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There was a lot to dislike in the season finale of “Halt and Catch Fire.” The pacing was off, as it has been all series; huge plot twists occur quickly, without explanation, suggesting the creators were trying to fit several episodes into one. Suddenly Cameron is gone from Cardiff and she’s working at a phone company. Then, wait, she’s quit the phone company. Now, whoa — she’s poached all of Cardiff’s programmers to start her own online service. If the show had lasted a couple minutes more, she might have invented Facebook and the iPad, too.

As ever, strange things happen for no reason other than it being a little cool to see strange things happen. Gordon buys a Porsche, he and Donna get carjacked, and then — well, nothing much happens. Joe, upset that the computer they’ve built isn’t as revolutionary as he’d hoped, burns down a truck full of finished computers. He stands and stares at the truck burning — because I guess that’s what you do when you’ve set a truck on fire, rather than, say, run far away? — and as the camera zooms in on his eyes, we’re supposed to see the moment as some kind of real turning point. Except, no: The destroyed truck apparently poses no real business problems to Cardiff, and Gordon appears to bear Joe no ill will. Everything turns out pretty O.K.

So, dramatically, the episode was a mess. And yet as I look back on the finale and on the whole season, it’s clear that despite its many flaws, “Halt and Catch Fire” managed to hit on a profound idea about the tech industry, one that is often glossed over in most analyses of the business.

That big idea goes like this: In the tech business, there’s no such thing as thinking too big. The real danger, in tech, is casting your dreams too narrow, aiming for the achievable rather than the extraordinary. Again and again in this industry, the founders that aim for the impossible emerge victorious over those that purse the merely difficult. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates tried to make computing easy and ubiquitous, Google’s founders tried to make information accessible to every human being, and Mark Zuckerberg tried to mimic the entire social world online; they succeeded because of the audacity of their vision, rather than despite it.

The final few episodes of “Halt” hang on this question of vision. All season, we’ve seen Joe, Gordon, and Cameron buck terrible odds to pull off something that seemed extraordinary. They made a small, well-designed computer that mimics all the functions of IBM’s machines, but at a fraction of the cost. They did so with a ragtag team, without much money, and with a series of bosses who didn’t really support their plan. That they pulled something off at all seems remarkable.

But by the end of the season it dawns on both Cameron and Joe that their machine will end up a footnote in the annals of computing. Joe realizes it because he’s seen a Macintosh. Cameron realizes it because she can see the future. Both understand that what they’ve created will be run over by the breakthroughs that other, bigger thinkers will soon unleash on the world.

Gordon, meanwhile, appears clueless about all this. He’s in love with the possible present of computing rather than the potential future of it. By the end of the season, Gordon is in charge of Cardiff, more or less by default. Cameron is at her online company, trying to forge a future that, we known now, will turn out to be the future of this industry. And Joe is off hiking, once more in search of himself.

It’s a sad moment. Joe, Gordon, and Cameron had started with so much promise, but by the end, all three haven’t really accomplished much at all. They called their machine the Giant, but their work was doomed from the start, because they simply dreamed too small.