I’m starting to think that Zack Whedon is Halt & Catch Fire’s secret weapon. Between this week’s “The 214s” and “Landfall,” the younger Whedon sibling has been responsible, or at least partially responsible (he co-wrote this episode with Davhi Waller) for two of the show’s strongest episodes. Like “Landfall,” “The 214s” feels dramatically solid and emotionally honest in the way that other episodes frequently don’t. More impressively, it takes some of the weaker plot points of last week (Donna’s kiss with her boss; Gordon’s breakdown) and makes lemonade out of them.
As has been the case with all the more recent installments, “The 214s” opens with the office in a general state of euphoria. The Giant is operating smoothly and Cardiff is preparing to present their innovation to potential buyers at their booth at COMDEX, a kind of Comic-Con-esque expo for computer geeks. Of course, this being Halt and Catch Fire, nothing can go well for long. As if on cue, police officers enter the office and arrest Bosworth. Apparently, due to a cash flow issue, Bosworth had Cameron hack into a national bank to get the necessary funds to keep the company afloat, the idea being that they’d put the money back once they’ve made income from the Giant.
Needless to say, the company is thrown into disarray by this twist. One of the hardest hit is Gordon. After his mini-breakdown last week, we open with him listening to self-help tapes as a means of coping with his stress and anxiety. With Bosworth’s arrest, he begins getting unpleasant flashes of his failed Symphonic project from years back. This drives a further wedge between him and Donna, who is still reeling from her kiss with her boss in Lubbock.
Right off the bat, it’s nice to see that the writers are trying to pivot Donna’s character. While they do follow up on her ill-conceived encounter with her boss from last week, it’s merely to show his guilt over the incident and his subsequent resignation from the company. As such, Donna’s plotline becomes less about her romantic woes and more about her examining her status quo. Between her increasingly distant husband digging a hole in their backyard and potentially losing another big investment with the Giant, Donna naturally questions whether this marriage is in her and her children’s best interest. Ultimately, she comes down on the side of staying with Gordon and, in another great sign that the writers wish to use more of her, she ends up accompanying him to COMDEX.
Also getting a bit of emotional development this week is Joe, who—following Bosworth’s arrest—discovers that IBM is developing its own version of The Giant. Furious, he storms out to find his father. What starts as a business discussion quickly morphs into an argument about their past. For years, Joe’s father led him to believe his mother was dead. Joe Sr. believes that his mother was merely crazy and it was better Joe never knew her. Joe, on the other hand, firmly believes that she taught him to be a dreamer, even if one of her experiments did result in him being permanently scarred. Again, it’s an expected revelation that does little to lend the character sympathy after his abhorrent behavior in the early days, but it’s nice to know that the writers are now trying to smooth over the character’s abrasive edges.
The final, unexpected emotional centerpiece of the episode involves Cameron’s visit to Bosworth, who is out on bail and cooped up in his home. As I said last week, actor Toby Huss has managed to accomplish a good deal over the season despite the somewhat underdeveloped shifts that have plagued his character. His paternal relationship with Cameron is certainly nothing I could have foreseen in the earlier installments, but it has quickly become an infinitely more interesting dynamic than anything she’s shared with Joe.
Watching “The 214s,” it becomes immediately apparent what may have been lacking in the show’s weaker episodes. Part of the initial charm of Halt and Catch Fire was the idea that these three disparate individuals would be coming together to defy the odds and build something revolutionary. Instead, many episodes found the characters either separated from one another and in their own separate plotlines or, in the show’s more volatile moments, at each other’s throats and fighting a permanent sense of estrangement. For the first time in what feels like a long time, this incident finds the three in the same room and working off each other. There’s arguing, of course, but it’s constructive arguing as opposed to merely petty squabbles.
Like most of Halt and Catch Fire, “The 214s” is far from a subtle or nuanced bit of television. That being said, it’s an unmistakably engaging one. Next week, presumably, finds our characters all together and tackling the big, Vegas-set world of COMDEX. For perhaps the first time since the pilot episode, I find myself legitimately excited by what comes next. Congrats, Halt and Catch Fire. Congrats.