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I`m happy to see you here again!

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Latest cooperative essay for A Song of Ice and Fire: the Plutonian Others.

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Totally heartbreaking, but imo there's a door for a reunion in the future. As Cam said to Donna, "For it work you must work on it". Cam and Joe “wanted it to work”, but Cam only realizes she might have worked on herself and them more once he left, and Joe played a game Cam loves (Centipede) after she’s gone.

Joe keeps the picture of Gordon and Haley on his desk, but Cam's picture is placed with the "soul in the machine" book and the Buddha and the Giant (”the thing that gets you to the thing”). It's a shrine. Cam didn't start to think of working with Donna (a reason to stay around Donna and Haley), until after Haley summarized the letter, where Joe tells he intends to keep in touch and visit them. Subconsciously, Cameron is preparing to do what she said in 2x09 (doing our own stuff to hang on to each other), and thus ultimately put herself in his life path, when he’s ready for it. The subtext of Donna and Cam talking in Haley’s room is like Gordon and Joe talking about “seeing the future”. And just like Gordon knew it, Donna knows too.

The two then predict with “phoenix” what would happen to their company (what happened to Comet between Gordon and Joe essentially), but it doesn’t matter that the company would go down, since they’d spend time together. Time that Cam needs to figure out what she likes and to learn to stay put like Joe needed a decade to find himself: what paintings, books, house decor, car. Cam’s been a chameleon as much as Joe has been. 

Basically, by the time “Phoenix” and Donna’s idea has run its course, Cam can find herself, which is all she needs to move to the state of NY. If there was a S5, I can see her go work for IBM r&d.

Finally S3 NIM showed us three trials: 1st try Joe loses, 2nd try Cam wins, 3rd try Joe wins without Cameron losing (she didn’t take the last lighter). In the 4 seasons we’ve only seen them try at an actual relationship twice. The first time they went on total subconscious impulse, going by the fly. The second time they know each other’s quirks and are committed to each other, but they make mistakes, don’t know themselves really, and don’t know how to deal with pain (not alone, let alone with each other). Third time is the charm.

Oh and Joe needs to get himself a dishwasher.

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Gordon’s Gift

Warning: spoilers until 4x08, theory, keep handkerchiefs nearby

In Gordon’s Shrine, the Garage, I already stipulated how the Garage is Gordon’s shrine that he tried to rebuild with Joe since S1 in part I. To summarize, their cooperation only worked within a garage setting. Gordon and his relationship with Joe breaks down in basements or doesn’t get off the ground. And when he tries to build similar inspirational working relationships in the garage (or garage like setting) with others or by himself it fizzles quickly. I also stipulated that the origin of the garage shrine for Gordon rooted back to his youth, and how Gordon’s insistence on keeping his bro-mance with Joe exclusive and keep out Cameron self-sabotages his business and his friendship with Joe.

ROOT TRIANGLE

Basically the shrine building keeps happening in a character’s arc like an iteration of earlier versions, and is deeply rooted for each of them in their youth or childhood: a parent, sibling or even a childhood sweetheart who either is beyond their reach through death, irreparable damage, or just not the right person. This Freudian take is also reflected in the Pilgrim as a “kid”.

The unsalvageable root of Gordon’s garage shrine is his relationship with his brother Henry, Henry’s high school sweetheart Jules, and his father’s auto shop.  After learning about his disease in 2x05, and unable to reveal it to Donna, Gordon seeks someone to unburden and ends up calling his brother Henry to relate his wish to visit him in California with Joanie and Haley. Even during the telephone conversation, we already get a hint of a fraught sibling relationship between Gordon and Henry.

While Henry initially acts empathic and helpful during the visit, the next day he sends Gordon and his two daughters out of the house late at night, immediately suspecting Gordon slept with his ex-girlfriend Jules. The only reason that Henry was empathic to Gordon was in the hope that Gordon could convince their father not to sell the auto shop.

Off-screen, Gordon learned over the phone with his father that Henry is an alcoholic, chased customers away and leveraged the autoshop over the “past three years”. Meanwhile, Henry tends to spend half of his time in Jules’ bar, drinking. This is not dissimilar to Joe screwing around with post-its for three years in the basement.

Along with the callous, impulsive manner in which Henry sends two children of 6 and 8 out in the night over Jules, while Henry himself is long married with children, suggests that Henry never really got over Jules and that he long resents Gordon for his failures in life. These brothers were not just estranged, but likely had a severe falling out around the time that Gordon left for Berkeley. Jules seems to have been in the middle of that, both in the past as well as the present.

Jules is a single mother of a 12-year old son R.J. she loves and regards as her anchor. Gordon apparently never knew about this and thus he has not seen or heard about Jules since at least ’72-‘73, when he would have been 19 and studying at Berkeley. The father doesn’t have to be Henry, but it is possible. She talks in disdain and pity about Henry, denying she wants to get back with him, and yet she later admits to narc over Henry.  A part of her cannot let go of Henry, and her sleeping with Gordon is some twisted form to return to the past.

Whether Gordon was envious of Jules choosing Henry over Gordon back in High School or how Henry’s affections for Jules may have stood in the way of Gordon having his brother all to himself is unclear, imho. Likely it was a mix of both. Being the younger brother, Gordon likely looked up to Henry, but simultaneously may have envied him for Henry was the sports guy and “handsome one”, and Gordon relied on his wit to impress people and girls. Jules and Katie have physical similarities as body type, so Jules may have been Gordon’s type.

We don’t need the exact particulars, but it should be clear that Gordon, Henry and Jules have a triangulation connection where they play chess with one another, not just in ’85 during Gordon’s visit, but in the years before Gordon left for Berkeley. While Gordon moved on to Donna, San Francisco and Dallas, Jules and Henry never actually moved on at all, even though Henry married another woman. The fact that it can go so wrong within a day in ‘85, as the three of them use each other in dysfunctional ways, is a sign that it is actually a rote pattern between them.

The triangle of Gordon, Joe and Cameron shows a lot of similarities, except the fact that Gordon never appeared to be attracted to Cameron in any way (she is not his type). What it all comes down to is that Joe “replaces” the broken brother bond for Gordon. Note how I do not say that Joe “surrogates” for Henry. Joe is the “brother” that his actual brother Henry could never have been for Gordon. Joe trumps Henry. In fact, he does not seek out Henry in S2, until his one-time-deal with Joe at Westgroup is done, as if Henry is the “surrogate” to Joe.

PLAYING CHESS

The failed youth triangle of Gordon, Henry and Jules  explains his almost immediate antagonistic position towards Cameron from the get-go in S1. Despite Joe having proven himself to be manipulative and untrustworthy and Cameron only being a 22 year old college drop-out, he searches for evidence against Cameron, wanting Joe to get rid of her once the BIOS is written. When he learns that Joe is considering Cam’s OS idea, he tells her coders that she’s sleeping with Joe.  He uses her to play Joe emotionally into putting up the money for Comdex ’83. And intends to use Joe’s feelings for her by threatening to send her to jail to make Joe agree to the original shipping date, even though Cameron has left . Donna calls this “the chess game you three play with each other,” to Cameron.

Chessboards are a recurring décor item throughout the series, in quite telling scenes about having control, such as when Joe seduces Travis at Mrs. Lutherford’s in 1X03. Joe pushes Travis onto a table with a chessboard and sends the pieces flying. Cameron’s top of S1 with the squares that reappears in S4 is a chess board. Joe tests and figures out how Cam and Mutiny tried to deceive him about UNIX with a chess game. And Haley plays chess against herself. Different story, but having a similar analogue on how people use each other like chess pieces, check out the Musical Chess of ’86, from which you probably know Murray’s song, “One Night in Bangkok”.

In S1 Joe, Gordon and Cameron play as dysfunctional a chess game as the games played between Gordon, Jules and Henry in 2x06. The final season, ten years later, we finally have an iteration where these three have an opportunity to relate in a non-dysfunctional way. Cameron played a key part in reconciling Gordon and Joe, in Joe keeping urls for the past three years, planting the seed that leads to Joe’s web indexing idea and a business model where Joe and Gordon are not just business partners in name, but truly work together harmoniously. Gordon may not be playing pool table with his brother Henry, but he would not have been playing pool together with his chosen “brother” Joe, without Cam’s nudges. (Note: the left gif is what we see before the camera pans out to show us Gordon and Henry talking over beer in Jules’ bar)

And yet, Gordon’s initial reaction to Joe and Cameron is once more antagonistic, and attempts to verbally step into Joe’s personal life again. Unlike S1, he does not take further direct personal destructive actions though. He does draw the line at Cameron’s presence at Comet, even though they’re hiring and her career is down the dumps, eventually leading to her choice to writing the algorithm for the competition Rover. This logically has its backlash in the personal relationship between Joe and Cameron, Comet and bubbles over into Gordon’s personal life as Haley is uncomfortable around Katie. S1 Joe, Gordon and Cameron would have been unable to handle this graciously, resulting into a broken down triangle as much as the one between Gordon, Henry and Jules. In S4 they’re all more mature. They’re still flawed and make mistakes, but are far better equipped in dealing with it, and moving past it.

And so at the start of 4x06 we have a reconciliation conversation between Gordon and Cameron over her helping Bos with the algorithm for Rover. Initially Gordon jokes about Cam’s professional crisis and disbeliefs her aversion to tech. But her insistence and claim she doesn’t dream in code anymore ends with Gordon staring at her thoughtfully for quite a while, before Joe calls for their attention that they’re ready to do the rocket launching. The length of that stare built a feeling of expectation that there would be some follow-up to this from Gordon, and yet we never seemed to have one.

Gordon seems overall inspired during the launch as he stares up at his rocket, as if he gets to be the visionary for once. While initially reluctant and deaf about Joe’s hints about Haley, Gordon gets it when he visits Corn Dog. He has his own visionary idea, based on Donna’s marketing information. He uses Joe, in a positive and honest way, to patch his relationship with Haley. He fixes the AC. He accepts the idea of a re-design as part of a re-launch. He has a stable relationship with Katie in which he is genuinely happy. His daughters like her too. He has a good co-parenting friendship with Donna. And the moment of his death is one of beautiful peace and recognition of Donna as the love of his life.

It thus seems odd that he did nothing to help fix Cameron’s career, especially in light of the fact that Gordon admitted his part in the events that led to Bos’s heart attack, and their unconditional friendship. Surely, Gordon was able to recognize his contribution to the threat in Joe’s and Cameron’s relationship at the start of 4x05? Surely, Gordon could recognize his pre-S1 and S2 issues being mirrored in Cameron’s life. He mentioned the Symphonic to her, as well as “having too much time on her hands” and how it leads to trouble. Hell, he was 32 himself in S2 when he was professionally adrift.

THE GIFT

I propose that Gordon did in fact did something for Cameron. Sometime after the rocket launching, Cameron finally checks her emails on Joe’s computer, for the first time since about half a year. Her inbox is full of emails by either Tom, Alexa and Gavin from Atari, and one email giving her a link to a fansite “The Howe of it all”: http://www.thehoweofitall.com/

The link was not sent to her by either of the people mentioned, but by “Haley” via her Comet mail address.  The show give us the impression that Haley must have discovered the fan website, sent a link to Cameron, but that Alexa built it since her emails to contact Cameron went unanswered. Cameron at least seems to assume as much.

But the way Alexa talks of Pilgrim hardly convinces me that she ever reached the higher levels. If she did, she may have used backdoors into the code, and only saw the imagery, without realizing the metaphors behind it. She only talks of world building, while of course figuring out that the Pilgrim is a kid is the spiritual gaming reward. Alexa does not seem to get the spirituality nor soul of the game, but is purely focused on the world and graphics containing the puzzles (even the level 0 world contains fake puzzles). And while she dispassionately praises Cam’s work as “great”, it sounds empty. None of her words about Pilgrim at their first private meeting, or the bots in the trailer and the hike match with the tone of praise of the fan site. No wonder that Cameron is confused by Alexa: she thinks this woman understands her.

The most glaring oddity about the fan site are the pictures. The site shows one of the pictures that Tom took in S2 of the Mutiny staff. It is however not the picture that Cam, Tom and Bos chose to use for the Mutiny ad in Byte. (In the S2 gifs of 2x04 below, the left one is the picture scene used for the website, while the right one ended up in Byte as an ad.) You may have noticed this discrepancy while watching 4x06, or when visiting the “Howe of it all” website, but relegated it as the show’s prop department’s choice, and just thought it was cool to see those pictures.

In-world it makes little sense for Alexa to have gotten her hands on those. Those pictures were not digital, but physically developed from Tom’s negatives and not in the public domain at all, not in Byte, never on Mutiny’s interface. Heck, Mutiny’s interface is non-existent and the reason why the creator of the fan site used a playnet gif instead of Mutiny. Alexa could only get such a picture from the person who kept them.

The Polaroid of Cameron in the Cardiff basement while working on the BIOS is even more startling. Polaroids are unique pictures without a negative. And in 4x08, we see Gordon was in possession of exactly that Polaroid when Cameron rummages through the pictures. More, since the Polaroid of Donna was taken in their Dallas kitchen and of Gordon in his garage, the Polaroid camera was in possession of the Clark’s to begin with.

