A Quick Look Back At The Super Mario Bros. Episode Of Halt And Catch Fire

AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire returns tonight for its fourth and final season. It’s become one of the best prestige television shows still left standing, and while there’s a lot of stuff it gets right and does well, few things show off the series’ charm like the episode it dedicated to Super Mario Bros.
With all of the season’s conflicts are left up in the air and spinning like plates, a small CRT lodged into tiki entertainment cabinet displays the second level of Nintendo’s iconic game. Gordon and Cameron frame the shot staring intently at the programmatic edifice while Gordon’s two kids, one sucking down a Capri Sun, stare on in bored disbelief. “When will it be our turn?” the crow in an instantly recognizable tone. Cameron is playing, and of course Cameron immediately dies because dying is the only way to explore the game and figure out it’s bizarre logic. About to skip one of the level’s secret rooms hidden beneath a pipe, Gordon reminds her she has to double back, only for Cameron to do so and forget about the Piranha Plant waiting to punish her thoughtlessness.
It’s a moment I’ve experienced a hundred times and from all of the different angles the show brings to it—the person playing and failing while others shake their heads, the one sitting next to them trying to back seat drive, and the hopeless bystanders simply waiting for it all to end. And the masterfully understated way that Halt and Catch Fire handles it is emblematic of what has made it one of the best and most beloved shows on television now heading into its fourth season. There are a million reasons why the show shouldn’t work, and it almost didn’t, but the way it strings together individual stories about people and technology has helped make it more than just a knock-off of Mad Men or a nostalgia trap for 80s and early 90s consumer culture.

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