"Search" and "Ten of Swords" are two episodes of the American television series Halt and Catch Fire that serve as the series finale. They are the ninth and tenth episodes of the fourth season, and the 39th and 40th episodes overall. They originally aired back-to-back on AMC on October 14, 2017. "Search" was written by Mark Lafferty and directed by Daisy von Scherler Mayer. "Ten of Swords" was written by co-creators and showrunners Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers, and was directed by Karyn Kusama.
In the episodes, months after the death of Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy), his friends, collaborators, and family ponder the futures of their personal and professional lives. Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) and Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis) prepare for the relaunch of Comet's website as a web portal, but an unforeseen competitor threatens his company and their relationship. Donna Emerson (Kerry Bishé) must decide whether to accept the vacant managing partner position at her venture capital firm. Meanwhile, as she and Cameron continue to reconcile as friends, they contemplate the possibility of working together again.
"Search" and "Ten of Swords" were watched by 394,000 viewers during their original broadcast. The episodes were acclaimed by critics, who praised the closure reached for the main characters, the emotional scenes between Donna and Cameron, and the uplifting yet ambiguous ending. Several critics ranked the finale of Halt and Catch Fire among the best in TV history.
Plot "Search" At the startup company Comet, several months after the death of his business partner Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy), Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) prepares for the relaunch of their website as a web portal, for which his girlfriend Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis) led the software development. Joe screens a planned television commercial for the company employees that will accompany the relaunch, and he becomes emotional when seeing footage of Gordon. Later, Joe presents Cameron with a Centipede arcade cabinet, hoping to persuade her to help with one more task: optimize Comet's performance before the web browser Netscape Navigator is released, in hopes of becoming Netscape's default search engine. Cameron reluctantly agrees to stay on longer to help.
Departing for Bangkok, Joanie Clark (Kathryn Newton) bids her mother Donna Emerson (Kerry Bishé) and sister Haley (Susanna Skaggs) farewell at the airport. Diane Gould (Annabeth Gish) stops by Donna's house to tell her she must decide whether or not to succeed Diane as managing partner at their venture capital firm AGGEK. Donna remains unsure what to do. After receiving a clean bill of health, John Bosworth (Toby Huss) tells his wife Diane that he is ready to travel the world together.
Donna and Haley have dinner with Joe and Cameron, continuing Donna's and Cameron's reconcilement as friends. Donna expresses interest in being more involved with the creative side of projects. After Joe shows Haley the commercial, she lashes out at him for including footage of her deceased father and for profiting from Comet, which was founded from her idea; Joe decides not to air the commercial. Haley works up the courage to ask a fast food waitress out on a date but is rejected. Donna decides to accept the managing partner position.
While Joe and Cameron review a beta version of Netscape Navigator that her financier Alexa Vonn (Molly Ephraim) had sent her, they find a hyperlink to Yahoo!, an upstart web portal, is prominently placed on the browser's toolbar. Joe realizes that Yahoo! has struck a deal to become Netscape's default search provider and that Comet is doomed. After one last night together, Joe and Cameron break up. When Donna is announced as the new managing partner at AGGEK, Trip Kisker III (Charlie Bodin) informs her that Yahoo!'s rise will mean the end of Comet, and that AGGEK will explore selling Rover's search algorithm so it can revert to its original purpose, indexing medical records. Donna laughs incredulously while repeating the Yahoo! name. Cameron decides to accompany Alexa on an overseas trip to a technology conference.
"Ten of Swords" Joanie calls Donna from Bangkok and tells her mother a story of her travels. Realizing Comet cannot compete with Yahoo!, Joe sells the company. He visits a tarot card reader, Denise (Carol Kane), hoping to understand what the future holds. As he leaves, he is nearly hit by a car before encountering a former colleague from IBM, Dale Butler (David Wilson Barnes), who tells Joe he is excited to see what he does next. Donna renames AGGEK to "Symphonic Ventures" and revamps their work culture to be more relaxed and inclusive. After an unsuccessful business trip, Cameron ends her professional relationship with Alexa. Planning to leave California, Cameron packs up her Airstream trailer; Bosworth visits her to offer words of encouragement. She stops at Joe's apartment to drop off his belongings but finds that he has already moved out.
Saying her goodbyes, Cameron stops by Donna's house, where Donna is preparing to host a cocktail party for women in the tech industry. When Haley's computer hard drive crashes, Cameron stays and tries to help Donna recover a school project from it. Cameron proposes that she and Donna work together again, which catches Donna by surprise. Later that evening at the party, Donna gives a speech reflecting on her experiences as a female in the tech industry, during which she refers to Cameron as "my last and best partner". The speech culminates with Cameron accidentally falling in the pool. The two later visit the former office of Mutiny and Comet, and envision what it would be like to work together again at a hypothetical company named "Phoenix"; dreaming up the history of the venture, the two decide it would ultimately fail but that their friendship would endure this time. Haley listens to Gordon's self-affirmation tapes in her bedroom. The following morning, before Cameron's planned cross-country road trip, she has breakfast with Donna at a diner. While paying the check, Donna has an epiphany; rushing out of the diner, she tells Cameron, "I have an idea."