This Polaroid of Cameron is the direct evidence that Gordon made the Cameron Howe fan site and had Haley send the link to Cameron via email, or Gordon used Haley’s email address for it. Alexa had nothing to do with that site at all. It was Gordon’s gift to Cameron to boost her career confidence. (Yes, I know, your eyes are prickling and your throat thick digesting this, no?).

Hence, the pictures on the website aren’t errors or deviations by the production prop department. They are deliberately chosen by the prop departments as clues and hints to the in-story fan site creator: Gordon.

What a beautiful gift that site is if created by Gordon: Gordon calls Space Bike his favorite game, publically recognizes her work on the Giant (which he did not do at Comdex ’83), memorializes Mutiny and gives her sole credit for the founding of it, and calls for a publication of Pilgrim by Atari, providing a public hint to a level of the game that reveals he figured it out (like Donna did) and shows those gamers who loathed it for fools.

Finally, @paceofbase  alerted me about a strange date for the email in Cam’s inbox about the fan site: it says Saturday 20th of August 1994. The prop department certainly looked it up, because 20th of August 1994 was indeed a Saturday. Except the last emails with a month on the screen say March. Haley’s failing tests at school (it’s not summer holiday), and her biology re-do test says 11th of April 1994. Curt Cobain died on the 5th of April 1994. We discussed with each other whether the datestamp for the email about the fansite was a massive production error or something else.

Gordon though has enough code knowledge to fiddle with the server date, and thus make it look like he sent an email “from the future”. So, the date again is not a prop error, but a deliberate in-world “mistake” smuggled in by Gordon to hint to Cameron that she still has a future in tech.

Joe tried to play it, but lost himself in the puzzles, and likely never played it anymore as he tries to understand Cameron up-close and personal instead. At least he figured out the Airstream game. We saw Donna finish it on screen. The game was her sole safe way to make “contact”. But Gordon never said a word about the game on screen, though Cameron gave it to him and he visited the testing room to warn her to be considerate of Joe’s feelings for her. Whether Gordon figured it out by himself or Donna revealed some of the tricks and hints to Gordon is not that important. But of the four, aside from Cameron, Gordon was the actual fellow “gamer” and connected with her via “games”. 

4x08’s final scene also confirmed that Gordon can be sneaky and secretive, in contrast to his usual blabbing and shooting his mouth. Donna thinks he never jumped from that quarry cliff into the lake, but he did, and he never told anyone.

An oddity in all of 4x08 is how the camera pans from the dinner table to his “office” in the house and lingers for a while on an old wooden writing desk and file closet, presumably something Gordon has of his grandmother. Bos making his chili is reminiscent to Gordon making his grandmother’s stew in S1 for his daughters, one of the moments where Gordon bonds with his daughters as father, contrasting the 4x08 flashback scenes of him walking out on Donna and baby Joanie when Joanie starts to cry. Donna brings up how this and that in the house are keepsakes from Gordon’s grandmother. So, what is interesting about this old-timer desk? Well, it is free from tech. It’s a writing desk, not a computer desk. And thus can be seen as a link to Cam’s exclamation of being done with tech.  

CONCLUSION

Gordon’s Gift gave Cameron enough confidence to start working again and thereby he resolves his part in sending Cameron away from Comet in the first half of S4. By publically acknowledging her contribution to the Giant, he helped her to see the soul back in the machine, as she is fooling around with self-learning AI. His gift attempts to strip the pair Joe & Cameron of side-issues that distract from the most important ones about building a life together: house, children or not, etc.

These are differing wishes that can only be resolved between themselves and for themselves. As long as they don’t have the answers through each other whether they want a life together, despite the differences, they will cling to one another based on the past like prisoners, like Henry and Jules still do.

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Working on another Gordon meta, but need some help to remember the episode where Gordon tells about his youth, and how he as the younger one was under less scrutiny and thus free to do his own stuff. I don’t even remember which season he said it. It was just a side comment. I do know it’s not in 2x06 where he actually visits his brother Henry.

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Trailer for Halt and Catch Fire 4x08, “Goodwill”

Posted on here for those with country restrictions. No copyright infringement intended.

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Sneak peek of Cameron and Donna in Halt and Catch Fire 4x08, “Goodwill”

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Your HACF posts are a delight to read 💗

Thanks so very much. The show is so subtle and slow burn. You get a sense of something, but then I wonder about these little moments that aren't spelled out: cam's hesitation to go inside, Joe's face faltering at an odd moment, or seeming pleased and happy at other odd moments. Or some things that don't add up with Donna or Gordon with on the surface events. And you know there are callbacks to previous seasons, but only by actually rewatching the scene or the point of that episode do I understand what is going on in their minds, and it makes it so real and human to me, because we all do or say or choose things at certain moments that other people don't get, or we don't get ourselves even. Our memory and subconscious and intuition is just such a major driver, and this show and especially this season manages to convey that so beautifully, and I just love to share my enthusiasm on what I think they're trying to show and tell us. 😍

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Comet, Thresholds and Whiteboards

Meta-analysis Halt and Catch Fire, spoiler warning 4x07

Let’s talk the final scene of episode 4x07: Cameron entering the think/meeting room of Comet to be a solace to Joe in their mutual grief over the loss of Gordon. The clue is in the image of Cameron staring through the glass windows, looking at Joe mounted as Shiva-Yogi on the table and the whiteboard with Gordon’s last written words, “Re-Launch”: we see her reflection in the glass. And I want to “reflect” with you all, why the “reflection” is there and what its cinematographic implication in this scene is.

I parallel-giffed it with a 3x07 moment and image in “time”: the moment she stumbles out of Mutiny’s meeting room in ’86 after every business partner (and friend) basically voted her out of the company she started.

First of all, Comet’s meeting room may look and appear different, but is the exact same room where Cameron lost her company, which as Lev once mentioned in S2 she started to “mutiny” against Joe MacMillan, after he went along with Gordon’s decision to take out her OS. And now, in 4x07 she faces a situation where Joe is the sole person in that fateful ex-Mutiny room. She may have long forgiven him for the pain he caused her in ’83 and ’85. She has grown to love him. And she already gained perspective on the loss of Mutiny in ’90. But it does not mean that those personal wounds have fully healed, or that this blending of Joe in the prior Mutiny meeting room is not a triggering wormhole to a deeply painful memory. 

THE WAYS OF PAIN

It seems strange that Cameron has such difficulty with entering the Mutiny building and this room in particular after all this time. Didn’t she pick that building on purpose for the www-meeting in 1990 and visited that room then to stare at Bos’s bull horns above the door? Didn’t she play Doom with Gordon in his office? She spent days trying to fix a baby Honda in the building and visited Joe in his basement shrine to bring him the finished browser. She seemed to have no qualms or entering spaces then? So, why is it suddenly highlighted as an issue when the man she supposedly loves so much is inside in pain?

Well, for one a healing process is not linear, nor is pain experience. Think of Gordon’s symptom and pain journals of his disease. One day it’s only level 1, another it’s level 6, then it level 4, etc. You can put the data in flow charts and graphs but find no discernible pattern at all. So, the various times before this 4x07 moment, the intensity of pain she felt about it all, may have varied.

Secondly, there are various ways of dealing with (or using) pain, and some are more successful long term than others.  You can self-medicate with painkillers, drugs, opiums, or alcohol, like Donna does. You know that trick when you have a throbbing wound from a cut for example, but you pinch the surrounding area to feel the pain of your nails more than the throbbing? That is self-inflicting extra pain, and it has been proven to work neurologically. But it only works temporarily. You can lash out and hurt others, “kill something”, get it all out, so that at least you’re not alone in your misery. Or you can try to fix it, put it back together and patch it up. Unfortunately some issues and the related pain are chronic, and all you can do is grit your teeth, refuse to surrender to it and live with it. And then there’s mom’s miracle balmy kiss and touch, to help you bear it. What is certain is that it requires “time” to heal anything.

Cameron’s background is such that nobody taught her how to deal with pain when she was a child. When her father died, her mother used distraction in pageants and hemorrhoid cream to mask it. So, that was the first method she was taught: mask pain and pretend to the world you’re happy and perfect (“Little Miss Flawless”). By the time we first meet her, at 22, she already rebelled against this: cut her hair, died it blonde, be aggressive, rude, the total opposite of hiding it. As aggressive as she was throughout most of S1, this had little to do with hurting others, but exposing her pain like an open sore while simultaneously scaring people away. “Don’t touch me, because I’m hurting!”.  She acts and behaves like a wounded animal that protects itself from anyone coming close, out of fear of getting hurt or killed.

Even in 1x10 “1984” her lashing out serves to scare Joe away more than hurting him. She hurts him tremendously, but she hardly believes her words would stick and her major intent is to scare him off for good. We know this because when in 2x03 Gordon’s Sonaris wrecks Mutiny and she ends up hearing Joe’s voice at the other side of the phoneline, she instantly hangs up in shock and then orders “Shut it all down!”. Later she has a panic attack. Something very interesting happens here with Tom. He manages to calm her down, make her think of Parallax, chapter 3, the Cave of the Four Wizards (Cam, Donna, Gordon and Joe). “How do you get the dragon’s egg across the chasm?” he asks her.  You can’t jump, because then you’ll drop the dragon’s egg. There’s a rope bridge, but with the egg you’re too heavy and the bridge breaks. The solution is “to go back inside and face the Forth Wizard” (at the time Joe) and crack the egg in his chest “to make him human again”.

Not only does Cameron learn to face her fears in that way, but her pain as well: go back, face the source of your fear or pain and then crack the egg. It’s what she does in 2x09 Kali when she seeks Joe out, kisses him and hands him Sonaris. It’s what she does in 3x10 NeXt when she picks the old Mutiny building to remind and feel the pain of the loss of Mutiny, meeting the three other wizards, and then crack the egg in Donna’s chest.

Except, it doesn’t heal, doesn’t resolve the pain. It only gives her control by inflicting as much misery on the perceived source as she’s in. Facing the pain is like digging her nails near her throbbing wound, but she uses that temporarily solution to then rip the scab off, rather than apply medicine to it. So, yes, she managed to go back to the Mutiny meeting room in 1990, because she wanted to feel the pain for self-control. Nothing got healed though.

The Doom game in Gordon’s office is something similar. She plays the game that she blames as the cause why nobody gets Pilgrim, inside the ex-Mutiny building which is another source of pain, in the office of her friend who was angry with her for reuniting with Joe, the same day that Donna tried to get in her face about the past at MISC.

What is surprising in 4x03 is how she hates the game, the concept of “killing things”. Did that not astonish you to hear this from someone who built a company with skinner-box games like Tank Battle, wrote a shooter game Extract and Defend, won at shooting ducks and taught Gordon to “take them outside and shoot them”? It’s “boring” and “unfulfilling”, she says of Doom, but also cathartic (for a moment). It almost seemed OOC, except it isn’t OOC. It’s growth and a sign of how she does not wish to live or deal with pain anymore, nor purposefully hurt others. She has grown to loathe it, and that is because she has grown to love the person she regarded as her “enemy” a decade ago. Yes, she made the antagonistic “parasite” comment to Donna earlier that day, but by nightfall she already knows she derives no pleasure from it. Once the “divorce box” is destroyed by the truck she is done with the method of cracking dragon eggs in a wizard’s chest that Tom unwittingly taught her.

Season 4 is the first time we witness Cameron trying to mend or fix things. She faces Joe in the basement, after he rejected her at Gordon’s party and relegated her to Gordon’s couch. But not to fight or destroy things. No, instead she gives him what she feels she owes him, and even says, “Do you want to talk about what we’re really talking about here?” when she sees how bitter he is. By allowing him to voice his grief and pain, she gave him what he needed to be “human again”, call her up and tell her that regardless she’s too important to him to have her walk out of his life altogether.

Cameron tries to apply this “mending” method to her pain in relation to the loss of Mutiny, when she fixes the Honda inside the building. And for a moment there, she even engages professionally with Gordon and Joe about the algorithm. Met with opposition though, she backs out. She can’t “fix it” by herself and Gordon is unwilling to participate in fixing a broken work relationship, nor is she willing to accept his help with the bike. The space bike breaks down and thus the Mutiny wounds aren’t mended.

Cameron stayed away from Comet ever since, putting a physical barrier between herself and Joe when he talks Comet the moment she wakes, insists she’s done with tech altogether (the lady doth protests too much) and instantly flees the scene the moment he asks her to watch his marketing research for Comet. She’s not running from Joe, but from Comet that used to be Mutiny, and thus from her pain over it. Unfortunately, his overflowing enthusiasm and perfectly normal need to share his work results with his partner is what Cameron is fleeing. He doesn’t know it’s a source of pain, for she hardly acknowledges it to herself.

When we see her enter the Comet building at the end of 4x07 that is the first time she enters the building without wanting to scare others away, without feeling in control (or using it for that end) and without the belief that she can heal the pain. She enters it, grieving over Gordon, Mutiny, the pain she knows Joe must be in. It’s all just pain in its most vulnerable state.

The writers could have made it easier on her: meeting Joe at home, or in his office. But they didn’t. To be there for him, she has to go to the room of her past doom in the longest walk through time to face her reflection.

