#HE WAS ACTUALLY ALSO GREAT ON HALT AND CATCH FIRE S3 LIKE ANYONE WATCHED THAT HA

[critgemhero]

NO ONE TOLD ME SHAGGY WAS A PART OF THE STREAM OF MANY EYES OMG WHAT

[sweetsunrayssr]

Cameron’s Pilgrim

Spoiler warning S4 Halt and Catch Fire, until 4X05

I’ve read recaps and comments about Cameron’s choices , words and actions, and I would like to contrast it with my understanding of what 4x05 “Nowhere Man” revealed.

The first half of S4 we are kept much in the dark about what’s going on with Cameron. We just mostly know how it appears to Joe, Bos and Gordon. Joe thinks she’s searching for something out there, to reinvent herself. Gordon - the outdoor man who loves camping - calls it 2 giants living on a timble. Bos jokes about space bikes. Nobody takes it seriously, just like Donna didn’t take Cam seriously and thought of her as an impulsive child in S3, but it turned out that junior had married, bought a house and had worked on a better solution than credit cards even.  And the reveal about Cam’s game Pilgrim in 4x05 suggests that Cam knows why she bought the land, the airstream and why she wants Joe to make love to her there. Cameron is the sole person who is not “searching”. Instead, she wants her loved ones and especially Joe to find and understand her. If Joe was the mystery man throughout the seasons, Cameron was the mystery woman.

From her conversation with Bos in S1, we know that Cameron always had communication issues, especially when it involves her feelings. It’s not something she will just grow out of. Discovering the program language Basic helped her find a language to communicate. She’s a coder and thus her language, communication and actions are coded.  More, especially the S1 episode where she pitches her OS idea to Joe as wanting to make people fall in love with the machine, while holding a toy up, it becomes rapidly clear that toys and games are her tools of connection and communication. It is how she reaches out to people and reveals something about herself.

Cameron is at odds with Gordon for 2 seasons, until they start to play Nintendo together.

Bos rarely understands her games, but he tries (love that moment when he asks the coder monkeys to help him get out of the damned cave), and he knows the games she develops tend to be about her.

Donna and Cameron have a stellar working-friend relationship, but the misunderstandings begin to heap up once Donna’s chat pushes Cameron’s games out of Mutiny, until eventually Donna pushes Cameron herself out of Mutiny.

Her relationship with Tom hits off while they play a physical shooter game and work together on making a virtual/digital version of it.

The particular scene where she pitches the OS idea to Joe while holding the puppet in S1 is Cameron actually revealing that she wants to make him fall in love with her, or how she can fall in love with him.

Joe is rewarded with a passionate night with her at Comdex 90 (and unbeknownst to him at the time her heart), when he figured out the lighter game.

When viewers and her friends and lover regard her airstream as a childish game, they not only sell her short, but expect Cameron to just grow out of her communication handicap. She will always need these tools. She is not immature, or lost to herself. She is trying to show and communicate something. Her heartbreak and disappointment over nobody figuring out her message via her Pilgrim game, not even Joe, is not so much about professional failure but her failure to communicate her soul, heart and vision adequately. Cecil commenting that not even he can explain her coding work to connect his rudimentary code to her solution and it is at another level entirely emphasizes this.

Her isolation in the airstream is a physical manifestation of Cameron’s communicative isolation. But it does not mean she has stopped trying to communicate the same message she put into Pilgrim. Instead of making a “new digital game”, she uses an entirely different medium: Cameron uses material tools and physically tangible items. So, when Joe told her to move on from the Pilgrim failure and make a new game out of nothing, Cameron actually took his advice. She just did it with real world items, like a builder, which is quite unprecedented for her, way out of her comfort zone.

And she picked these new tools for Joe. He took the step in S3 to learn BASIC code, telling her that even if he might never be great at it, he is not unteachable. He loves HTTP and HTML because it’s such an elegant, simple code that almost anyone can learn and use to make something out of nothing.

Joe’s personal coding of expressing himself isn’t programming code though, but metaphors: the browser is a stadium or a doorway and HTTP is the roseta stone.

