Joe. Is. The. Worst.
That seems to be a consistent phrase that runs through my head whenever I watch a Halt and Catch Fire episode. This week was no different. The bright side is that Joe’s sociopathic business choices are also somewhat marginalized this time around in favor of a nice Donna plotline. I say “somewhat marginalized” until the very end, where it turns out his bad behavior was not marginalized at all. But we’ll get to that.
The whole situation starts when Joe, elated by Cardiff’s recent success with attaining an effective computer speed, recruits a journalist to swing by the company and write a profile piece on their burgeoning business. At that exact point, Cameron returns from a much needed break to discover that the janitor has accidentally blown the power with a vacuum, thus seemingly crashing her computer and erasing the BIOS code she’s been slaving over. What’s more, all her backup discs appear to have been wiped clean due to their proximity to her stereo.
Desperate to get this done by EOD before the journalist goes off to write a hit piece about a company that “flew too close to the sun,” Gordon calls in Donna to take care of business. Implementing her long-dormant tech skills, Donna begins the process of slowly recovering the data. In the process, she clashes, then makes up, with Cameron, and briefly experiences a renewed connection with her husband.
After two fairly subpar episodes that did little to endear me to any of the characters, “Close to the Metal” makes for a (slight) breath of fresh air. While my issues with the show stand, I love what the writers have done with the Donna character. Here, she’s allowed to demonstrate firsthand that she is just as capable working with technology as her husband. It’s not hard to believe that someone like Gordon would fall hard for a woman like her. In many ways, this episode also cements Donna as the most put-together and capable personality of the regular cast. This makes it all the more heartbreaking that she’s not allowed to take credit for her phenomenal achievement. To add lemon to that wound, she returns to her regular job only to find herself on probation for less-than-stellar work.
The tragedy of Donna is complemented by a surprisingly effective Cameron subplot. After a few episodes of merely being the quirky punk-rock chick, we get to see the character (and, by extension, Mackenzie Davis) actually experience authentic emotions. She’s now forced to watch helplessly as a project she’s poured her blood and tears into appears to unceremoniously disappear. Who among us can not relate to the idea of jumping full-force into a project—whether it’s a school paper, a story, etc.—only to have large portions of it lost because, in the heat of the moment, you forget to push “SAVE?” Her delicate mood is tested even further when she takes responsibility for babysitting Gordon and Donna’s kids only to hear that Gordon once referred to her as “white trash.” I actually ended up, for the first time, feeling for the character and her intense vulnerability.
With such promising plotlines, it’s a shame Joe has to come in and ruin it all at the last second. At the beginning, it merely seems like Joe has once again—to quote Community— Britta’d up the situation by prematurely inviting a journalist to write about their fairly minor success. Sure, the idea is idiotic, but I could accept such a move because Joe has not exactly shown himself to be prone to thinking long-term. Instead, we’re hit with an even more face-palm-inducing scenario: Joe orchestrated the entire disaster. He fried the computer and wiped all the back-up discs in an attempt to give the journalist a juicy story to write about. Because potential bad press is better than no press, amiright? Even if it means casting your employees into crisis mode/emotional distress, bringing in a woman who works all day for nothing and even firing a janitor who it turns out had nothing really to do with the malfunction. This twist casts a dark shadow over whatever has come before it. I hate this character. I really do.
And ultimately, that’s what I can’t figure out. The show keeps reiterating how horrible of a person Joe is, yet I’m not sure if it means the writers want us to be dumbfounded by his actions or intrigued by his ruthlessness. If it’s the latter, it’s certainly not working. Even the worse TV antiheroes had their redemptive qualities. Don Draper had charm. Gregory House had a brilliant scientific mind. Vic Mackey had a desire for justice (no matter how freakishly skewered). Even Walter White had some semblance of love for his family throughout his whole ordeal. Joe retains all that abrasion and manipulative aspects of those characters with none of the great characterizations necessary to transcend them. I now become actively disengaged from the show whenever he’s on screen just because I can’t stand to listen to him.
In this way, “Close to the Metal” is a major mixed bag. It highlights and expands upon the show’s best qualities (the Donna-Gordon relationship), improves upon a problematic one (Cameron), but ultimately craps the bed by reminding us of its biggest albatross (Joe). The show takes two steps forward only to take another big step back.