THE THRESHOLD

Further evidence that Cam’s issue and resolution process in 4x07 is about the events in 3x07 “The Threshold” is Bos’s wedding. Bos tells her they didn’t want to make a fuss about it, but since Diane invited her daughter as a witness, he wanted to invite Cameron there. He doesn’t actually use the word “daughter” to Cameron in 4x07, but both Cameron and Bos know that is what he means, and she hugs him for it.

In 3x07 Bos learned that Cameron got married to Tom and she held it secret for weeks. He’s hurt and confronts her about it in the meeting room, telling her that even if she might not ever see him as her figurative father, he will always regard her as his daughter. She shows her hand and the ring on her finger and sheepishly says “Bos, I got married.”

So, Bos’s and Diane’s marriage with Cameron as witness and “daughter” in 4x07 is a reverse parallel to Bos’s hurt feelings in 3x07. Back in ‘86, n the same scene, Bos also told her that if she marches to the beat of her own drums, she risks losing the band. He urged her to find a way to work with Donna, and reminded her how the two need each other.

Cameron hiked with Alexa in the woods the day of Gordon’s death, and Alexa inquired with Cameron what went wrong between her and Donna. So, several events of the episode in 4x07 in Cameron’s arc all point to that fateful day, when she walked out of Mutiny’s office broken, betrayed, in tears and as hurt as the day Gordon and Joe took her OS out of the Giant.

3x07 has “the threshold” as title, and that is exactly what we see in Cameron’s hesitation to go inside to reach out and be there for Joe. She has to cross the threshold of pain to be love. If her reflections opens the wormwhole of pain when she stumbled out of the meeting room in 3x07, it also lands her to the moment of most important parental advice she had since her first father died. With her stands Bos telling her to, “Find a way to work with him. You two need each other.” For if Donna was Cameron’s anchor in the days of Mutiny, Joe was her anchor long before that: as much as she could tilt the room to the stars for him, he was able to tilt the room back to the ground for her (even if she didn’t like that at the time in 1x06). Bos’s words enable Cameron to cross the threshold for Joe: a small step in the eyes for so many of mankind, but a giant leap for love and healing by Cameron (yes, I’m using Armstrong’s words about the moon landing here). If she couldn’t see the forest for the trees in 4x06 and much of 4x07, Cameron sees it now.

THE WHITEBOARD

If you’ve read my meta on Joe’s shrines before 4x07 aired, you probably recognized that Joe sat like Shiva-Yogi on the table as he stares at the whiteboard, exactly as he does on his mountain top in S3 when he works with Ryan Ray.

In S3, Joe’s life like a Yogi on a mountain (top floors) is a self-protective flight from pain and desire, in particular Cameron. He wants to shut out the world, its noise and feelings then. The fact that we see him seated in the same Yogi manner by the end of 4x07 is indicative how much he hurts and tries not to feel it. He just lost his best friend and his business partner, the man he established a communication with where he could say one thing, like “You wouldn’t [not re-design]” while tapping his own chest and thus actually saying, “I wouldn’t [re-launch without re-designing]”. And instead of making a stink, Gordon smiled and rewrote re-design as re-launch. “Who needs a guy?” Joe needs that guy called Gordon.

With Gordon’s death and the almost blank whiteboard, except for the word “re-launch”, Joe faces that same moment in the past once more, when he realized that Ryan had jumped from his balcony to his death. He tried to help Ryan by laying out his options: flee and run and I’ll give you the money or give yourself up and you might be out in a few years and you’re still so young. The reason why Ryan committed suicide was because Joe told him they could never work again as a team, writing stuff on the whiteboard. Because of Ryan’s suicide, Joe fell into a depression and told Gordon to build the local network by himself. Then when they finally are business partners again since the www meeting in 1990, he spent all that time in the basement, screwing around with post-its, longing for Cameron. Seven years he could have worked as an actual team with Gordon, but he didn’t. “You and Cam, I swear to God, no sense of time.” And yet, Joe had no sense of time either.

The existential questions are there, silently and invisibly written on the whiteboard: Did I waste my time on the wrong project? On the wrong person?

The above Shiva imagery comes from 3x04 “The Rules of Honorable Play”, the episode where Donna lies to Cameron about firing Doug & Craig, and later feeling guilty she tells Cam she can take her time to look for a place of her own. After Donna’s words about not having to move-out yet, Cameron asks Gordon “when did you know you were losing Cardiff?”

When Cameron calls Joe to tell him she said yes to a dinner invitation from Alexa and cancels their own dinner plans, Joe’s magnanimous about it. And at the end of the conversation Cameron tells him he’s great and confirms she overheard him talking about building a house by mentioning she has been thinking about it. The moment he puts down the phone though, he’s shaken. Something shifted for him. We get the musical theme that we’ve been hearing for Cameron and Joe several times since 4x02, including the moment in 4x04 when Cameron stares sadly into her campfire, because Joe fell asleep on her during their first night in the trailer. It’s not a doom theme, because S4 also uses it during loving moments, but it signals that one of them is thinking about the other at a pivotal moment for them. In that telephone scene though it mirrors Cameron’s moment about Mutiny: Joe suddenly feels like Cameron is slipping away from him, just like the time window for their hike slipped away. He couldn’t see the glow and love in her eyes when she says that she’s been thinking of building a place over the phone after all.

On top of that he doesn’t get why Cameron says “You’re great!” You know the classic issue for a man with his female partner, right? Don’t ever give her advice, offer solutions or try to fix it for her when she has had a bad day. You can be her problem-solving hero (after asking) when you’re not a couple yet, but once you’re together don’t do more than “listen”. We saw Cameron get all misty over Joe helping her write her press statement in 4x02, before they’re actually a couple, and he feels victorious when she says, “Yes! We should send it!”. Then Joe gives her advice in 4x03 about the bad review and she walks away, leaving him wondering “What did I do wrong? Why doesn’t she want my help?” In 4x04 he wants to introduce her to his friends, while she’s covered all in mud underneath a coat, desperately in need of a hot bath and cry in self-misery. But, he does it exactly right in 4x07 over the phone.

Guys, raise your hands if you know this befuddling aspect about your SO? It probably drives you nuts with itching fingers eager to do something for her and make it better. And when she says “You’re great,” for listening to her, you feel like a fraud, thinking to yourself, “I didn’t even do anything!” Cam’s “You’re great,” feels like a lie to Joe, because he feels he did nothing of significance for her to think so. The sole reason he can imagine her “lying” is to make him feel better, because she feels guilty. And nobody wants to be loved out of guilt. To learn and realize that he’s experiencing classic and common misunderstandings between a couple, that actually are not his fault, Joe “needs a guy called Gordon” too. Gordon talked him through his moment of loss in 4x05 about Cameron, without either of them actually directly having to mention her name.

More, he learns that Alexa challenges Cameron professionally. He asks her with a big grin when she last heard that she was thinking “small”. Cameron answers, “I don’t know. It’s been a while.” His face falters at that, understandably. Who bugged her the past three years over the phone about the browser? And who said in 1990 to take a step back and stop trying to define what the web will be like (content)? Joe did. In that moment, it’s as if she has completely forgotten that he challenged her professionally for years, which he did for her, to help her see the big picture.

So, it only adds to this increasing existential feeling that he may have wasted three years on the wrong project and the wrong person, that perhaps she does not make all the suffering worthwhile. And if Cameron had not stepped across that threshold, but instead say drove to his place and solace him there, then yes it would have slipped away for the both of them right then and there. Cameron would be marching to her own beat, and Joe would not make the effort anymore. Instead, Cameron decided that Joe makes all her own suffering in the past worthwhile and came “to see him” while he’s hurting and grieving. And whether he knows it or not, he’s the sole person this season who managed to challenge her out of her emotional comfort zone. Joe’s greated gift to her is how he taught her the most important aspect about pain purely by example - extending love and forgiveness at the end of the tunnel is the sole way to heal and live with scars and pain; that it outfeels and outlasts everything else. When it comes to loving the persons who hurt you and whom you hurt, Joe is indeed the master guru.

The momentarily glimpse of Joe allowing his grief and pain to wash over him, once he knows she’s there encourages us to believe he can find solace with her.

It is a recurring theme that they find each other when one of them is grieving, the opposite of what Shiva-Joe once called: “you were happy for a moment and you believed the nearest person was the source.”  This theme of finding solace to lift the loneliness is also present in the ending of Cam’s Pilgrim.

CONCLUSION

As a result, Cam’s anxiety over Comet and working with Joe, even if just to support and listen to him as his love partner has been resolved by the end of 4x07. I do not expect her to flee or put up any barrier over Comet anymore. Now, I’m not saying I expect a re-launch of Mutiny or Joe-Cam business relationship here, but Cameron doing her part and effort to make it work with Joe, and that includes supporting his professional career.

[sweetsunrayssr]

Boxes & Stuff

Reverse parallels to prior HaCF seasons. Spoiler warning up to 4x07

INTRO

When Gordon finds Cameron’s at Joe’s apartment in 4x03, he rails at Joe how bad an idea this is. He is sure that Cam and Joe are trains racing towards each other, carrying dynamite. Joe translates it as “we’re bad for each other and it will end in disaster,” with Gordon jumping up and down shouting “Yeah!”. But Joe blatantly ignores Gordon’s advice, shifting his attention to Haley’s website Comet. As little as he wants to hear Gordon talk about giving up Callnect, he doesn’t want to hear Gordon tell him he’s making a mistake by starting a relationship with Cameron again.

Meanwhile Gordon was also the man who believed Sarah made Joe happy, helped him become a good man and was impressive. Except, it were Cameron’s harsh words in the S1 finale “1984” and her pushing him to be authentic, be a man of flesh and blood and have a soul in 1x06 “Landfall” that made Joe dump the salesman persona and walk out to the observatory. He wasn’t trying to live up to Sarah’s standards, but Cameron’s. Cameron’s opinion of him is the main reason why he’s so desperate to convince Cameron he had nothing to do with Westnet and gives credit to Cameron as key-note speaker. But Cameron wouldn’t take him back in 1x10, while Sarah tended to reward him until 2x05.

For Joe, Sarah betrayed him when she proved her values were far more selfish. He expected her support on him giving copyright credit to Cameron. And he expected her to believe him that he had nothing to do with Sonaris. While she whined about her father all the time, when push came to shove, she wanted Joe to support her father and wrong Cameron, even when she already admitted Westnet was unethical business. Jacob Wheeler only had to give her a necklace and she was fine with it all. In 2x09 “Kali”, Joe turned out to be a far better person than Sarah was: at least he did the right thing, because he believed it to be the right thing, regardless of his personal feelings or his desires. It’s not because Cameron is his ex-lover that it’s ok to support some big company stealing her work.

Joe realized he deserved far better than Sarah when Gordon gave him the “tabula rasa” disk. Instead of reaching out to Sarah or repairing the damage at Westgroup, he seeks out a VC to start Macmillan Utility in San Francisco and removes his wedding ring. Even his S3 “rising of the ashes” he credits to Cameron alone.

So, Gordon was wrong about Sarah in 2x03 “The Way In”, and he might be wrong in 4x03 about Cameron.

Another reverse parallel in the 4x03 train-wreck scene is Joe’s response to Gordon’s warning. In 2x03 Joe elaborated and repeatedly said “I choose her,” about Sarah to Gordon when Gordon and Donna came over for dinner. “She made all the suffering worthwhile”. And Gordon believed it. At the time he said it though, Joe was trying to convince both himself and Gordon of this. In truth he was pining for Cameron. Someone who needs to repeatedly tell themselves and others “I choose her/him” are more out to “prove” something, rather than actually being convinced of it. More, Sarah pointed out to Joe early on during the dinner that he seemed to be dick measuring. As Cameron later says, “I can’t tell if you’re lying or believe your own lies.”

In 4x03 Joe barely deigns himself to respond to Gordon’s claims about the fate of Joe’s relationship with Cameron. He does not elaborate on it. He gives no further explanation, other than “She’s divorced! Almost.” And he makes no effort to convince Gordon of the contrary to Gordon’s claims.

This is the total opposite of Joe telling Gordon how happy Sarah makes him. Sure, partly it’s because he doesn’t want to hear and consider Gordon’s warning, but he’s also indignant that Gordon brings it up. In 4x03 Joe does not want to prove anything, not even that it will all work out. Instead he’s following Gordon’s S2 “Heaven is a place” advice: he suffered because of his love for Cameron, so her loving him back “makes all the suffering worthwhile”. He expects it to be hard, but “he’ll hate himself every day of his life if he doesn’t try”, now that he finally has a chance at it. Even if it were to end in a separation, at least he would have full closure on it, for once and for all. Joe doesn’t care how crazy it may seem to everybody else. He believes he owes it to himself. If Cameron is the “are you nuts” choice and Sarah “the impressive” choice, it makes Sarah in many ways, Joe’s “popcorn fiancé” (when he sought out Gordon and Donna at Return of the Jedi) to appear “normal”.