Simple, real world, physical items. He is a physical guy:

swinging bats to hit for the fences and breaking the bat when he feels betrayed by his father.

Hitting a car with a sledge hammer to turn her on and show her he’s a prime specimen in great shape

Using a low voltage live current to turn her on

Using torches to shoot for the stars and dispel a hurricane

Immolating a shipment of empty, soulless portable computers (after Gordon tried to compliment Joe that the Giant was like him)

He wins her heart with lighters

He betrays his passion, his love and need for her at Comdex 90 in a very physical way

He waits for her for years in a basement, where they used to have sex

Her message hasn’t changed. She’s very much trying to use Joe’s metaphorical language, initially in Pilgrim, because she was 5000 miles away from him, and when that fails she uses the physical world to show him those metaphors. Pilgrim and the airstream are Cameron’s mixtape for Joe.

Let us look at the evidence of my claims above, and I’ll start with Pilgrim and what Donna discovers about it:

Joe says he was once on TV as a “pilgrim” over the phone reconnection. And thus overall Joe is the intended “pilgrim” in Cameron’s game.

The pilgrim is a blue man. Joe started out at IBM, called Big Blue, and IBM men usually wore blue suits.

Donna clicks the “key” item in the menu when she starts the game. In other words, the path and the discovery is a crucial “key” to understanding the game and consequentially Cameron.

The avatar reaches an area with what looks like flames in the air. I’ve read recaps and reviews who think those orange-brown things flying in the air are broken pieces of the puzzle, but I’ve watched every previous image of the game and it has nothing to do with the puzzle. I think the things flying in the air that the avatar eventually climbs are meant to be “flames”. In other words, they are a different version of the lighters that Joe and Cameron play around with at Comdex 90 where their relationship and passion was “rekindled”.

Gordon is feeding his journals to the flames

PJ Harvey’s lyrics

The series title “Halt and Catch Fire”

The avatar hits some type of invisible “airstream”, taking it off balance.

The avatar must climb upwards into the sky or towards the stars where the airstream and flames were, not walk forward towards a future which is just another crappy version of the present to Cam.

There’s a flash of light and the pilgrim reappears at this empty space of light (star level). Only Joe’s arc has had a similar scene happening in S3, what I think of as a “rebirth” scene.

We see a shooting star landing on an island or continent with a 2D image of the avatar stamped on it. This is the place where the pilgrim gets to actually play the game. And it is highly likely related to the Shangri-La (magical land) concept that Joe wrote a letter about to both Gordon and Cameron. Only Gordon confirmed in S2 that he read the letter. Cam refrained to answer Joe about it. The map and land though suggests that Cameron read the letter.

Then 8 crystals or starlight emanating shards appear (”jewels”). Each acts as a “doorway” to a partition of the island/continent, and immediately transports (like Star Trek) the avatar into that piece of the map. Cameron called the airstream a “jewel” to sweep Joe off his feet into a magical land.

The doorway that Donna chose to transport with landed her in the SW of the island, and a Japanese winter garden with a shrine in the middle of Tokyo (you can see dark skyscrapers in the background), emanating warm welcoming light and surrounding torches. The only person Cameron mentioned a shrine in a spiritual sense to was Joe.

Cameron herself says it’s not just a game you play, but a game you live.

All evidence points to the pilgrim meant to be Joe, rather than Cameron. The island and continent represents Cameron herself. Unlike what some reviewers claim, Cameron doesn’t need to be put together or fixed, since the continent is whole already. What she needs and desires is for her pilgrim to explore her completely. And her comment about the game being something you live suggests the game is meant to represent life or a lifetime exploration. In a romantic sense Pilgrim is Cam’s proposal to Joe, not unlike Gordon’s decoder engagement ring for Donna.

There is the addition that even if the pilgrim misses the clue to climb the flames, but instead stays on ground zero, getting himself distracted by picking up treasures and completing puzzles, he gets transported back to the beginning, to try again and find the airstream of flames. Cameron drops that hint to Joe when he calls her up about the game. If this is about Joe, as I claim it is, then Cameron is trying to say she’ll wait for him until he figures it out. She’s not going anyplace else.

