‘Halt and Catch Fire’ episode 6 review: Like ‘Jingle All the Way’ (but with more rain)
We remember back to the first few weeks of “Halt and Catch Fire,” wondering whether or not the show was going to meet some of its potential. Then, the past few weeks have started to encourage us that AMC has the next great drama. Lee Pace is magnificent, the characters are interesting, and this brings us head-first into an interesting era in the 1980s.
Sunday night’s episode “Landfall” was all sorts of strange from start to finish, beginning with Gordon’s dream about trying to catch something just out of reach, and then continuing into him going on a journey that feels very much akin to the old Arnold Schwarzenegger movie “Jingle All the Way.” Desperate for a Cabbage Patch Doll (a fad of the time), Gordon goes as far as to break a display window, and not really care too much about what seems to be a dead body on the street in the middle of a massive storm.
The one part of the story that was a little strange was the frequent chatter about this storm being a hurricane, given that we lived in the Dallas area for decades, and this was very rarely a concern. Thunderstorms were more the flavor of the month. Still, watching this episode had a sort of ethereal quality to it, in between seeing how Joe handled criticism for his lack of humanity (eventually bonding with Gordon and Donna’s children) to Cameron actually using emotion rather than antics to convince everyone that her vision of the future was a wise one.
The strange thing is that there really was not that much that happened here, and yet there was plenty as we saw Joe try harder to be an actual person, and Gordon continue to remind us that he makes things a billion times harder than he really needs to. The project continues on, but it’s still anyone’s guess as to how this is going to end up. Somehow “Halt and Catch Fire” made us enjoy this episode through its rampant strangeness, and we applaud them for that. Grade: A-.
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