Season 3 of Halt and Catch Fire and the rise of the Silicon Valley

The AMC/Netflix series Halt and Catch Fire continues its upward trend in Season 3, w/ each season getting better, more tense, more dramatic that the previous. Season 3 takes all of the main characters on a migration from Dallas (at one time a tech-industry capital) to the SF and the emerging Silicon Valley culture of the late 1980s. We see the characters at least initial bathed in sudden enormous wealth (Joe McMillan, the marketing genius, becomes a Jobs-like figure as head of McMillan Utilities, based on software that he stole or at least appropriated from Josh) while Cameron and Donna, w/ their vastly different temperaments, join forces to create a software startup - only to watch it go down in flames when an IPO fails to attract enough $. McMillan, too, falls apart when town to shreds by lawsuits from competing investors and by some risky, perhaps illegal, investments. In other words, this season captures the mood of the time - rise and fall of fortunes, young people with more $ than they'd ever imagined, great potential and great risk, and lots of ego. All of the lead characters are strong, credible, and in dubious battle w/ one another (an exception may be Tom, now married to Cameron but in no way her equal - he seems like someone she'd have left in the dust). So far the series, though the lives of the characters, has followed the tech industry as it rapidly evolved from a gaming and entertainment industry, to a world of software and the first PCs, and, as season 4 nears, we can see that the characters are first becoming aware of the potential and the challenges of the world-wide web; they're groping their way toward an understanding of this next phase. It's amazing to think about how much our world has changed in 25 year; these characters seem to contemporary, but in regard to technology the world they lived in was prehistoric.m Strong performances by all the leads - especially the ever-intriguing Cameron (Mackenzie Davis) - and some great writing and crisp directing throughout this Cantwell and Rogers production.