After the death of Apple co-founder and technocrat saint Steve Jobs in 2011, the comedian Bill Burr started delivering a routine aimed squarely at Jobs’s Great Man myth. “You bought into it, right? All that advertising. The way they align themselves with some of the greatest people of all time: ‘Jesus. Gandhi. Me!’ Remember that? ‘Muhammad Ali. John Lennon. This guy!’” The ads referenced in the bit were part of Apple’s “Think Different” campaign, many of which featured only a portrait of a specific figure – spiritual leaders, musicians, revolutionaries – with the Apple logo and “Think Different” slogan. In the context of the ads themselves, they did indeed imply that Apple, and the omnipresent Jobs, fostered innovations and movements on par with those figures in the campaign. The first popular narrative to puncture the Jobs archetype, AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire, did this with a two-pronged approach: a Jobs figure in Lee Pace’s Joe MacMillan, whose mystique would lose air over several seasons, and an ambitious effort to depict tech innovation as a creative exercise, one possible only through a collaboration between equals.

The series followed the established template of the new “Golden Age of Television” cable dramas, led by male antiheroes and depicting ego-driven conflict. In the pilot, the conflict is between unassuming but brilliant engineer Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy), whose routine at the Dallas software firm Cardiff Electric is disrupted by the arrival of salesman Joe MacMillan. Joe manipulates Gordon, and the company, into joining the PC market and lures coding prodigy Cameron Howe (MacKenzie Davis) away from college to write an operating system modeled on IBM’s. Cameron serves as one half of the ensemble’s women, who would wind up at the heart of the series by the second season. The other half, Kerry Bishé’s Donna Clark, works as a secretary at Texas Instruments while playing housewife to Gordon’s and her children and looking for ways to put her Berkeley MBA to use. Although the first season is less successful than the later ones, series creators and showrunners Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers used the final episodes to set up a new status quo – Gordon ascendant at Cardiff, Donna joining Cameron at gaming startup Mutiny, and Joe torching his reputation in Dallas before setting off to start over – which would become the first in a pattern of resets for the series and its characters.

Dismissed in its first season as a knockoff Mad Men, issued by AMC in desperate search of another hit, similarities between the two series persisted throughout: Macmillan, a handsome cipher who acted unpredictably and spoke in Don Draper-esque riddles; the merging and shuttling of startups, a reflection of the little guys’ struggle to stake their own claim and of the cycle of ideas. There was a key flaw in this comparison; Mad Men, a more sophisticated show in almost every measure, treated artistic expression as a compromise with the world of capital, expression that could happen in isolation or in the community created as incidental to the workplace. Halt’s idealism, on the other hand, extended to both its people and their products – the possibility that the tech boom could shape a better world. That the protagonists’ ventures fail, and that their work is no longer with us – unlike that of Apple – is fundamental to the series’ project, which uses tech innovation as a broader analogy for the lives of creative people, and for their transient legacies.

Modern narratives about Silicon Valley culture and the American technocracy live and die by how they treat their inventions: as inherent goods, or as devices in human stories. In 2010 Mark Zuckerberg was given the premature biopic treatment in The Social Network, from a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. Five years later Sorkin’s screenplay of Steve Jobs, a biography that played out at three product launches over a span of decades, was adapted by Danny Boyle. If The Social Network succeeds, in spite of the ensuing failures and wide-scale harm caused by its subjects, it’s because it treats its technology as incidental to the story; what Zuckerberg is chasing is not a creative ideal but status, and the film’s misapprehension of what Facebook has become detracts nothing from its fable of power struggles between the new rich and the old. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs’s beatific final moments, which gave him absolution for his offenses against his biological daughter and looked forward to his invention of the iPod, rang false at the time, and it may benefit from merely fading away as all mediocre films do.

The characters of Halt and Catch Fire lived through a generation of American social upheaval that was also reflected in the era’s art and culture. Beginning in 1983, the series takes place during an era when the new age and human potential movements of the 1960s went from mainstream alternatives to the DNA of corporate philosophies and tech expansion. What author Marion Goldman calls “spiritual privilege” in her book The American Soul Rush – the proliferation of spiritual and therapeutic choices available to all Americans, not merely those located on the coasts or in major cities – led to the language used at communites like the Esalen Institute being adopted by major corporations. In 1985, the group therapy movement called the Erhard Seminars Training, or est, was retired and replaced by The Forum, a less demanding program pitched to businesses as a form of professional development. In the same decade, David Miscavige took over the chairmanship of the Church of Scientology, an organization which still maintains a stranglehold on the West Coast, and led an aggressive campaign of legal and personal harassment against officers of the IRS, which resulted in the restoration of the Church’s tax-exempt status and a new level of legitimacy for the organization.

