Channel Zero is an anthology horror series in its second season on SYFY. I haven’t watched the first (Candle Cove) as No-End House was the first promo I’ve seen for the series.

No-End House is a creative take on haunted houses that pop up all over the country for Halloween. This particular house has a viral internet following as it seems to get only advertising online. Short teaser clips sent to people that are shared around until someone sees the house (an on the small side two story home painted matte black). When people congregate at night, the front door unlocks, allowing groups of people. Inside are six rooms, each scarier than the last. Most people bail out of the experience before they get to the end. There are all sorts of rumors about the house that draws people in, that the rooms are different for everyone, and making it through will change your life.

Main characters, Margot and Jules decide to check out the house together with their friend JD. They meet another guy, Seth, shortly after they find out about the house and he tags along with them.

Margot and Jules had been close childhood friends until Margot’s father died from a prescription drug reaction. After the tragedy, Jules left town for school, essentially leaving Margot behind. Jules comes home from break and she tries to reconnect with Margot. What better way than a haunted house?

Once in the house, Margot and Jules traverse the increasingly intense rooms with JD and Seth and two others until they are separated. They come out of the back the house to discover…they are still inside the house and it wants something from them.

Through the six episodes, the rules and secrets of the house become exposed. The secrets of the people also trickle out. It’s a cerebral trip through a dangerous and surreal world.

No-End House is a really creepy show. The set up with the house is cool and there are some amazing visuals once things going. Like any good horror/mystery story, subtle foreshadowing is all over the place and not everything is answered. You constantly question the motives of the house and the people. Each person has their own story, one that the house seemingly knows and exploits.

I think six episodes is the sweet spot for a show like this. Enough room to get a complete and complex story out without any wheel spinning. It’s constantly moving and delivering, there’s time for characters to grow (and die) but not waste time. The end is satisfying yet open-ended enough to create good discussions on what happened.

Season 3, Butcher’s Block, is coming up next year and I’m looking forward to it if this is the kind of quality I can expect. I’m going to check out Season 1 as soon as I can.

legacy

All about that Tyrell. The long gap of time where Tyrell was missing has been filled in. Turns out he really. really, missed Elliot.

So the Dark Army found Elliot and Tyrell back at the original f society HQ just after the five/nine hack. And Irving was managing that pick up team, so Whiterose has had him in his employ for some time. He separated the two and hid Tyrell from the feds while Elliot went on to commit himself.

It was a rough go for Tyrell, looking at video of his son while he was secluded in a cabin in the woods in New York.  Coding and chopping wood seemed to be his only two pastimes while he was there. Being so pull out of society damaged his psyche. Reading that your wife has filed for divorce will do that to a man. And as Tyrell said, if she saw him the way he was there, she never would have taken him back.

We got a sizable nugget from this separation: Tyrell didn’t know Elliot had a split personality. Every time he was with Elliot, it was Mr. Robot. When he talks to Elliot on the phone when he’s locked up (season 2), Tyrell gets upset that Elliot didn’t recognize his voice. Tyrell holds Elliot (the version he knows anyway) in high esteem. He tells everyone that will listen he has to be working with Elliot on Stage 2. It’s not until Elliot is recovering from surgery that Angela tells him about the two personalities. It’s Mr. Robot who wakes up first.

We get another glance of the machinations of Whiterose. The complications of Elliot breaking and committing himself brings us to Whiterose’s right-hand man first expressing his displeasure of the continued insistence on not cutting Elliot loose and moving on without him. Whiterose is none too pleased about what happened but he’s confident in his decisions. Keep an eye on Elliot while he’s there and pull the strings to get him out (which they do). And then comes Donald Trump on TV at the start of his campaigning to become president of the United States. Whiterose found another wildcard to bet on.

Undo

Elliot gets a job at E Corp on the recovery team and does everything he can to fix what he started. One of his biggest goals is to keep the physical files from being brought to the New York location to prevent the mass destruction of everything from being possible. When a wall comes up, he goes classic hacker to knock it down. He makes some good progress but when he’s away from work, he gets crushingly depressed from being lonely.