At an instinctual level, Joe does get that the game Pilgrim is a means of connection between them. He plays it and calls her up when he gets sent back to the “start”. And when she mentions how beautiful the moon is in San Jose, Joe looks at the Pilgrim avatar on his screen and decides to spend the night with her in San Jose. He understood the indirect invitation then.

But nobody gets the game and it gets pulled from publication. Cam says dejected that even Joe doesn’t like her game, while he reassures her he hasn’t finished the game yet. As he then also advises her to “move on” and keep making other games, she retreats to be by herself. If of course, the game represents the lifetime she imagines for herself with Joe, he unwittingly disappoints her by mentioning “finishing the game” and “moving on”. What we have here thematically is “lost in translation”, which is of course a book and movie set in Japan. Joe assumes things about her and the game that are erroneous, including the belief she forgot and stopped caring about them while making this game, as he claims during his camping with Gordon in the season opener. Notice how that tent is beautifully lit in the darkness like a beacon in that camping scene, and just a material iteration of the warmly lit shrine in the Japanese garden in Pilgrim in 4x05.

After playing “doom” and Gordon telling her that the purpose of the game “is not to get killed”, she returns and “unpacks” by throwing her Japanese past with Tom in the bins, doing what Joe asked her to do, but in her own way. And after that she buys the bike, messes around with hardware, rides around the country. Gordon and Bos later make the link to it being a materialization of the “space bike”. Space Bike was a game about Cameron’s values and talents: she can make herself big or small, befitting the environment (proportion), sense of humor, sense of self, decency and the latter leads to common sense. But the bad-ass chick on the Space Bike is homeless and unbound, forever traveling from one planet to the next, only requiring drinks and a shower. Instead of doing it virtually, Cameron now tries to materialize this.

While she rides her Space Bike she discovers a plot of beautiful land with a sign that says “If you lived here you’d be home now”. And come on, it’s a very beautiful piece of land in that discovery shot, has a fairytale or magical quality to it. And the sign has three key words: live, home, and now (instead of the future). Whatever she eventually would end up building there for a house, it has the ideal potential to be whatever Joe and Cam could want it to be. Think of the scene between Joe and Ryan in S3 in the basement of Macmillan Utility where Joe intends to set up the local network connected to NSFNET. So, she buys the land, but instead of hiring an architect and immediately get contractors to build something on it, she pretty  much leaves it in its ideal state of a blank slate full of potential. Is that wrong? Of course not. She shouldn’t be deciding what the permanent form ought to be by herself. Joe should be part of its creation, so that their mutual vision can be part of the walls and lay-out. On top of that, even if Joe has asked her to move in with him, she’s still not officially divorced and they haven’t discussed the form of their relationship, nor said “I love you.”

It’s actually surprising a little that Joe doesn’t totally get that or hates it out there. He did hike up to the Observatory in Texas once via scenic route at the end of S1 a decade before that, walking into Sarah’s life. He’s a stargazer, right? And yet at the start of S4 he can’t see the moon from his home, blocked by a hill. Also, with that wool sweater and her long auburn hair in this phase of S4, Cam reminds somewhat of Sarah.

Anyway, instead of building a house all by herself on the plot, Cam buys the airstream. To the owner who sells it to her, with Joe standing right there, Cam explains it’s a temporary solution, before something “permanent” can be “built” there. We are introduced to the onthologist in the same episode who stipulates how one word can have different meanings, using “bark” as an example. The word “airstream” can be an airstream trailer, but it is also a change in the air caused by heat as it does in the game Pilgrim. Cam reveals she used to play in the airstream with her friend in her youth, and Joe asks her what she’d play in it then. “Airstream,” she answers. Here is Cam’s second hint to Joe how he can play the Pilgrim game. Oh, and she calls it “perfect”, which was the word of understanding between Joe and Ryan.