While Joe refuses to indulge in a heart to heart with Gordon about Cameron in 4x03, it is Cameron who ends up giving Gordon some feedback. This makes the 4x03 scene between Gordon and Cameron the reverse parallel of Joe’s “I’d choose her” about Sarah in 2x03. It’s a parallel, as it is about Joe’s relationship with a woman. It’s reverse, because something entirely different happens. Gordon inquires after her divorce and then Joe. About the divorce she volunteers “It’s as good as it can get, but still …” and thus she does not deny that no matter how much you wish a marriage to be over, it isn’t without its hurts and regrets. About Joe she says, “Who knows, but right now it’s good.” Cameron’s honest, and realistic answers to Gordon is probably the reason that he stops being on Joe’s case about it.

THE BOXES

Another reverse parallel to Sarah in S2 are Cameron’s boxes. When Sarah moved from Austin to Texas most of her boxes, but not all yet, are unpacked. She jokes over the phone to Joe that she’ll “pack everything” that evening, after he says it’s probably a mistake they moved to Dallas for this Westgroup job. After she moved out though, Joe’s apartment is near empty, revealing that almost everything in the Dallas apartment was Sarah’s and not Joe’s.

Meanwhile in 4x03, Joe urges and reminds Cameron to unpack her boxes, finally, giving her the go ahead to fit her things and by extension herself into his full life and home. Unlike Sarah, she never ends up doing so. She simply throws them in the garbage container.

Cameron’s boxes contain seven years of Japan (from ’86 until ’93), the tangible leftovers of her journals, her work for Atari, life in Japan and marriage to Tom. Here are all the clues we’ve been given to understand why she ends up throwing them in the bin:

In 4x02 she said over the phone that time of her life seems like some weird dream now, and thus “unreal”.

4x03 starts with her confession to Tom around New Year ’91. We see her looking at herself in Joe’s bathroom mirror after having taken a bath. “You love him,” says Tom in her memory simultaneously. “That’s not true,” she lied back then and covers her eyes in the present, not wanting to look at herself. Seriously, whenever a character looks away from their reflection or turn their back on a mirror, they tend to be lying. Donna does it for half a conversation in the S2 finale when Gordon expresses his sympathy with Joe in the bedroom where they have their fight. Cameron does it in 2x05 “Infiltrator” when she wrecks her room “again” after her meeting at Westgroup and Tom climbs through the window asking her what’s wrong and she says “Nothing” and ends up cuddling him… all the while her back to the mirror. Meanwhile characters speak or recognize a truth about themselves when they face their reflection. In other words, on her first day in Joe’s apartment, Cam recognizes she loves and loved Joe already in ’90 and that her denial of it in ’90 was a lie.

She then walks through Joe’s apartment, remembering the reasons she told Tom why it is impossible to love Joe (and the lady doth protest too much). His apartment is filled with stuff. Beautiful and tidy, sure, but still personal and cozy. He even has a picture of himself and his mother. It looks like it was once crumpled or torn, but now given a special place and frame.

Joe tells her she has to put the bad review and failure of Pilgrim behind her and move on, which she says is not that easy for her (in general).

At Callnect, she first forgets to take Tom’s final box down to the car, and then when Gordon gives it to her, she accepts it more out of obligation and going through the motion than actually caring about it. After all, she drives off with it without putting it inside the trunk of the car. Then when it drops onto the road, she walks to it in the same “going through the motions” as she accepted it from Gordon. But when the truck appears, she runs towards it, trying to save it, except she cannot stop the truck and it bulldozers across, only to reveal there was nothing of value for her(that she knew of)  inside the box. This is a visual event that matches what Cameron tells Joe in 4x05 – at the time she thought she wanted to save her marriage with Tom, but in actuality she wanted to give him the perfect excuse to leave her. Her lies about not loving Joe and saving her marriage to Tom (and her trying to give Tom kids) was her equivalent of Joe’s “popcorn”: normal people save their marriage and have a family. They don’t drop their marriage and return to an ex-lover with whom they have had such a miserable and painful past, just because the ex-lover wants her to. Only “crazy” or “weird people” would do that (written in ironic tone).

Cameron “unpacks” the boxes by dumping them in the bin. And thus subconsciously, by the end of 4x03, Cameron already concludes those 7 years of marriage to Tom and her life in Japan were trash, garbage, containing nothing worth keeping even as a memory, because they were lies.

“Who are you?” asked Tom of her. Apparently not who she was in Japan, or with Tom, or what is in those boxes. Her boxes are “lies”, “popcorn”, “pretending”. And Cameron decides she doesn’t want to fit the “popcorn” into her relationship with Joe or his home. She wants to be her true self, whoever that is, and then she herself is enough. Cameron “unpacking” her boxes is her complete “tabula rasa” and a compliment to Joe and the home he created. When she walks through his S4 apartment she sees a real Joe, a truer Joe. It would be an insult to him, if she were to plant and strew stuff that are her past lies in the middle of that.

STUFF

Joe’s completely mystified by it though. It is such a radical action. When he asked Cameron to “unpack” her boxes he meant is as evidence that she’s “moving in with him”, mixing her stuff, her past life, herself into his life. Combined with the airstream, by the beginning of 4x05 he ends up seeing it as her not wanting to move in. In that way, it’s sad that Joe sees her rejection of Japan and her past marriage for the lies they were as a rejection of himself in the present, until she spells it out to him.

Joe’s interpretation roots back to 1x05 “Adventure” and 2x06 “10 Broad 36”. In 2x06 Sarah had gone back to Austin to “think”, because it was all moving way too fast for her. She comes to the Dallas apartment to pick up clothes and stuff of hers, while also leaving empty beer bottles on the counter. Joe’s anxious about losing Sarah, moving out and not answering his calls for a week. And he believes that every item that disappears and every junk item that appears is some purposeful signal by Sarah to make him notice her.

It was Cameron who taught him to see it that way, when she took his keys to pick up the stuff she left in his apartment. He had been condescending to her, belittled their affair in response to her (later proven to be valid) argument that the program manager he had hired was the wrong choice. She took his keys out of his pocket, told him their affair was off the table if that was what it took to “wake him up” and that she intended to pick her stuff out of his apartment.

Her stuff actually lay under his bed, and then there was a tape in his cassette player. He relays the next day, after he fired manager Steve and agreed to giving Cameron the job (Steve’s Job ~Steve Jobs) for valid reasons, that he noticed her stuff was gone (and thus he checked under his bed) but that she also took some things that didn’t belong to her (the Wall Street Quarterly).

She then reveals his father had been at his apartment and he must have taken it. Next he goes out to the bowling alley thing and goes out of his way to show he’s back in excellent physical fitness, and the affair is back on the table, with Cameron free to come over whenever she likes and Joe happy to oblige her.

In this episode Cameron basically “programmed” Joe to think

If she leaves her stuff in my home, it means we’re still on

If she takes her stuff out, I’m in the dog house because I wronged her and I should make it right again

If I make it right and tell her I noticed the message loud and clear, we’re back on

And that is exactly how he interprets Sarah’s behavior. Not only does he call her to tell her he noticed. Suddenly he turns 180° on having Mutiny on the mainframe and plays hardball business about the price, reneging on the deal he originally made with Gordon.

So, logically Joe’s confused when Cameron dumps her stuff with the garbage in 4x03 and even more confused when she buys the trailer and the plot of land. He’s only reassured when she tells him she loves him in 4x05.

This early established communication of “taking/leaving stuff” also explains why Joe doesn’t mind it at all that Cameron is taking his stuff to the trailer in 4x07. He already knows from S1 that she wouldn’t steal stuff that doesn’t belong to her if she was actually moving out. Joe regards that behavior as Cam making it “his place” too, as an invitation without her explicitly asking. He likely noticed some of his stuff gone missing, before he caught her in the act so to speak, while she talks about Bos getting married, and she responds positively to his cuddles and kisses.

So he takes the in his mind unspoken invitation and invites himself to the airstream. More, despite the fact she turned their love-nest into her work-place, she’s prancing around in his underwear (she wears male undies; female boxers don’t have a pouch). Even if there is not a lot of Cam at his apartment, she smuggled a lot of Joe to the airstream. And while it’s her work-place, Alexa later refers to it as if she’s walking into Cam’s mind, which Joe subconsciously agree with. So, to him it feels as evidence that he is ever present on her body and mind (that is until he learns she was going to stand him up for a dinner with Alexa and some guy of Stanford).

Toilet paper has an association to the act of “toilet papering”, which traditionally is done to a house. So, “his stuff on her land” + “toilet paper” => visualizing a house for them on her land.

In every way the 4x07 scene with Cam smuggling his stuff to the airstream is a reverse-parallel to Sarah taking her stuff out of the Dallas apartment and leaving empty bottles (garbage) in 2x06. Sarah was moving out of his life and he felt punished for helping Mutiny, Cameron’s company, when she gradually moved her stuff back to Austin, after telling him she felt he was moving too fast about marrying her (in 2x05). In the 4x07 scene he feels he’s being rewarded and encouraged to think of marriage by her taking his stuff. Especially since finding Cam’s note she went to the airstream to “think” in 4x06 triggered the memory of Sarah moving out.

It’s little wonder then that he takes the opportunity to have a talk with Bos and figure out whether he may have been pressuring Cam too much about the no-go zone of having children. To his relief early on in 4x07 Cameron went to the airstream to think on her career and it was not “about reconsidering Joe”.

The fact that so many scenes are reverse parallels between Sarah and Cameron for Joe, and his short-lived marriage to Sarah ended disastrous is quite encouraging for Cameron and Joe.

[sweetsunrayssr]

Halt and Catch Fire, s04e07

[sweetsunrayssr]

Gah, Joe needs to find a way to pull her out of the cosmos back to earth. And while he took his time to realise the beauty of her picked spot to build a permanent home, it's beautiful to see when he does get it. Coincidence he gets the idea while she's building something in his presence?

Sneak peek of Joe and Cameron in Halt and Catch Fire 4x07, “Who Needs a Guy” (x)

[sweetsunrayssr]

Joe’s shrines and relics

Meta-analysis of Joe’s arc throughout the seasons of Halt and Catch Fire, as far as 4x06, and thus a warning for spoilers. Also, this is a long one, because Joe Macmillan is after all a complicated guy.

JOE’S START-UP SHRINE – THE BASEMENT

Where Gordon’s shrine was always an almost sacred location to him before meeting Joe and it became a shrine when the right person did an all nighter in his garage, Joe did not have a pre-determined location. Joe just feels he wants to work with someone when he meets that person. The person comes before the location. And he will seek them out anywhere, wherever they are. He wants to work with Gordon since he saw him at Comdex 81 and he wants to work with Cameron when meeting her at his lecture in Austin Tech. He seeks and needs people who have a conviction and dare to oppose him. After all, we know Joe – dog with a bone. Gordon and Cameron both do that, but in different ways. Gordon grounds him, Cameron inspires him. Gordon can say “Enough! What you want right now is not realistic at this point in time.” Cameron says, “What you want right now is not enough. We can do so much more.” So, he has chemistry with both of them, but only the chemistry he has with Cameron is inspirational and sexual. Because of the background story we have about Simon, it is not sex that inspires him, but rather inspiration that turns him on.

The basement setting as a shrine begins to be established for Joe within the first ten minutes of the series: he meets with Cameron in a bar to scout her professional potential, has a peek-a-boo argument with her, gets drunk and before long he has sex with her in the bar’s basement. Basement screams instinctual, primal, uncontrollable, and subconscious. The connection created and sought here by Joe and sought after in later seasons in this location comes forth from a primal subconscious need, often masked by rationalizations, rather than a deliberate conscious process.

Just to clarify how primal this first sexual encounter with Cameron was, I’ll remind you of the mating of cats: lunges, luring, cornering, mounting, and painful barbed finish for the female who lashes out and screams at the tomcat. That is pretty much how Lee Pace and Mackenzie Davis acted it to me. Later once hired, Cameron decides to work on the BIOS in the basement instead of her designated cleared out cleaning room. It is in this basement that she initiates and establishes a sexual incubating pattern: whenever Cameron is mentally and mathematically stuck on a problem, having sex with Joe gets her unstuck, lifts her mentally into having a higher overview. And they celebrate their anticipated success for Comdex 83 in the basement (before Bos gets arrested).

THE SOUL IN THE MACHINE

While Season 1 may establish the basement as a future shrine for Joe, he initially had no shrine at all. Instead he naturally holds on to relics: the bat his father gave him, the PROM chip Gordon and him reversed. This makes a lot of sense for a man who has uprooted himself and traveled Europe and the US. You can’t carry buildings from place to place, but you can carry the relics.

The GIANT is a relic he ends up burning, and is pretty much a product the series pushes as an analogy to Joe. The very first glimpse we have of him is machine like, in his car and road killing an armadillo. He starts out looking like an IBM clone salesman and both Cam and Bos refer to him as this, while his initial product idea is an IBM clone.

Then in 1x06 Landfall, Cam wants both the machine and Joe to have a soul. The IBM clone (Joe and the computer) are boring to her: an empty 1000$ suit and an empty box that may be fast and look sexy, but is not something she can interact with, not of flesh and blood, or fall in love with. Naming and speaking (truth) is a meta-dialogue element ever since that tends to be a callback to this episode. It’s what would make the Giant and Joe “unique” and a “visionary”. It’s the first time that Cameron pitches her own innovative vision and idea, and she does this using her own relic – the doll.