After avoiding his sister (he thinks she’s a trigger for Mr. Robot), he talks to her. She says she’s ready to skip town and Elliot asks her to keep him company for the night. Darlene is working for the feds and hasn’t been able to give them any useful information. She thinks he isn’t working with Tyrell and they give her proof that he is. When Elliot is asleep, she plants something on his computer. But Elliot is asleep and that means she has an abrupt meeting with Mr. Robot that sends her running. Her software drop was successful, giving Dom and her partner access to Elliot’s PC. Well, sort of successful.

Price tries swinging his weight at Whiterose and it doesn’t work. Chalk up another brilliant scene for BD Wong.

Elliot’s therapist, Krista Gordon, meets Mr. Robot for the first time. Chalk up another brilliant scene for Christian Slater.

A major character death! It took me by complete surprise, I never saw it coming. Just goes to show, when you get used to trampling people to get what you want, you can think you’re invincible. There can be consequences from being a pile of garbage.

Search / Ten of Swords

Halt and Catch Fire is a series of failures. A group of four brilliant people and those that get pulled into their orbit jumping to reach the sky and hitting the ground after each attempt. Sometimes their feet don’t make contact first.

Halt never found a big audience. It managed to reach and keep just enough fans to keep going. In fact, the production never knew if there would be another season when they finished filming each year. Thankfully we managed to keep this show on to get it to its conclusion.

I love where this show went. It transformed and expanded past just Gordon and Joe. Halt covered a lot of time, more than a decade, and that meant the tech nexus of each season got to change with it. Four people who met in the 80s and worked on the next big thing had to keep coming up with another next big thing. Their relationships changed just as much as the tech they worked on.

In just four seasons I got really attached to Joe, Gordon, Donna, Cameron and to an extent Bos. The acting so strong that I believed everything they went through together. Their emotions and rational were tangible through every moment. That all came together in a powerful final season.

Starting with IBM clone PCs, to Mutiny, to Comet, each project started with an idea. A thought that turned into a business that would start a wave or catch one that others were chasing. While there were great successes, failure was seemingly never far behind.

It’s the bounce from those failures, how they broke and managed to piece things together to keep going, is what Halt is ultimately about.

Joe and Gordon were the easy focal points of the show at the beginning. While they were a great base to build from, where Cameron and Donna went is what I think is the shows’ greatest strength.

Cameron and Donna are fantastic characters. Both brilliant from different angles, it was often their partnership what drove the show. Joe and Gordon would not have gone anywhere without them. So when they broke apart, there was a major shift in the show. The star-crossed lovers, Joe and Cam, split up as did Gordon and Donna’s marriage. No one could trust Joe. Cameron was stubborn and a flake, nearly impossible to work with. She hated the business side of tech while Donna embraced it. That was Donna’s anchor tied to her foot. She could be ruthless and would choose “the greater good” over an individual every time. Gordon was often caught in the current the others made, an engineer who was happiest when working with his hands.

Sacrifices were made by everyone and I always questioned if they felt it was worth it. Donna’s cocktail party at the end was especially poignant for me, sharing how she reflected on her career and what it did to her life.

I really liked the end. Bos gets his second chance, a celebration of life. Comet burns out in the only way it could: they were inches short again. Joe and Cameron fall back on their tried and true trait: run. But Joe goes in a different direction. Cameron reaches out to Donna, something I didn’t think she’d do. It’s not instant though, there’s an apprehension behind their potential future and they talk about it.

And this extends to Gordon and Donna’s kids. Haley travels abroad to find herself and in Thailand relays a beautiful experience to her mother (after only talking to Haley for weeks). Haley’s time working with her father at Comet was a pivotal time in her life. She also comes of age with her own questions about herself. She’ll continue her father’s legacy, using him as her inspiration and her guiding star.