As they try the bed out, Joe asks her why she wants him to consider the AOL money. And she replies it would give him more time spend time with her, mentions “human touch”. He asks her whether the long trailer means she’s moving out, to which she immediately replies, “No,” and clarifies, “She’s trying to buy this jewel to sweep him away to a magical land”. This is her third game hint: the jewels, sweeping him into the air, and a magical land.

She takes the trailer out there, builds a hearth and puts up some lights in the air that have the form of “flames”. This is Cam’s 4th hint. Watch her face of disappointment when neither Bos, Gordon or Joe take much notice of it.

These are not just all hints. They are her material recreation of Pilgrim. And here follows the clue that Pilgrim was created for Joe and her fantasy of the two of them while stuck, isolated in a doomed marriage at the other side of the world:  she’s all happy when Joe promises he wouldn’t want to miss out on his first night with her in that honeymoon bed, but she is near to tears when Joe fell asleep on her.

Instead of Joe actually visiting the airstream to find her and be with her there, even if just for a night and make love to her there, we’ve seen two other character seek her out at the airstream: Bos and Tom. Bos goes out there to help her out with her plumbing and tells her he’s proud of her getting out of her comfort zone. She discovers his compass, and he reveals his money trouble, and she is the sole person who helps him out, on the condition it’s a one-time gift. Tom goes out there to get the divorce papers signed, gifts her the solution to the noise mystery in their apartment back in Japan and she apologizes to him for the pain she put him through and says her goodbye to him.

So, Joe… Why is he blind and tonedeaf to what she’s actually trying to do out there in her “space trailer”. Basically he’s doing the same thing the Japanese did with their shrine – rebuilding the original process.

Team up with Gordon and bring Cameron into the business

Connect with Cameron in the basement, which in the past was the first location both in the bar and at Cardiff where they had their first sexual encounters. It’s where he waits for her for 4 years. The basement at Westgroup is also where he had the time-sharing idea, to then team-up with Gordon and eventually have a “hands-on” business relationship with Mutiny and Cameron. The number of first downloads of the bugged browser “loadstar” is after all 69, which is a quite famous number for sexual position.

Give her a key to his apartment to come over whenever she wants and needs to

We as viewers can empathize with Joe trying to recreate the environment and circumstances that brought them together originally as well as how frustrating it is for him to have Cameron refuse to step into business with him, while she shares his bed. Joe Macmillan isn’t the manipulative cutthroat anymore that he was in S1 and so he naturally believes that if he works with Cameron this time, now that they have reconnected, they could pull it off. His work is his life and he wants and hopes to include Cameron in that. He tangibly looks forward to working with her again, since the S3 finale. She’s his muse after all.

But she steadfastly refuses this, and Joe clearly doesn’t know what to do with it. For a big part that is because this is how he goes about it with anyone he connects with and can be himself, by working with them – Simon, Gordon, Cameron, Haley. He even tries that angle with Joanie. It’s so fundamental to him to have a working relationship with the people he admires or tries to include, that he expresses how clueless he is where his relationship with Cam is going to Gordon, in a subtextual manner in 4x05. He asked her to help him with Comet, she refused and fled to the airstream, he smashes the wok, goes all S1 Joe on Gordon the next day until Gordon orders him to take a fresh breath of air. Then when he comes back with a newly bought wok (while Cam is opening a box with a wok she bought too), Gordon mentions that Cam is on the phone line. Joe says he doesn’t even know which problem he’s trying to solve. How he was in the basement for 3 years (aka waiting for Cam to choose him over Tom and come back into his life), he finally has his arms around “it” (Cam again), but now he can’t see it anymore. As Gordon asks Joe whether they’re talking about the future here again, Joe says he should call Cam again. Gordon then asks him about whether Joe saw this (Comet) ten years ago in Gordon’s garage. To which Joe explains it was not about where it would end up, but knowing the feeling of working together. He could envision how it would feel to work with Gordon, and we can infer how Joe envisioned that working with Cam would turn him on completely. He does not know what it would be like to share a life with Cam without working together. That is why he says he has been beyond patient with her. He’s been waiting for her to show up at Comet one day and agree to be part of the team, and to prove to her she can trust him as a business partner.