Note: a cinematic trick occurs in this scene. Joe lies reclined, while Cam stands. The camera uses a frog perspective from Joe to Cameron as he watches her pitch talk about the OS, mesmerized. The camera has a bird perspective from Cameron to Joe as she tries to convince him. However, when he tells her that he is sure of what he can sell without her OS at Comdex and how her OS promises him none of that, the camera angle shifts back to horizontal on both of them. It’s as if the room tilts behind them back to normal. It’s difficult to show this with stills with the camera on Joe as the background looks almost so similar, but if you ever re-watch 1x06 look out for it happening (At present I’m working on a 7 year old laptop that overheats when rendering movie clips). But I can show the sequence with stills as the camera is on Mackenzie. It implies that Cameron literally tilts the room for Joe when she speaks.

At Comdex, after Gordon removed Cameron’s OS and she leaves Joe, his sales pitch at the booth reflects the same transference between machine and characters. He spurns “unique”. It’s “not your friend, but your employee”. “If you want to chase rainbows and tilt the room? Walk outside.” Simon referred to Cameron as Miss Rainbow Bright and a tilting of the room is what the cameras did in the 1x06 scene.

The Comdex 83 episode finishes with Joe ending up in the Apple suite rattled and shocked that “it speaks” after it says “My name is Macintosh”, in almost direct analogy to the moment when Cam’s OS interacted with Joe.

The S1 finale starts out with Joe being blown away by the Superbowl Commercial by Apple in 1984, with the model who looks so much like Cameron: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I

Joe realizes that Cameron is the muse he needs and he’s willing to follow her wherever she wants to go. Except his muse rejects him as soulless, an echo who recites her own ideas back to her. Worse, she figuratively shoves him of a metaphorical stargazing roof to land on a fence, condemning him to healing from her damning words for close to two more years.

When he then stares at the finished Giant, Joe can only see it as the empty machine that Cameron condemned it to be. And then Gordon gives Joe credit: “The Cardiff Giant is an incarnation of everything you are. Shows the reach and power of your vision and the very best of your abilities as a leader.”  While Gordon means this as a compliment, Joe despises the Giant and so when he burns the shipment, he’s actually trying to destroy the idea of him as an empty machine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIf_7rtGNrQ

Joe verifies this subconscious intent of the immolation scene in 2x01 when he tells Sarah’s friends that initially he believed he was not content with the end product, but in truth loathed himself.

So, aside from a basement as a shrine to reconnect with Cameron, a giant machine making noise becomes the subconscious relic of Cameron’s voice. She is like a ghost in the machine. And this all sets the stage for us to understand that Joe subconsciously thinks of Cameron in S2 and S3 when he’s in a basement and makes choices to have her back in his life somehow, even when he believes otherwise.  

SEASON 2 – SURROGATE SARAH

As I mentioned with Gordon’s Garage shrine, season 2 is overall the surrogate season – most characters seek to replace a specific bond with someone else. Sarah is the surrogate lover for Joe to soothe the rejection by Cameron at the end of S1. Almost from the very beginning that Sarah is introduced to us, she’s jarringly supportive, and while certainly Joe believes himself in love and sincere, a part of it is just plain awkward. “10 miles!” “I can tell”. “I was Andy Kaufman.” “Oh, I was big bird. I guess that makes us quite the couple.” CRINGE!

Compare that to S4 Joe on the telephone with Cameron, or in the trailer in 4x06 where he feels free to allow for a bit of sarcasm and smugness combined with overflowing sweetness, with Haley or when his friends of Comet are at his house to watch the skating Olympics. S2 Joe with Sarah may be a better Joe, but it is less authentic than he believes at the time.

Before Donna gets to say it, you already think, “What’s he doing with her?” Gordon predicted correctly that Joe’s fiancé would be more of a Joan Baez type: not as aggressive as Cameron. Sarah asks him during his proposal whether the reason he loves her is because she’s the first person to forgive him. And yes, that pretty much sums it up basically, even if Joe cannot admit that to himself even. Sarah says the things he truly wants Cameron to believe of him: he’s not an echo, he has a soul, and can love, not a bad guy, he’s redeemable, etc.

We are given a few pointers in dialogue though that Joe likely sought her out at the observatory, because he remembers her as “challenging”:

They knew each other from college, from a rhetoric course, and she used to win those rhetorics.

Joe himself tells her father he loves her because she’s skeptical

Joe says that in their college days he couldn’t keep up with her

Even if we as viewers don’t see it at the time, Joe has an image of her as a woman who can stand up to him. Which makes sense: if he does not believe that of Sarah, then her support and forgiveness would be without value. She has to have some strength of personality to be Cameron’s surrogate. And while she may lack Cameron’s fierceness, she proves to be quite assertive without ever looking back, once she has all the evidence that she is not a second chance, but a second choice. Anyway, that her forgiveness is not enough is already hinted at with Joe playing Tank Battle against Cameron as an anonymous user, while Sarah sleeps, the night he asked Sarah to marry him.

MAINFRAME IN THE BASEMENT

Joe starts working at Westgroup as a grunt in data-entry in the basement with outdated equipment and colleagues that are even more passive and bored-out than Gordon was in S1. They have however a brand new giant mainframe. And when he has enough of his non-innovative surroundings, Joe seeks his solace with the mainframe, buzzing and whirring around him at the start of 2x03. It’s the only machine that’s alive, more alive than his colleagues. He leans against it, almost as if he needs to feel its humming vibe.

It could be said that in his subconscious, he’s seeking Cameron’s ghost in the machine. Certainly storywise, the mainframe heralds Joe moving into Cameron’s personal life. But I’d go further and say that in that setting Cameron is ever present in his subconscious mind. When he arrives at work the next day after his dinner with Gordon and Donna, that ended with them saying goodbye because something was up at Mutiny, he calls for a meeting in the mainframe room and is present as the machine wakes up. When he cryptically says “The way in,” he might consciously mean tech via time-sharing, but Joe simply wouldn’t have gotten that particular idea without its subtextual ties to Cameron, who’s running an online company. He is so not surprised when Gordon demands Mutiny to be Joe’s pilot project for a discount. Nor does he even protest against it. And he uses his typical S1 posturing, which is but a mask: indifference, annoying Gordon.

Once Cameron’s Mutiny is connected to his mainframe, it’s no coincidence at all that Joe’s sex life with Sarah turns hot. It is all the more suspicious, since later, after he’s actually married, Sarah remarks down at the Westgroup basement, “This place really turns you on.” “You have no idea,” he says cryptically, the exact same thing he says to Cam when she’s about to give him her Kali kiss. Who’s actually on his mind is already made clear in the club when under the influence of XTC he says to Sarah, “I’m not an echo!”

KALI AND SAINT SARAH

Joe’s intentions are sincere (like the wine), but not until 2x07 does he become honest with himself. But before that, once his benevolent act for Mutiny gets into the open and possibly heads for disaster, the more he postures and begins to manipulate like S1 Joe, fully willing to exorcise Mutiny, and thus Cameron’s ghost, of the mainframe.

And yes, he does grow to care sincerely for Sarah, after he witnesses Jacob Wheeler lecturing her in 2x07. That is the pivotal moment where he can begin to let go of Cameron and talk of her as his past ideal partner, as well as praise and defend Cameron’s work and vision, even if it would cost him. That’s when he starts to do the right thing for the right reasons - because he truly believes it is the right thing, instead of proving to either Cameron or Sarah that he’s a decent human being. That the healing scene between Cameron and Joe occurs in a hospital is symbolically apt. Note also that this is one of the many scenes including a reflection. Between Cameron and Joe the reflection scenes usually occur during true and tender confessions, as well as a moment that will karmically return to them in some form. The reflection in this scene also suggests the unspoken truth that a part of him will always love her or remain with her.

In that sense his goodbye to Westgroup’s basement with Sarah is his sexual goodbye to Cameron and the basement shrine. If Westnet hadn’t occurred, messing with his effort to leave Cameron in peace and with a sincere impression of him, if Cameron hadn’t exorcised Westgroup and Joe with Sonaris, he would have likely moved on and eventually have grown to love Sarah more than he still loved Cameron. Love can grow to be true via many paths.

But Westnet did happen, and Cameron did kiss him and made him desire her in Westgroup’s basement, even if he stopped it. While Cam’s intent was to exorcise him from her life with her own goodbye kiss, she simultaneously reclaimed the basement to haunt him.

The whole Sonaris trap she sets would be called creating a karmic bond in esoteric circles. Since the episode 2x09 is called Kali, a Hindu goddess, we do have references to the religion where karmic thinking is a cornerstone. That Cameron enacts the destructions of demons as Kali is depicted by her lying in the garden like a force of nature. And how she herself is bound to Joe because of this and not actually free from karma is reflected by Tom leaving her at the end of the episode. Her plan backfires in her personal life.

Incidental or not, I would also like to remark on a version of Kali that was brought into Europe during the Middle Ages by the Romani: Saint Sarah, or otherwise known as Sarah-la-Kali (Sarah the Black). And the character Sarah in Halt and Catch Fire is almost saintly patient, but whatever wounds she healed with Joe after S1, she tears right open again in the same episode called Kali. She finishes the destruction that Cameron unleashes. This would fit the surrogate role.

SHIVA ON HIS MOUNTAIN TOP

If Cameron is Kali to Joe, then he himself could be said to be analogues to Shiva (Kali’s consort). This is a paradoxical Hindu deity who is known as destroyer as well as a pacific benefactor, who can be cruel and wild but also kind and tranquil. His second paradox is that he is both an ascetic yogi/guru sitting self-absorbed on a mountain and family man with children (which in Hindu culture tends to be mutually exclusive, except for Shiva). His third paradox is that Shiva is half-male and half-female spiritually. Bi-sexual, so to speak.

There are various iconographic depictions of Shiva: dances to destroy, lying reclined while Kali stands to give him energy to create, and as a meditating yogi far removed from the world high on a mountaintop, or with his wife Parvati and two children (Parvati = Kali, but the benevolent avatar). One of his attributes are ashes, representing burning things to the ground in order to set the soul free for evolution.

Ok, that all sounds very cool, and I amassed the above information when I checked out Kali who’s Shiva’s shakti or muse. And yes, that all sounds pretty much like Joe, but is that a coincidence or is there Shiva imagery worked into the series. Well, we do have the Yogi image for Joe in S3.

Joe is introduced to us as a Tech guru like Steve Jobs, in a top office floor of a skyscraper overlooking SF Bay (as does his apartment). We have several references and images that not only put Joe like Shiva high in the sky, but in an Asian context, often with mountain imagery in the background or drawn behind him.

So, did the writers and directors include Shiva imagery for Joe in S3? I’d say absolutely. What does all of this have to do with basements and mainframes? Just like Gordon stays away from the garage in S3 as he refuses to work together with Joe, Joe seeks to be as far away from the basement shrine for over half of S3, because he wants to be away from Cam and her influence. But not just her. The world and their chatter in general. Another Shiva-Yogi aspect is that Shiva isolates himself from the world on his mountain top. Joe is not just featured in top floors surrounded by Asian décor and mountain imagery. He walks around with headphones too, to avoid hearing other people talk. Joe does the same thing what Cam did in S1 with her music, except not in some hole in the ground, but at the top of the mountain.

Sure, he throws parties and has numerous flings, but he wouldn’t call these people friends. One of the first flings we see is Donna’s predicted model with long blonde hair, shoulderpads and Daryl Hannah cheekbones. And in that atmosphere he remains aloof, distant and unaffected, but benevolent, wishing well on people, and giving it away for free. Joe’s flight to the top of the mountain and anti-virus product also symbolize Joe’s self-protection reflex. He only trusts himself and it’s dangerous to be around someone with whom he can be himself. So, he surrounds himself with people he doesn’t feel anything for. He does not want to feel.

Ryan Ray who works at Mutiny manages to get Joe’s attention, enough to be hired, on the condition that Ryan forgets all about the people he worked with at Mutiny. Joe knows he wants to do something new and innovative, but he doesn’t know what. He’s seeking for a rebel and muse, but one he is not sexually attracted to. When he hires Ryan, he hopes he might be a sterile Cam for him basically (a Cam surrogate, just not as personal). But Ryan doesn’t rebel against pricing the 2.0 user version and doesn’t take initiative to work on something the way Cameron would have. So, when Joe comes down of his mountain top to be a student at BASIC programming, he believes Ryan is a kind person, but nothing special.

The first scene where Joe does get of his mountain top, as a student, he hears Cameron talk. He’s stopped right in his tracks and thus for the first time affected. He first decides to avoid her, but eventually waits for her and faces her. He does his zen-master act, thanking her, trying to make some sort of peace, be benevolent to her, even willing to give her Ryan back.

Except, she laughs in his face and tells him that his zen-master act may work on other people, but not on her and she doesn’t believe it. She proves to be right, for he cannot be aloof around her, can’t let her walk away from him without giving a retort and ends up being pissed at her. The face he makes as she strolls of, certainly is not that of a zen-master at all.