No matter what there’s always talk of the future on Halt. The talk of the next big thing, what could be next, what can they do and how do they avoid what always happens to them? Cam says, “I don’t know, I don’t have any more ideas.” and then later the inspiration comes from Donna, “I have an idea.”

Nothing is perfect and few things work out the way we want. Gordon and Donna drifted apart. Joe and Cameron found that they wanted different things. A tragedy doesn’t signal the end. You just need to find the opportunities to follow and the guts to pursue them.

Power Saver Mode

Last season ended on a cliff hanger with Elliot shot and the season 3 premiere wastes no time in moving forward.

Some realizations come quick and a fundamental pivot has happened.

First, Tyrell is real. Elliot was wrong. In a power move to take control of his own mind, Elliot had challenged what he thought was a mental projection. That was a real gun and a real Tyrell. This leaves Elliot bleeding out of the floor and we’re introduced to a fixer for the Dark Army: Irving.

Now the Dark Army made some big moves last season. Darlene is scared to death as they put the pinch on f society with deadly actions. She couldn’t find Elliot for days and has basically crawled into a shell.

Irving comes to Tyrell’s SOS and saves Elliot’s life. They sweep the base of operations clean, Tyrell is who knows where now and Elliot comes to in Angela’s apartment. Elliot has a lot to process. He doesn’t feel Mr. Robot anymore. Maybe the shot killed him. But he was wrong about everything to do with f society. He knows what Stage 2 is (his own plan made without his knowledge) and Tyrell stopped him from shutting down the plan. Everything he wanted to do with f society was a mistake, it made everything worse and he can’t blame anything but himself. He has to do what he can to fix it. He has to shut down the backdoor to E Corps recovery effort so the Dark Army can’t destroy it all. He needs Angela’s help to get him a job at E Corp. Elliot has committed himself to being a white hat.

White Rose has other plans and her right-hand man (I guess that’s what he is) is annoyed. Tyrell and Elliot are unstable and he doesn’t understand why White Rose wants to keep working with them to finish Stage 2. He’s “more than capable” of doing it. White Rose is convinced she’s right, she just needs to keep Elliot’s rage focused on the task she wants him to do. And she has help.

In the gadzooks moment, Angela has turned. The Dark Army stopped her from going to the FBI. Angela has listened to what Whiterose has told her and is in her pocket. Mr. Robot isn’t gone and Angela can tell when it’s him and when it’s Elliot. Elliot has no idea Mr. Robot is autonomous again. Angela plays along with Elliot leading him where Whiterose wants and works with Mr. Robot when he shows up. Elliot may be a white hat but his other half is a committed black hat and he has no clue. It looks like Irving is her contact/handler/liaison to the Dark Army and Mr. Robot knows Irving. The scene with Angela is talking to Mr. Robot on the subway is nuts on so many levels. “How can you tell when it’s me or him?” “Your eyes are different. You don’t look away.”

This is straight up spy stuff and I love it. Irving first meets Elliot (conscious Elliot) and Darlene by getting them out of a bind and tries to get Elliot to go along with Stage 2. White hat Elliot says no and Elliot sneaks off with Darlene to close the backdoor in a hidden hacker party. He manages to do it but gets cut off by Whiterose’s men. So it’s a win for Elliot and a point of contention for Mr. Robot when he finds out. Mr. Robot is furious that Elliot will be pushing back on everything he tries to do with Stage 2.

Interesting realization: Elliot doesn’t know about Mr. Robot but the reverse isn’t true. But when one personality is in charge, the other one doesn’t know what they are doing. It’s a complete mind split with independent thoughts, memories, and actions. Now, how long until Elliot figures out what’s happening. I don’t think Elliot is blacking out when Mr. Robot takes control so it won’t be obvious to him. The first time we see Mr. Robot in the episode is when Elliot goes to sleep in Angela’s apartment.

Fascinating start, I can’t wait for more.