Joe returns home to Armonk, New York, to become a humanities teacher at a school. Addressing his students with the same words he spoke to Cameron's college class in the series pilot, he says, "Let me start by asking a question."
Production + Schedule of production deadlines for episodes "Search" "Ten of Swords" Story beats April 21, 2017 May 5, 2017 Outline May 8, 2017 May 22, 2017 Revised outline May 15, 2017 May 30, 2017 Rough draft May 29, 2017 June 13, 2017 1st draft June 5, 2017 June 20, 2017 2nd draft June 12, 2017 June 27, 2017 Preparations June 21, 2017 July 5, 2017 Filming starts June 30, 2017 July 14, 2017
Writing For the scene in "Ten of Swords" in which Donna hosts a cocktail party at her house for women in the tech industry, co-creators and showrunners Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers wrote a two-page monologue for the character to discuss her experiences in the industry as a woman. Rogers called it the most difficult part of creating the finale, as they did not want to "overtly moralize". He said that throughout the series, they "really tried to live [their] principles... versus advertising them", but that he was still afraid her speech would come across as preachy. However, the duo felt they had earned the opportunity to make "textual what should be subtextual" because of Donna's journey from housewife in the first season to ambitious businesswoman heading a venture capital firm in the final season. Rogers said, "The knowledge of that journey and the bumps on the road afford her the ability to speak about it in a personal way."
Cantwell said the intent of the Phoenix scene was for Donna and Cameron to recognize a pattern in their behaviors: the excitement in pursuing a new idea and coalescing around it but ultimately harming their interpersonal relationships in the process. By acknowledging how their hypothetical venture could have failed, the characters gain what Cantwell called "a new foundation to stand on, as opposed to where they were before that". The writers briefly entertained the idea of writing a conclusion that depicted the characters' fates in the present day, but they decided not to due to logistics with aging makeup and because they felt it would be disingenuous to the show since a vital component of its story was the characters "not knowing what's coming around the corner".
The original scripted ending called for Joe to return to IBM, but Cantwell deemed it "much darker and melancholic" and it was scrapped.
Casting David Wilson Barnes reprised the character of Dale Butler for "Ten of Swords"; he previously appeared in the first two episodes of the series before the character was written out when the story went in a different direction.
Carol Kane portrayed the fortune teller Denise. Her appearance was the result of the producers requesting the casting directors find "someone like Carol Kane" for the character, to which they replied, "How about Carol Kane?"
Filming At the end of "Search", Donna laughs incredulously as she repeats the website name "Yahoo!". For the scene, AMC's business affairs department prohibited the producers from having Donna yodel; the Yahoo! name had been yodeled as part of the company's television marketing in the 1990s.
"Ten of Swords" was directed by Karyn Kusama. Having directed an episode in each of the three prior seasons, Kusama was asked by executive producer Melissa Bernstein to return for a fourth-season episode; Bernstein said she had "been begging Karyn to direct all season". Kusama initially faced scheduling conflicts while working on the film Destroyer, but according to Bernstein: "Eventually, I think she just folded to wanting to be a part of bringing this series to a close. It just felt right."
Production on the episode, and thus the series, wrapped in late July 2017.
Cocktail party scene The cocktail party scene at Donna's house was filmed at a mid-century modern-style home in northeastern Atlanta that was scouted by Kusama, director of photography Evans Brown, and production designer Ola Maslik. It was chosen for its minimalist architecture that could be easily decorated to reflect Donna's upscale tastes and the period setting. The staff also thought it would be easier to shoot the swimming pool on location than to replicate it on a sound stage. Due to a slope in the lawn, Maslik and set designer Lance Totten built a wooden platform on top of it and covered it with sod, giving the lawn a flat appearance. At the risk of it collapsing, all non-essential personnel were barred from standing on it.
Since the cocktail party was set during dusk, the crew were hoping for overcast conditions for optimal lighting. Instead, it was a bright day with almost no cloud cover, and temperatures in Atlanta reached , a high for that month; Brown called the combination of conditions "the worst nightmare". Shooting began at 6:55p.m. and lasted four hours; with only an hour of natural dusk, the crew had to simulate it for three hours of the shoot. To filter the sunlight, key grip Bill Merrill floated a large helium-inflated, mattress-shaped balloon called a "grip cloud" above the yard, while charcoal "solids" were set up on the west side of the yard to reduce lighting. The crew also adjusted the balance of ambient outdoor lighting with interior lighting coming from the house; increasing the interior lighting gave the exterior a darker appearance on camera.