She also informed him that Ryan is special and one of the best coders in the bay area. And his meeting with Cameron, away from the mountain, is the spark that makes him decide to have Ryan Ray work with him in his apartment, while he tries to regain his zen state. Which results in a brainstorm session where Ryan mentions Mutiny, and Joe instantly tells him to shut up.

The cinematic shot that follows is Joe requiring silence now, with a hilltop in the background beside his head. And when he shushes Ryan and closes his eyes in a type of meditation, Joe visually becomes one with the mountain top.

At least Ryan shares Cam’s annoying quality of being noisy and not shutting up, and he can’t truly regain his zen state anymore. He still looks and acts the part at the party where he meets Bos and Diane, but his little evilness rears its head and pokes Diane about Cameron (and thus in Cam’s business). Next that same destructive anger makes him blow up the peace attempt with the gay-hating father who decides on state contracts, and then he learns one of his flings is seropositive and he might have contracted HIV himself. Shiva-Joe is about to fall from his mountain.

The idea of the regional network is one of Joe’s true visionary ideas that he arrives at after months of labor, by himself. Ryan did the research on what is present now: ARPANET and NSFNET, and echoes Joe’s words. Cam did not directly inspire him to have that vision and idea. But she did put a crack in his ascetism, enough for him to bring in Cam-like noise and mess (when Ryan arrives at Joe’s apartment after his ex-fling left), and inevitably make him act and react, as well as reconnect with life (invite Ryan to dinner), and break down the forts and citadels (the destruction aspect and legends of Shiva). If he destroyed the GIANT out of self-loathing in S1, Joe intends to destroy the forts from an enlightened idea in S3 instead.

The very next scene, we see Joe again is … yup, in the basement. It’s empty and silent, a blank slate: right now it’s perfect. The enlightenment behind it is visually supported by the light editing. We first get a burst of light, and in that light, slowly the image of Joe and Ryan in Macmillan Utility’s basement forms and sharpens.

This is a rebirth or reincarnation scene. And when Ryan asks whether the room is perfect, Joe clarifies “the idea” is perfect, but the camera singles out Joe. We are looking at a “perfect Joe”, able to connect with the past as he mentions Mitch from his IBM days without any ill feelings, truly at peace with Cameron and himself. He can be in a basement and feel connected to her without anger and desire (there’s no mainframe), and just let her be. He even understands that life won’t be perfect and there will be disappointments ahead of him.

So, we get an image of Yogi-Shiva/Joe not on a mountain, but in the basement, metaphorically reconnecting with the world and his past as the basements is being wired (he actually helps with the wiring) and a mainframe is installed. Simultaneously he accepts the concept and value of an “echo”. Even though Ryan echoed him, with his help, Joe managed to achieve the idea. And Joe further promotes Ryan to be a mini-Joe as a sharp dresser.

NOT HIS MAINFRAME NOR HIS CAMERON

What Joe does not yet know is that there are no rewards for becoming enlightened. Life does not become less painful or less of a struggle. This is perhaps the most beautiful and painful raw aspect of this TV series for Joe’s arc: how true to life it is that most of the time there are no rewards, even if you deserve it, even if you do the right thing, are right about what will happen. And the latter half of S3 exemplify it.

As the idea of the regional network is about to become reality, and still perfect, he arrives back home to find Cameron waiting in his hallway, at his door, in the middle of the night. Kali comes to visit Shiva on his mountain. It’s the perfect materialization of the memory of Cameron coming to his apartment. Of course a part of him hoped she used Gordon as an excuse to come to him in the middle of the night and the inevitable would happen.

But then he looks down and sees the wedding ring on her finger. A part of him just can’t believe it. Whoever her husband is, he could never be someone lasting, just the nearest person you project happiness on. Much earlier in the season, in the brainstorm scene with Ryan, Ryan protests against him wiping the whiteboard clean of a clutter of ideas. Not only does Joe say that “good is the enemy of great”. He also says that if “anything is worth pursuing we’ll remember it tomorrow.” And both these guidelines most likely reflect his feelings about Sarah versus Cameron. Sarah faded away, but Cameron never will.

And yet, he has to let go of Cameron to be someone else’s as well as surrender the mainframe, the basement and the creation of the regional network completely to Gordon. Both during her visit to his mountain, his visit to her home to ask her to help find Ryan and the first scenes at Comdex 90, each time Joe is reminded that he will never get over Cameron. Every meeting he’s confronted with his desire for her, the realization that Tom’s the lucky one and the accompanying pain at the reminder of what he lost when he chose selling a computer that nobody remembers. It doesn’t matter whether there are three years, seven years or ten years between then and back.

Comdex 90 events develop in 3 stages:

First they talk like friends, walking around Comdex 90 and he learns she has gone through some cycles of her own life experience and identity, which he can fully recognize. He reflects it’s amazing how much changes in just a few years, but also how much stays the same. As she rattles away about what is worth seeing at Comdex90, unaware she’s making typical facial expressions, he watches her mesmerized: much of the original Cam is still the same, so are his feelings for her. It hurts and overwhelms (he cryptically admits it in phase 2 when she asks him whether something “caught his eye on the floor”). And yet it was fulfilling to just spend that relaxed time with her – a stolen moment. Joe prepares to say goodbye: “Oh God, it was great to see you and..euhm… this was a lot of fun.” But Cameron grabs his arm and Joe can’t resist that temptation. Basically this whole scene is the moment of regret over the past as well as recognizing what he loved about her in the past, and he’s grateful of every moment he steals in being around her in the present.

In the second scene and phase (the NIM game) it is not just so much the confrontation with memories of the past and seeing the past in the present, but the gob smacking realization that he still wants to pursue her and that this was the true reason why he’s there at all – to find out whether he still has a chance at a future with her. “This is not about Ryan”. Joe realizes this as Cam puts the past in perspective, absolves him of blame, and then tells him that he’s a creator of change, for his great strength is bringing the right people together (Shiva again). In that moment she heals every wound she has hacked into him in the past in retaliation of all his mistakes and her own hurts. Again she invites him to stay, and it sort of becomes a date to him, and he’ll do whatever she wants to do.

The third scene at the Atari party we see them dance together for the first time (they didn’t dance together at Comdex 83): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMobSQ68lk0 Here too we can possibly see a connection to Shiva and Kali-Parvati. Shiva is the Lord of the Dance and dances various dances (tandava) depending on his mood and intent, some destroy, one is joyous. Kali is just an aspect of Parvati, where Parvati becomes fierce and enraged to force change and time. Parvati is the loving, benign form. And her dance Lasya is a happy, graceful one, tempering Shiva’s dance. When Joe goes to get refills, we see Cam still dancing in joy, exclaiming to friendly people she loves them (more Parvati dancing Lasya), but then Donna shows up. Cam’s dance stops and she storms off in wrath (becoming Kali like again), taking Joe with her, who calms her.

Note: The dancing Shiva even has a tie to CERN, the nuclear research center in Geneva, from which Joe got the hypertext manuals in the S3 finale. CERN has a statue of the dancing Shiva, gifted to the research center by India in 2004, for their particle research describes the “cosmic dance” of creation and destruction.

No, they don’t go to the basement, but to the roof of the hotel (top of the mountain). After winning NIM with lighters, the honest admission that he is at Comdex, and her becoming honest to herself about her feelings for him (even if she does not verbally confirms it to him) they end up sharing a night of love and passion on the mountain. And yes, we have hilltops behind them at the roof, with yin-yang color play. From a time-thief he becomes a wife-thief.

In rolls the finale with a project they would all be excited about (except for Tom), where he can’t help but put doubts in Tom’s mind and uses CERN’s hypertext as information to win Cam over and destroy Tom (the Shiva dance remember). It eventually leads to a fight and Joe falling through the floor onto the mainframe in the basement, her actual mainframe, her basement. While a part of me cheered for him making that sardonic dig at Tom about wives not having a vote, the dick measuring also sows the seeds of Cam having to work on the project remotely. On the other hand, he championed her right to choose and deflected Tom’s attention from ordering Cam around like some lord of the middle ages. He seems willing to sacrifice his image and make himself look like the bad guy to deflect any suspicion Tom may have about Cam. In response, Cam champions Joe to Donna.

S3 finale and 4x02 suggest how much Joe has come to terms with Cam’s Kali aspects, both empathically as well as predict when it will rear up, and how he manages to channel and temper it. The moment he sees that Donna showed up at Comdex90, he knows that was the wrong move. His information and night with Cam soften her enough to hear Donna out. Joe is suspicious of the reasons that Cam chose to hold the meeting at the prior Mutiny building once Donna reveals this. Donna couldn’t imagine why, but he freezes and his eyes and face say, “Oh, you’re in trouble Donna. Cam’s going to go Kali on you.” He understands that Cam is conflicted over the www project, unsure of his commitment to her and distrustful of Donna. He tempers Cam again, telling her that Donna is trying while also pleading with her whther there is a chance for them. How much Joe understands and can channel the Kali aspect of Cam is featured again in the telephone convo of S4 when he wrote the press release statement. In sympathy he included the skull reference about Gavin Green (and yes Kali’s attributes are skulls), but he also cheers when she says it’s what she should send, but minus the last bit about skulls. He’s proud she has learned to temper her Kali nature.

Meanwhile Cameron admits in 4x05 that Joe won her heart over the course of events of the last two S3 episodes. It’s nearly Christmas 1990 when they have the www meeting, and she has told Tom in Japan shortly after New Year, in the hope that Tom would leave her.

POST-IT BASEMENT SHRINE

While Joe championed and won Cam’s heart, while he gets to work in her basement that houses her mainframe, and she wants to work on the project, it doesn’t work out for Joe as he hoped. How does that work with that mainframe? Well the mainframe is not operative anymore. It is as silent as Cam increasingly grows over the distance. Without her actually being in the basement, Joe has to wait and wait and wait, and grows bitter. They may have reconnected, but nothing beyond that: they don’t work together, they don’t live together, they don’t sleep together.

One of the sexual connotations in the S4 opener is the mention of 69 downloads, as 69 is a famous mutual satisfying (and sort of yin-yang) sexual position. Add the fact that this number is also mentioned in combination with the key-word “stuck” as in “stuck at 69 downloads” and later “screwing around with post-it notes”. Working with Cameron is merely the route he hopes to use in order have a non-platonic relationship with her. And the post-its imo represent both his “post-sexual frustration” as well as constantly reminding himself that he is right (and she is wrong). As the mainframe and basement gets filled with post-its and Gordon asks Joe to move upstairs, he adamantly refuses to do so, refusing to accept that the browser project and a possibility of a future with Cameron is dead. It is a competition with AOL that makes him take the first step to let go, just as Cameron shows up.

They don’t meet in the basement, but at Gordon’s party, on top of the hill (a small one) overlooking the celebrations. These are mirror circumstances of Comdex 90, except he’s mad at her and the silence grows uncomfortable. Joe leaves and Cam ends up on the couch. Obviously, Gordon’s couch was not where she hoped to end up that night. Along with Hole’s song Doll Parts we get more of the vibe that Cam feels punished by Joe. Not that it was realistic of Cam to hope that Joe would welcome her with open arms, but then again, he sought her out after 7 years before, all smiles, loyalty and support at Comdex 90, knowing she was married. (Sidenote: we see Cam wake up on Gordon’s floor the next morning. In other words, she refused to accept the couch punishment.)

The second meeting takes place in the basement he turned into a post-it note shrine. He only discovers her there as he comes down. As an image, she appears like a materialization of the mainframe and post-its, handing him the finished browser Loadstar, the project he believes was the sole excuse to maintain the connection. As much as he resents her for leaving him hanging alone for three years, he’s also sad (masked as anger) that this means the last tie to her will be severed. She’s about to walk out of his life for good in his mind. Since there won’t be any sex, the next best thing is arguing with her. Even if she offers and asks him what she could do for him, he tells her “nothing. It’s over.” Then she does her inspiration thing, as she moves up the stairs: he’s going to run out of post-its soon. Just 5 minutes and a small remark of identifying the future issue is now enough for Joe to have a new idea of his own.

POST-BASEMENT SHRINE: FAMILY AND HOME

I do not expect to see them in actual basement anymore in S4, not unless they have a completely falling out. But even in that sense they both have outgrown the basement as has their relationship. As a shrine it was never an end-goal for Joe anyway, only the reconnect and restart location. We only saw it having such a crucial role for Joe throughout the seasons, because they were not part of each other’s lives since the end of Comdex 83. Their reconnecting night at Comdex 90 was not a life, just “a night”.

Seeing her leave, possibly for good (in his mind), Joe reconnects with Cameron over the phone. I want to point out the visual we see through the window of Cam’s hotel room: a mountain. The mountain has become a fundamental part of Cam’s personal shrine to reconnect with Joe. A mountain, hotel room and party is the complete shrine for Cameron in relation to Joe. The obvious reason is that a party and hotel room are reminders of how she wished Comdex 83 would have ended, instead of how it truly ended. And the mountain is where she is most likely to meet the most benevolent aspect of Joe. This is an idealization in part – as we see her fall asleep to his forgiving voice, her hand lovingly cupping the speaker and off she drops into dreamland.