The language of human potential persists in corporate philosophies, and in the terminology of those who wish to influence them. The 2014 book The Regenerative Business by consultant Carol Sanford includes in its subtitle the phrase “Cultivate Human Potential”. Sanford’s work, which foregrounds the idea of “toxicity” in business and the ability of executives to affect them through intentional practices, includes an invitation-only Regenerative Business Summit for business leaders, which groups participants according to “fooding, sheltering, transacting, adoring, recreating, communing”. Donna, who received her MBA from Berkeley in the 1970s in the show’s timeline, would have been one of a generation of students at top universities who experienced the influence of the human potential movement secondhand through professors and classmates who had met at communities like the Esalen Institute and returned to share their experiences. In the second season, it’s Donna who proposes pivoting Mutiny from a gaming company to Mutiny Community, a platform for chats and exchanges.

Halt didn’t frame itself as the story of IBM, or of Yahoo!, competitors whom the show’s protagonists fail against along the way. For a show that spent too much of its lifespan figuring out what it was about, it had a good thesis in its first season, when Joe sees the iMac at ComDex and realizes all their work on a new PC is for naught. That moment of failure, of coming up just short of first place, sets Donna, Cameron, and Gordon on the path to Mutiny — destined to be another also-ran in the history of Internet development, but also a literal attempt at building an alternative world, a community where connection to other people and creation are endemic to existence. Joe’s sales pitch for new technology is “the tech isn’t the thing, it’s the thing that gets you to the thing”, and Community is where the show first proposes that the ultimate “thing” in this framing is human connection.

The show’s third season, which is about a band breaking up — the company founded by Cameron and Donna, the punkish gaming visionary and the would-be executive — delivers on the promise of the show’s female leads as one of those brilliant collaborations that becomes a kind of hurtful division all music fans are familiar with. As played by Mackenzie Davis, Cameron is also a cousin to Carson McCuller’s Mick Kelly in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, a solitary young girl with music in her head, who longs for nature’s idyll and tries to bring it into her created worlds. Although Cameron softened her look by the end of season three, in the show’s first two seasons her pixie haircut, T-shirt fits and Davis’s broad-shouldered, androgynous charisma all echo certain figures of the rock era: Andy Warhol, Davids Bowie and Byrne. The look is less a reference to a particular bandleader than a statement about who Cam is to other people: a rock star. And Davis’s face, with those ice-blue eyes, is the show’s key image, as when her jaw drops a little, her eyelids open wide, as she absorbs the wounds that can be dealt by those who know you best.

Moments in the second season, which takes place in Cameron’s ramshackle home during its time as Mutiny HQ, place her as the kind of revolutionary figure depicted in the “Think Different” campaign. When Joe makes an offer to buy the company out, Cameron leaps on a table and rallies the development team to cheer her on as she rips up the term sheet in front of him. In the next episode, Cameron makes an unexpected connection with a young woman at a party for Mutiny users, who says Mutiny helped her realize “that there wasn’t anything wrong with [her]” and pulls Cameron into a hug. Internet communities continue to provide shelter for outcast personalities, as humanely run as Mutiny or not, but the meeting between web user and tech visionary has no analogue in common experience. Instead, the viewer interprets the scene intuitively the way it’s staged: as a fan meeting a creator.

You have to work backwards to find the rock band analogy, but the show’s third season finale, in which the geographically and romantically disparate leads reunite for (surprisingly, in hindsight) the first brainstorming session with the entire foursome, draws its much-belated project into focus like the members of a supergroup walking onstage for the reunion tour. The characters in that scene, whose identities formed for the audience in opposition to each other, appear at once in sharp relief, each made singular by their time together but only visible as complete personalties after their separation. There’s a line of Donna’s in the fourth season: “What’s that saying? You grow stronger in the broken places?” that she delivers with a bemused sadness which may contain the whole span of the series’ arc.

The unlikely pairing of Donna and Cameron was offered as the first season finale wrapped itself up, with Cameron visiting the Clarks to ask if Donna could bring her business savvy to the new startup, anarchic in name and by nature. In the second and third seasons, Mutiny draws the women closer and then pushes them apart. Cameron’s flinty nature is perhaps easier for viewers to understand: her youth always remains obvious, especially when she aligns herself with the indoor kids of Mutiny’s original team, and although her immaturity causes the team problems, it’s natural that such a creative genius should feel protective of her work.

Meanwhile, Donna resents being cast in the role of the adult, and so her will hardens until the two are no longer able to resolve their disagreements. The breakup happens via an argument about when to take the company public, which turns into a hastily convened board meeting and then a vote when Cameron decides she’s unable to live with the power struggle between her and Donna any longer. It’s in this scene that the more complex woman Bishé has been playing fully emerges: for once, Donna’s ego seems to eclipse her business sense, as while the time might be right for an IPO, the company’s failure without Cameron is a foregone conclusion. The audience knows this intuitively, because the season’s use of music has prodded viewers to see the company as a different kind of creative unit.

