe’s extended self-exile becomes a chance for him to punish himself, to live in the middle of his deeply felt sorrow at the way he could never build a functional, adult relationship with Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis), who’s now living in Tokyo with her husband. He waits for her to deliver a cutting-edge browser to him, because he’s just waiting for her.

Thus, Halt and Catch Fire creates nostalgia around the early internet era in the best way possible: by creating nostalgia for that moment in anybody’s life when they’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for someone or something to come through. You can lose whole years in the middle of the memory hole, but then, a modem shrieks to life, or a phone rings, and the years evaporate.

It also functions as a kind of meta-commentary on a series that has long prided itself on reinvention. It started as one thing — about Joe and Gordon trying to build a computer that could compete with IBM in the early ’80s — and then became about seven different things across its first three years. It’s one of the few dramas in its weight class that hasn’t had to add fleets of new characters to stay nimble and sharp, because it finds endless new iterations of the characters it already has, simply by throwing them into new groupings with each new season.

Season four functions as a sort of mirror image of the show’s (often maligned) first season — Gordon and Joe are working on a project together again; Gordon’s ex-wife Donna (Kerry Bishé) is outside the main group; Cameron is a constant wild card — but in so doing, it reveals both how far the characters have come and how little they still understand themselves.

Joe better understands how casually cruel he can be, but he can’t keep himself from lashing out. Cameron better understands how she can seem a little cold and aloof, but she can’t bring herself to say how she feels when it most matters. And so on.

In lesser hands, the series could feel like a merry-go-round, constantly spinning and returning to the place it started out. But in the hands of showrunners Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers, the series becomes about how reinventions and reboots are often about trying to convince yourself you’re somebody you’re not, somebody better.

The internet changed how we live. But we also changed the internet.

The thing Halt and Catch Fire is so clear-eyed about that many other tech-based stories miss is how technology doesn’t make people different. Instead, people take technology and bend it to their will.

When a teenage girl builds a website that lists a bunch of internet sites she thinks are cool, it has the sort of rough, personalized charm you’d expect from such an invention. But when that site becomes a larger, corporate project, the edges are slowly sanded off. The implication is clear: the tools might be sleeker, but they’re still wielded by human beings. The internet changed the way we live our lives, but it could never change us. We’re still short-sighted and petty and nasty — but we’re also capable of kindness and depth of feeling. The internet is just how we express ourselves.

The season’s central metaphor seems to be the search engine, the idea of seeking something — an answer, an item, the right question to ask. If you could just plug the right combination of words into a box, maybe a computer could give you what you needed. But we know from our own lives that there’s an immense gap between Googling the answer to a question, truly understanding the answer you receive, and realizing you were asking the wrong question in the first place.

Just as Mad Men used advertising as a short-term panacea for the soul, doomed to fail, Halt and Catch Fire uses technology as a means of expression that is inevitably misunderstood.

Cameron, who’s become an acclaimed game designer, struggles in the face of her artistic ambitions being swept aside in the face of the rise of action games like Doom (or, she’s loathe to admit, maybe her latest game just wasn’t very good). Donna, now a corporate executive, can’t help but make everything she touches just a little bit inorganic and false. Joe so desperately wants to connect with anyone that he’ll become whatever person he needs to be to fit the situation. And Gordon, living with a life-threatening health condition, uses computers (the one thing he understands) to connect with a teenage daughter who’s slipping away from him.

The idea is that a computer, or the internet, or a smartphone, or a social media post, might better tell the world who you are. But who you are is something hidden away from everybody else, maybe even hidden from yourself. It exists in the spaces between, the regrets and lost years you let grow tattered and worn. The story of your life, if it were a TV show, would skip over so many events and moments, just as your memory does. But it’s in those gaps, those moments between, where life is built and lived.

The internet can never be our savior or our devil. It is only as good as any of us are, and to use it as an alternative form of the self is a dangerous thing.

Halt and Catch Fire knows that. But it also knows that the internet is there, waiting, for us to log in and connect. We might type something into that box, then let the world see it. Someone else might see it and say, “Oh, hey, me too.” We might, finally, win the greatest struggle. We might finally be known.

Halt and Catch Fire airs Saturdays — yes, Saturdays — at 9 pm Eastern on AMC. The first three seasons are available on Netflix.