From midway S3 (3x06) until early S4 (4x02) we have 4 mountain meetings: twice Cam seeks Joe on the mountain, twice Joe seeks Cam on the mountain. And it only successfully rekindles a love affair when Joe “comes to see her”. That is what Joe ends up doing when Cam mentions the moon, which he cannot see because the hill/mountain blocks his view (aka he’s not on the mountain at his SF home).

Check out both the background of the Pilgrim avatar on Joe’s screen and the painting in the background of the hotel room hallway: the Pilgrim is looking towards a mountain, evoking the “if the mountain won’t come to Mohammed, then Mohammed must go to the mountain.” And as Joe walks into Cam’s hotel room through the “doorway”, we get to see the painting that hangs at the end of the hallway: a pathway to a mountain, and left of the mountain hangs a light that emanates a completely different light than the other warm yellow hallway lights. It’s blue-white light like the moon. (Moon sickles are attributes of both Shiva and Parvati/Kali)

In 4x05 Donna solves the key clue to Cameron’s game Pilgrim (see previous meta), but the location where the Pilgrim is to climb the flames in the air to get to the higher level is on a hilltop.

Cameron’s moon mention also relates to the content of something that Joe referenced in S2. We learned then that he wrote a letter to Gordon and Cameron. Only Gordon confirmed he read it, and Gordon name drops Shangri-La, a pop culture reference of an untopia in Tibet, where someone could live a prolonged, simple life. Joe asked her whether she received his letter and read it, but she refrains from answering, and Sarah introduces herself. The pop-culture reference goes back to a book “the Lost Horizon” from 1933: a story within a frame-story. And in that book a mountain of 28000 foot towers over Shangri-La. It’s called Karakal, which translates to “blue moon”.

Later, Cameron transforms her mountain shrine into the airstream, a material, grounded love nest that is still cosmic and enlightened, with which she repeats the cycle of Joe “coming to see her”.

Back to Joe’s shrine. As I said the basement is the reboot shrine, and while he has no end-shrine with Gordon, Joe actually has a goal-shrine with Cameron: a family and home. We get the hint for that way back in the S1 storm episode Landfall. Joe plays relaxed with Joanie and Haley and does his memorable storm-destroyer performance with two torches. He’s happy and smiling as Joanie and Haley dry him off afterwards. Then Gordon enters haggardly having survived the storm. Donna races towards him with love and care and worry. Gordon’s two daughters run to their father to cling at his legs. Gordon wants to talk with Joe and eat something, but Joe acts as if he feels an intruder on this happy family reunion scene and departs quickly, but not before seeing a picture of perfect family life: husband and wife and children all together, holding each other, smiling and waving.

As he walks to his car he looks back at Gordon’s house, stares at his own reflection in the car windows (self confrontation) and then drives off to Cameron’s house, asking her if she has anybody she would call if she was caught in a storm. That is the full clue from the very first season that deep down Joe wants to have a family with Cameron, the same episode where Cameron tilts the room for Joe and she talks about falling in love and making him fall in love.

That Joe was not against having children we already know in S2 when he talks of the children he expects and assumes he’ll have with surrogate-Sarah, in response to Jacob Wheeler’s invitation to be the key-note speaker for Westnet. And in the finale of 3x10 we know how much he idealized the picture of the Clark family as he expresses disbelief that Donna and Gordon got divorced, even long after the fact: “That the two of you…”

If we see a mountain through Cam’s hotel room window, we see nothing but cozy, warm homes behind which Joe can imagine perfect idealized family scenes behind the walls. He glances outside of his window for a moment when he asks her whether she’s divorced. He turns his chair and takes in the view of those warm cozy homes from the outside when he asks her whether she’s gonna stay in California. When he mimics and retells the book story of the boy holding the dead pigeon that restores the boy’s faith, Joe himself holds his hands as if he’s holding a baby. In the same shot we see a Buddha or Shiva Yogi and beside it stands the picture of his father and himself (father and son), and thus family.

And of course he mentions his general desire to have a family to her over the phone and inquires whether she wants children. So, this is the shrine he wants to build with Cameron.

How much he wants that really becomes poignant in 4x05 and 4x06: with him wanting her to move in indefinitely in 4x05, the pain flashing over his face when Gordon tells him thoughtlessly he’ll never be a father, and his confession to Bos how having children is a no-go zone with Cameron.

4x06 even visually does a callback to the S1 episode where Joe asks her whether she has anyone to call in a hurricane. Cam wears the same tank top in both episodes. She wears it in 1x06 as she opens the door for him and he stares at it for a moment. In 4x06 she wears it while doing the dishes and Joe watches the rocket video on the cam-corder, remarking that one day Haley is four and building forts and telling jokes at 14 the next.

Cam may have said, “Kids are great! If you could birth to a 14-year old,” but she had a loving smile while stealing a glance at Joe. So, Bos might be right after all, when he tells Joe she might surprise hm. Her being relieved she had no children with Tom (a husband she wanted deep down to leave her) and how much she claims the above for possible fear of Mother Nature deciding her fate makes unclear where she truly stands on a family with Joe. There are plenty of women who love their child, though they’re not fans of other people’s babies or toddlers. There are women who love someone else’s children, but don’t want them themselves. There are women who adore babies but mother nature gets in the way. Kali/Parvati notoriously was not an obvious mother figure, until she actually held her own baby, which was conceived with great difficulty.

SELF-SABOTAGE

The point for Joe in season 4 imo is that now that he has an actual exclusive relationship with Cameron and tries to build his shrine of family and home, the real thing won’t be like the ideal in his head. The pitfall here is that this home building is less about the process but the goal for him. He knows he just can’t get from basement to family picture, but what comes in between that delays and diverts from that family picture is not something he can fully enjoy.

The emails that Cam hasn’t checked give us a good timeline impression. The oldest email is from Tom about a package from Tokyo (that got hit by a truck) and was sent by the end of October. Her benefactor “Alexa” contacts her halfway November about having seen her at the convention MISCELANNEOUS. Joanie and Haley were going to school in the first episodes already, and thus the telephone conversation between Cameron and Joe in 4x02 occurred sometime in September. The last email of Tom where he informs her he’s going on a business trip to SF is from Sunday March 20th, and he visited Cameron on a Friday. Hence 4x05 was the 25th of March. The snug love time in the airstream would have been the weekend (26th and 27th). So, it’s early April in 4x06. Cameron and Joe are a couple for a whopping 6-7 months. The divorce papers have been signed for less than a fortnight. And they’re both complicated people. But Joe wants Cameron to move in 24/7 with him before she even told him she loves him for the first time ever in a decade, and if it were up to him they’d be making babies right now.

Joe’s approaching their relationship like a product manager, putting the relationship on a time schedule where he considers Cameron as a bottleneck in writing the BIOS to make it on time for Comdex, or like Donna pushing for an IPO with what they have instead of ensuring a solid foundation. A lot of Joe’s pain stems from this self-imposed approach. How much of his frustration would be resolved if he saw the relationship with the love of his life as a lifetime process instead?  

Joe should take his time and enjoy the process now, rather than speed ahead to the future in his mind, for he’s inexperienced with Cameron’s tendencies to retreat at various moments, how she can be awkward with intimacy, nor is she a talented communicator. If Donna and Bos would witness Cam taking Joe along when she buys the airstream, the conversation she has on the hotbed in the airstream, her informing him verbally or by note where she’s going, they would both think Cameron improved immensely. Unfortunately for himself, Joe does not have a reference for much of that S3 behavior, which the people she loves the most tend to take personal to then end up making mistakes.

So far, luckily, Joe halted in time to redirect his goal building:

he bought the wok after the fight in 4x05 and reflected he should enjoy his time with her, and was rewarded with the truth in a (space) truck.

he let go of his initial dislike of her weird looking cheese egg and the airstream he can’t stand up in. He doesn’t need to stand up to make love in a hotbed, right?

And when she left for her magical land once more, Joe visited Bos and connected with him in a way he likely never did before (except that time when Bos shoved his fist in that asshole boring grey box designer in the strip club), got positive feedback by Bos on his relationship with Cameron and what the future may have in store for him.

But can he maintain perspective or will his tendency to obsess wreck it all? Can he identify the true danger and enemy to his relationship or will he end up making enemies of potential allies who could help him understand Cameron better?

SURPRISE

4x06 have a humongous amount of conception metaphors:

the “cheesy” egg, incubated in a microwave

firing rockets

a rocket making “landfall”, the title of 1x06

a thematic cosmic airstream = rocking the universe, for a couple that have so many references to a cosmic creation couple as Shiva and Parvati/Kali

love making in a “hotbed” or “love nest” (more incubation) and cosmic airstream = rocking the universe

Joe and Cam unwittingly may already have conceived by the end of 4x06. I use the word incubator, because it helps brood and hatch eggs. The season has given us a lot of egg and bird references, including Joe holding an imaginary pigeon like a baby. Psychologically "incubator” means subconsciously thinking of a problem while doing another activity (S1 “I’m stuck”, S4 “I want babies, but let’s have fun shooting rockets”). It’s one of the first strategy games with full 3D graphics published in ‘97, using Kali software developed in ’95. And in a ritualistic sense it is a practice of sleeping in a sacred area in order to experience a miraculous and divine cure, and oracle dreams, which is what Cameron may require if she has fertility issues. And apparently, Cameron doesn’t dream in code anymore. And Cameron also answered Joe that “computers” may one day know what he wants, before he does. She is the true visionary ahead of everyone else after all, no?

Every visitor at the airstream so far got what they materially and emotionally wanted and needed from Cameron:

Bos got the algorithm and Cameron’s daughter-like empathy

Tom got signed divorce papers, a congratulations on becoming a father, and a sincere apology for how she wronged him

Haley, Gordon and Katie got to bond with each other

Donna got a signed release on paper for free and a sincere inquiry after her well being, a gesture that Cameron holds no ill feelings anymore and would welcome a friendship.

So, why not Joe? If true, then Joe is on his way to be a daddy around New Year. The irony is that he may be torturing himself in 4x06 and coming episodes over this for nothing, just like he tortured himself with fear over losing Cameron in 4x04 and 4x05, only to learn that she wanted Tom to leave her four years ago already, because she loved and loves Joe.

Cam may be in ecstasy over the modem sound connecting via the satellite, but in the background we can see Joe’s rocket he fired during Haley’s birthday (oooh, that does sound very cheesy in metaphorical doublespeak). Cam seems to have kept it as a relic somesorts. Oh, and it’s reflected in the window, implying that “Joe’s rocket” (yayayayaya) will have a reflective comeback moment in the story. Without the modem sound, that satisfied, secret smile of hers looks like a woman who just got her wanted pregnancy confirmed, except of course Cameron doesn’t yet actually know. Or maybe she does?

Last note: Joe’s rocket is like a flame (orange and yellow). Some observed (as did I) that Cam’s rocket was black and the sole one not flying. But black is Kali’s color, and for this miracle to work she has to “receive” rather than “fire”.

[sweetsunrayssr]

Was thoughtless AF. Bos is gonna have the last say on it though. Children has been brought up way too frequently. It's implied that Cameron has fertility issues over the 4x02 phone conversation. Cameron said Mother Nature made the decision & Tom mentions he's having a baby with the new woman with care for how it may possibly hurt her feelings. She needs a moment to then congratulate him. Cameron isn't the baby mothering type, true, but nobody would have thought she was the marrying type in S3 either. 4x05 makes clear that deep down she wanted to end things with Tom, but not be responsible for leaving him. Her relief about Mother Nature intervening with Tom is possibly something similar. Then to her surprise she learns Joe might want to have kids. If she believes she can't have any, isn't it a Cameloni thing for her to project an attitude of not wanting any? It saves her the pain of trying and fail Joe. Her remark about birthing 14 year olds comes after Tom's news confirming it wasn't Tom's "fault".

That said, I think there are hints that a conception already took place. Every visitor at her trailer got out of it what they wanted: Bos, Tom and Donna. And not just in a practical sense. She was emotionally benevolent and loving about it too. Now very clearly Joe visited Cam there for a romantic weekend of “playing airstream” and had a snug, cozy, loving time there. Then we get “cheesy eggs” and “rockets” and the “not having children theme”. In the phone conversation when Joe mimics the story of the boy holding the pigeon, Lee Pace holds the imaginary pigeon like a baby almost. In the story he’s telling the pigeon is dead, but life & death are a reverse parallel theme. One’s faith can be restored by holding new life as parent as much as the boy holding a beautiful dead pigeon. The airstream is surrounded with “space” references, making it a cosmic place, confirmed with Cam connecting to “space” via satellite. She is Kali in 2x09. Joe has nothing but Shiva on his mountain imagery throughout S3. Shiva-Kali/Parvati are a cosmic creation couple (who often argue). The email screen-cap puts the 4x05 and 4x06 events at the end of March. Add 9 months to it, and we’re talking about a Christmas baby, which is usually the time around which the finale ends. We don’t only have dancing beards across seasons, but every character except Cam have ended up in hospital so far, Donna and Joe both with a cast around their arm, Gordon with a cast around his leg, and Bos with a heart attack. She’s also the one who’s never been at a police station. Donna was pregnant in S2, but ended it, and Cam ending up pregnant and not ending it would be fitting in a final season with so many recalls. Anyway I think all three events will collide in the last 2 episodes: Cam at a police station (to help an investigation parallel to Gerard’s Game), Cam pregnant (surprise), Cam at a hospital (to birth a child). J

oe won’t learn the surprise news though imo until he chooses Cameron over competiveness or his own wants. Joe doesn’t get anything the easy way, ever. And we might all think Joe deserves personal happines, and think Cameron cruel, but he also caused her a lot of hurt in the past. Even if she loves him and forgave him, the hardest test between them is for her to learn to trust him to love her flaws and all - her difficulty of communicating (though she leaves him messages, which she didn’t 7 years ago), her airiness, her habit of retreating, her defensiveness, and the (faulty) belief he won’t have children with her. It seems to me she can’t trust his love without him first forgiving her every flaw, especially after Joe betrayed her in S1, never actually tried to build something permanent with her before, and Donna betrayed her in S3.