Meanwhile he’s also insecure and unsure about Tom. His gut always told him to never regard Tom as a true rival to the intensity that Joe and Cam had even when separated in S2, nor in S3. Where Joe is a grown man, Tom looks like a kid, and conservative to boot too. He very much regarded Tom as Cam’s mistake like he mistakenly sought a replacement in Sarah, and the night at Comdex 90 and the www project would make her see “the light”. But it didn’t turn out as he expected it would. Cam did the decent thing – stick to the marriage - with the man he believes is wrong for her. We can see how afraid he is of what she wants to tell him that is so urgent she asked him to pull over the car, when she reveals she saw Tom that day. Joe sags his head and closes his eyes. It’s as if he fears that Tom and her reconciled. After all, Cam stuck with Tom outwardly in the way Sarah didn’t stick with Joe. The “facts” seem to prove to Joe that his gut was wrong about it all.

Basically, Joe is afraid to lose her and too afraid to upset her or have an actual fight with her. And when that first fight occurred, he doesn’t know what will come next.

But none of the facts are what they seem. It turns out that his gut about Cameron’s feelings for him trumping those for Tom was correct. It turns out that she waited for Tom to leave her voluntarily, that she loves Joe, and thus that she wanted to be with him since 90 as much as he wanted her to be with him. If he was miserable in the basement, she was miserable in an apartment in Tokyo, handcuffed by guilt to a husband (which is what the Stephen King book Geralds’s Game is a horror version parallel to) she wanted to leave, while denying happiness to herself. (incidentally Gerald’s Game has a “space cowboy” in it, but he’s a necrophiliac serial killer).

This sort of unhappiness though has its impact in the present, just in a different way than assumed. She’s not unhappy that Tom left her, has another woman or having a baby. But what is important to recognize is that Cameron basically denied herself almost completely for the last 4 years, and adapted herself to fit the needs and wants of Tom. Anyone who stayed too long in an unhappy match, denying their own wants and needs, will recognize that once free from such a relationship, one is bound to be very reluctant to move into what looks like a complete life of a new partner: Joe’s home, Joe’s work, Joe’s friends, Joe’s colleagues, Joe’s business partners. It doesn’t matter that Joe allows her to be who she is, endeavors to stimulate to do the things she loves or does not oppose her from doing her own thing even if he’s not a fan of it. She needs her own turf, see the people that Joe might regard as business rivals. It’s not enough for him to make room for her into his established life, and quite unhealthy for her to fit and mold herself to his.

It should be “their life”, and that is why it’s so important that he too needs to let go of his own comfort zone and try to immerse himself into this nowhere plot of land and airstream, and try to imagine what they could built together out there with “steel and concrete and building blocks”.  I don’t think her intent is to fit and lock him into the airstream, but to “play airstream” where they can brainstorm and fantasize what type of life they want to build together, while she “plays house” in his apartment simultaneously. And if he does that, she might even surprise him how much she’s willing to compromise.

When he asked her over breakfast in 4x02 whether she knows what she wants, she looks up and stares at “him”. When he tells her over the phone he wants to know her in his life, she makes a little silent fist of victory. And by 4x05 she tells him she loves him.  

So, unlike others, I disagree that Cam should just quit her “games”, “grow up” and “move in” with Joe. Joe should not move into the trailer, but he should “play” and discover her there.

ETA: I’m not saying that Cam and Joe shouldn’t compromize. The “airstream” does not represent a permanent home, not even for Cam. What I’m saying is that a) Joe makes the error to regard it as Joe’s home vs trailer b) while Cam herself regards it as Joe’s home AND trailer to build a foundation and discover together what their life together might be like. She does live in his home too. Even people who know each other intimately, the worst and the best, for a decade, but wanting or hoping to establish a lifelong commitment for the first time after all that time, still need game-room to play around with ideas. 3x09, 4x02 phonecall and breakfast were perhaps their first three proper dates.