To blitz through this: while the spirit of the characters’ endeavors — from gaming community Mutiny in seasons two and three to the Comet search engine and web index in the final season — is closer in spirit to the music of the Talking Heads, the arc of their relationships bends along the same lines as Fleetwood Mac. No one-to-one comparison between the musicians of Fleetwood Mac and the Clarks, Cameron and Joe lines up perfectly — the temptation is to say the Clarks are the McVies and Cameron and Joe Buckingham Nicks, but there’s no analogue for Mick Fleetwood, certainly not the patrician Boz — yet the way the group shifted over time, with the full re-branding that came with the self-titled record and the shifting power centers of the band, grants some insight into the reason Halt’s ensemble continually returns to each other.

(Though, if you wanted to get even more personal, I would say there’s much of the mercurial David Byrne in Joe’s successive rebrandings that echo solo efforts and collaborations with Brian Eno after the Heads. Let alone the way Cameron talks about Joe after their breakup, even as late in the fourth season when she calls him “empty”, which recalls the ill will borne Byrne by Heads bassist Tina Weymouth, who once said that he didn’t “love” his former bandmates.)

Meanwhile, Talking Heads married lyrics that evinced bafflement and wonder at city life and modernization with new wave music’s openness to international styles and cross-pollination between genres, and their songs feature heavily throughout the series. In one episode featuring the title “And She Was”, Donna hallucinates a conciliatory dialogue with Cameron while high on mushrooms, as in the song’s character, “lying in the grass/…making sure she is not dreaming”. In the final season, Cameron sees an open plot of grass by a country road and buys it, setting up a mobile home there.

When Joe and Cameron surrender to the dance in season three’s “NIM”, hopping and shimmying to the Pixies’ “Velouria”, we’re not only watching two erstwhile romantic and creative partners act out the push-pull of their attraction, but hearing a song whose performers echo that dynamic. The Pixies’ two creative poles were lead singer Black Francis and bassist Kim Deal; Francis took it on himself to announce the band’s breakup without informing his partners, and afterward Deal returned to her side project The Breeders, more successful than any other band launched by a Pixies member. Though Deal did join the 2004 reunion, she eventually left again to focus on the Breeders, and the Pixies music recorded in her absence has only underlined how foundational her talent was to their original records.

In the show’s timeline, Cameron’s work post-Mutiny included a series of games called Space Bike which expanded on her designs for her first online games, while building toward a doomed solo project called Pilgrim which would fulfill her ambition of “a game that you live”. The audience can understand that Cameron has once again missed the opportunity to be first— in 1993, the year of Pilgrim’s prospective release, the open-world puzzle game MYST became a hit on the Macintosh OS — while also reading Pilgrim as the sort of solo misfire pursued by musicians adrift without the influences of their bandmates. In one of the show’s most elegant flourishes, Donna works out her enmity for Cameron in a series of nearly wordless scenes playing Pilgrim for herself; her frustration with the game’s counter-intuitive dynamics, which appear at first as a Sisyphean journey without an ending, eventually dissolves into appreciation and a peace with her old partner’s intentions.

The show’s finale sees Donna and Cameron making tentative steps back toward each other, culminating in what appears to be the start of a new collaboration. The things left unspoken between them – like apologies for specific wrongs – make the wounds in their past loom all the larger, as if speaking their name will cause the rift to widen again. Fans of both music and television know what reunions mean. In music, it’s a chance to see an ensemble spark with each other again, even when it might be only an imitation of the old dynamic, or at worst a joyless cash grab. In television, it’s nearly always the latter that’s the end result. The opportunity isn’t to do meaningful work again but to line up the characters with the fan’s wish for a total resolution of conflict; for both the story to end as it should and for the characters to meet again and shake hands, in an ideal world where wounds are made whole.

For the ensemble of Halt and Catch Fire, no tech-sainthood awaits them. They came in second too many times. While the final season shows characters maturing and understanding each other better, that final scene of Cameron and Donna is also a violent one. Their reunion will rip an old wound open, even as the camera cuts away on the moment of exhilaration. In this, as in its plotting of relationships that rise and fall, it points beyond the Jobs myth, which obscures the true nature of invention. It also looks beyond its subject, beyond the world of tech, as great drama should. As a narrative about Silicon Prairie and then Silicon Valley, it’s an underdog tale that crafts an alternate history, one in which the tech boom built a utopia, “the place that cannot be”. As a story about the lives of creative people, it offers a striking final image to Cameron and Donna’s partnership: a coming together that presumes an eventual coming apart, like a song, a note that’s struck, lives, and dies in the same instant.