That time when Gordon couldn’t see either his daughter or Joe at all. (Halt and Catch Fire 4x06)

Joe:  You don’t understand. Haley needs this place. She’s not like other kids – she’s got different, umm … interests. [pause] She’s a little like me. 

[sweetsunrayssr]

Life issues without a cellphone

That is how much of S4 Halt and Catch Fire issues can be called no? And they dropped hints to this since 4x01. Bos introduced the GPS guys to Donna. She only saw it as a mildly amusing technology. The phone conversation between Joe and Cam keeping them bound to their rooms. Cam’s trailer misery. Joe not knowing she was coming home and having a bunch of people over he wants to introduce to her while she’s hiding her mud caked body beneath a coat and just needs a good hot bad. Gordon needing to send a messenger boy to reach Cameron. At least he recognizes what would solve the problem: build a telephone. Cam’s answer: I’m done with tech. Joe’s cam-cording. Cam’s satellite connection.

[sweetsunrayssr]

A Shrine - Gordon’s Garage

In Cameron’s Pilgrim I mentioned the Japanese shrine that Cameron talks about over the phone. Every twenty years the shrine is rebuilt with new material, looking the same as the original, but not actually being the original. Joe thinks it’s beautiful, while Cameron explains she believes people do it for how the process makes them feel, the doing of it. Following Cameron’s explanation of the Japanese shrine rebuilding, these shrines are physical manifestations and reminders of a process that the characters wish to repeat.

In this series, the process is not so much about building a computer, creating or playing a game, or achieving a business model. Those are all just a medium to these characters to connect with the people they want and need to connect with, even if they are not always aware of it. Ultimately inspiration comes down to the people you relate with and how curious you are about what is happening in the world.

Each pivotal character has a shrine, representing their connectivity to somebody who inspires and motivates them, and by the 4th season we can see a returning pattern of what they try to recreate and from the very beginning season 4 identifies to which location or “shrine” this is tied to. The bond they try to hold on to, reestablish or set-up with a particular person is automatically linked in their mind to a certain room or building in their memory.

Because a building or a place is durable and physical a “shrine” is easily mistaken as lasting and always perfect. In reality it is but a momentarily event when everything feels perfect and ideal. Other events and bonds are like the elements eroding at its perfection, and in the worst case scenario natural disasters or demolition teams with a wrecking ball. Each character is aware that their shrine is under possible threat at any given time, and tries to deal with this in their own particular way.  

This meta-analysis will limit itself to discussing Gordon’s Shrine.

THE GARAGE

We see the Japanese shrine in 4x05 in Pilgrim as Donna is transported to it with the avatar. Gordon’s lit up tent in the camping scene in 4x01 has the same warmth, and thus is a visual “shrine identifier” moment from Gordon’s POV. Gordon has a memory vision of Joe leafing the IBM BIOS binder in his garage morphed into the camping environment, right before we are treated to that beautiful image of Gordon’s warmly lit tent.

When in 4x05 Gordon asks Joe what he saw for the future in the garage back then, Joe  explains was how it would feel to work with him, “the doing of it”, and how that was more important to him than the actual end result. So, we could have no clearer comparison of what Gordon tries to recreate whenever he works together with Joe: that doing-of-it feeling with Joe in Gordon’s garage ten years ago, an idealized moment full of potential when their bond was just perfect.

SEASON 2: SURROGATES

Throughout the seasons we learn that the garage was always important to Gordon, even before he met Joe. He grew up in an autoshop, and he made his first computer project for Comdex 81 with Donna in his garage. So, the garage was always a shrine location to Gordon, but not until he reverse engineers the IBM chip for the BIOS with Joe does it become an ideal moment that he continues to seek, rebuild and re-enact in some way, and can only be perfect if Joe is his partner in it.

At the start of S2, after Cardiff is sold, Gordon intends to return to his garage, proclaiming it on TV even in an interview with the host no so incidentally called “Chip”. He intends to do it alone, but can’t help tell Joe in the elevator, who apathetically agrees that is what Gordon should do. Excited like a child, he orders several computers, sets them up, admiring the blank slate, but soon finds himself stuck. He can’t do it alone.

Since consciously Joe is still out of the question as a partner in that moment, Gordon reaches out to Donna and Mutiny instead, seeking a problem he can help solve for Mutiny (Tank Battle) and eventually writing Sonarys, which ends in disaster.

Simultaneously he reconciles with Joe on a personal level, enough for Joe to contact Gordon to help set up the Westgroup mainframe. Gordon sends Joe packing when this conversation occurs in Gordon’s living room, but he agrees to do it when meeting Joe in the garage parking lot.

Since it’s only a one-time deal, Gordon surrogates Joe with his Cardiff engineering team to build computers on demand. But again that fails, and on top of it he learns that Joe is moving to California with Sarah (again in the Westgroup garage). Gordon is so rattled that he can’t find his car anymore at a garage parking lot, gets lost, falls and is taken to the hospital. On the surface, Gordon’s breakdown seems amped by having business competition, but the whole breakdown occurs after he already discovered his rival is already total loss. And the doctor specifically stipulates to Donna that his breakdown in the garage parking lot was not related to his neurological disease, but purely psychological. Hence, Gordon’s arc in S2 emphasizes that Gordon’s well being and happiness relies on having a work & friendship relationship with Joe. He literally falls apart and is lost without Joe in his garage shrine.  

It is actually Joe’s visit to Gordon’s garage in the S2 finale to return the chip back to Gordon’s shrine that gives Gordon the fire to successfully transform himself from a hardware engineer in a world that is fast gearing to a virtual network world into a successful software coder: Gordon changes a few lines in the malignant Sonarys to turn it into an anti-virus cure. Except Gordon picked his family and Mutiny over working with Joe and learns that Joe built Macmillan Utility with Gordon’s program.

SEASON 3: ABSENT SHRINE

The entire shrine is destroyed, as there are no garage scenes for Gordon in S3. Throughout that season Gordon maintains that he does not want to work with Joe, not even if Joe offers him 70% of Macmillan Utility. He truly believes this and that is why we don’t see him in an actual garage.

When Joe gives Gordon credit and hands him a 20 million company, the two patch up their friendship and want to work together, but it proves impossible. There are various plot causes for it, but the visual absence of the garage-shrine is the tell. The browser project depends on Cameron and Joe isolates himself in the basement. Gordon may have built the network successfully by himself upstairs, but it is an empty success for Gordon with Joe in the basement. Callnect looks more like a Cardiff office floor than a garage, and Gordon was unfulfilled by that, as much as he was by the Giant-professional.

RE-ERECTED BY CAMERON

It is not until the opening scene of 4x04 that the garage shrine has been rebuilt for Gordon. Cameron uses it as a temporary autoshop when she brings her bike in and repairs it. In the same scene Haley inquires whether Scientology is a religion or a cult. A Comet is a returning object in space. And Joe and Gordon bond in the office agreeing with each other, absolutely content with what they have done. So, we have all the elements to identify a returned shrine moment: garage, a spiritual element, the name of a recurring event of the past, and Joe and Gordon being a bro-romance team all wrapped up in one scene.

Once the shrine is erected again, Gordon wants to preserve the shrine via maintaining control. Remember how he offered Joe 49% of Macmillan Utility in S3? Sure, giving Joe even 1% was a miracle, but that specific number shows how great a need Gordon has to control Joe. Another way he tries to have control over Joe is by wanting to keep the shrine exclusive for them alone. He does not want a third party influencing Joe, especially if they might pitch an idea to Joe that Gordon is not yet on board with, and then Gordon gets outvoted. Gordon has his gifts and talents, and a conservative reasonable voice to ground a development team is important, but he is also the person with the most limited view. He only truly innovates when being outvoted and all his excuses are thrown by the wayside.

An ever constant person he does not want around Joe is Cameron, but in S1 we also saw how obnoxious and insulting he was to Simon, and in S4 he’s just as wary of Haley being brought in initially. Sure, in S4, his need to keep Cameron out of the equation is not entirely selfish. He cares for Joe as a friend and he has witnessed him pine away in the basement for three years, for one reason only – Joe’s in love with her. And it is not even wrong that Gordon tries to look out for himself as well, when a miserable Joe usually means that Gordon is left out in the cold to muck around by himself.

What Gordon fails to account for is that he put the fuse in the dynamite in S1 when he made the unilateral decision to take out Cam’s OS. Nor does he recognize and is not fully aware how Cameron has been instrumental in re-erecting his garage shrine:Cameron advised Joe to give Gordon credit

Joe wouldn’t have been meticulously keeping all those post-its with urls if he had not been waiting for Cam.

Cam’s remark on how Joe would soon run out of post-its gave Joe the idea to index the web. Despite initially chastising Cam about this and remarking on it negatively to Donna over dinner, he’s now running a new company that he actually has nothing but fun in.

Cam helps Gordon see that Haley just want to spend time working with her father

Cam puts the dash on the T by bringing in her bike and actually making Comet a garage setting.

Joe’s complacent, cooperative and happy in a way he has never been before

When in 4x01 he tells Cameron it probably is for the best for Joe that their meeting at Gordon’s birthday party didn’t go so well, that’s ok. He’s just looking out for Joe. When later he tells her she was cruel to give Joe fire for the mountaintop unwittingly, Gordon may tell himself he’s just looking out for Joe, but that would be a lie. He’s upset with her, because she inspired Joe to a new idea and Gordon sees the signs that threaten the status quo. He is at least as out of line as Joe is in 4x05 about Katie to both Cam and Joe when he discovers their romance has been rekindled. Since Gordon cannot control who Joe chooses as a romantic partner (hell, Joe is 5 years his senior), his next step is to use passive aggressiveness against Cam’s presence at Comet, while Joe lights up like a Christmas tree with Cam in his lap checking out Rover’s HTML.

Initially, Cameron is not eager to get on board of the team and makes the adult and respectful decision to stay out of the business side. But the start of 4x04 was the moment where Cameron’s professional interest is piqued and she is right in her prediction that Comet will run into trouble once the web expands further (Rover would not be the sole company looking to solve “search”). If Gordon had not acted like a jerk to her in that scene, she probably would have ended up helping them. Instead, she bows out and respects Gordon’s wishes of business exclusivity. She has no hunger to develop a new computer game and physically stays away from Comet ever since, eventually leading to the circumstances at the start of 4x05. Joe and Cam have their actual first fight over Cam’s refusal to help them out for even two days. Even if Joe has no full scope on all of Cam’s reasons yet, he does instinctively identify Gordon as part of the issue. Worse, his best friend is not just keeping Cam away from Comet, but Gordon is having fun with his own lover at work. Joe lashes out to Gordon about Katie, because he’s envious.

MUTATED SHRINE

The volatile argument between Gordon and Joe reveals that Comet was turned into a playground by Joe’s initiative. Joe bought and wanted the air hockey. Joe’s probably also the person behind the pool table, the foosball, and the surfing competition. So, Joe turned the autoshop setting into S2 Mutiny. Just as we hardly need any outspoken explanation why Joe refused to leave the basement, screwing around with post-its (instead of Cam) for three years, we hardly need Joe to vocalize his subconscious motivation to make Comet’s work environment into a playground: he wants and needs Cameron there. 

Gordon’s objections to Cam being part of the professional equation and Cam respecting it and stay away from the place, leads to Joe mutating it into something else, as well as Cam using Bos’s plea for help to prove to herself she can write a brilliant algorithm, putting Rover one over Comet in the “competition” (which is actually a false competition: a guide of great websites is fun, but ultimately not the answer that a search engine is), and puts his relationship with both Joe and Haley in jeopardy.

SOLUTION?

Unless Gordon allows Joe the freedom to seek inspiration with a muse, his shrine is doomed for destruction once again. One of the possible solutions to allow Joe into bringing other partners into the shrine and still preserve a balance of opinions is for Gordon to bring in someone as well. In S1, Gordon brought in Donna for Comdex 83, and the Giant with Cam’s OS would have been a success if Donna and Gordon hadn’t been so careless with inside information that led to the Slingshot. In S4, Gordon’s bonding with Katie likely aims to do the same thing. Unfortunately it may already be too late. The seeds have been sown already.

Note: I will post other shrines for other characters as well, and point out how they may be self-sabotaging as well. So this meta-analysis does not have the intent to put it all on Gordon.