Halt and Catch Fire’s main theme has always been communication. Technology – affordable desktop computers, chat rooms, games, the embryo of an idea like the internet, a place to buy all of the things you’ve been looking for, for years (from Winnipeg, no less!) – was all about connecting one person to another, or one person to the world. Unlike earlier seasons though, season three has been less about making things that facilitate communication, than it is about communication itself. Two people talking, through whatever form that might take – online, on a phone, over the airwaves, in person. After moving on and moving away, to varying degrees (because he’s never very far behind or away), from Joe MacMillan, the unhinged businessman and anti-hero/pure villain, Halt and Catch Fire turned to its much more interesting at-one-time secondary characters: Cameron, the unstable coder genius, and Donna, the put-together, business and tech-savvy mother of two and wife of Gordon, a technical genius in his own right. It was and continues to be the relationship between Cameron and Donna that provides the show with its heart. And it is their fraught relationship this season that, though at times too constructed, has become what the show hinges upon.

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