'Halt and Catch Fire' season 3 spoilers, plot recap: On Joe, Cameron, and life in the '80s
Two of the most telling scenes in the recent episode of "Halt and Catch Fire" would barely last a minute even when fused together but it managed to capture both the "when" and the "what" of the show's latest installment.
Set in the 1980s, this period drama may have fictionalized some of the events leading up to the technological boom that characterized that particular decade but it stays true to what makes the era distinctly separate from the present day. From the outfits to the cuisine and the casual games that people play, every "Halt and Catch Fire" episode has never been devoid of references to the '80s.
Vulture lauded the show's depiction of the AIDS crisis in California that happened in 1986, the same year that the current season of "Halt and Catch Fire" is set in.
Earlier in the episode titled "Yerba Buena," Joe MacMillan (Lee Pace) told his loyal engineer Ryan Ray (Manish Dayal) that he was not sure if he's still got "another next" in him while hanging out at his balcony. This stunned Ryan, who had just been telling him that what made the city so great was that it gave everyone who screwed up another chance to get back on their feet and try again.
Joe's sudden descent to moodiness was made clear near the end of the episode when he picked up a call from a clinic about the results of his HIV antibody test. It was not made known whether the results were positive or not.
According to Fortune, the smile that eventually lit Joe's face after the call could be interpreted in two ways: the test could be negative or Joe could've accepted an HIV-positive test as an inevitable part of life. His mood did pick up after this and he managed to trip up on his next big venture.
The mid-80s also saw the practice of putting missing children's faces on milk cartons along with the label, "Have you seen me?" When Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis) failed to return to Mutiny after his trip to Texas on the 4th of July weekend, one of her employees displayed a milk carton with her picture on it, albeit as a joke.
In some ways, Cameron's story arc this week was about the missing pieces of herself. She went home fully intending to stop her stepfather from selling her father's stuff, only to chicken out and walk away at the last second. She may have also lost the bond she had with John "Boz" Bosworth (Toby Huss) after she snapped at the old man for acting as though he was her father.
And when she found out about Donna Clark's (Kerry Bishé) betrayal regarding the firing of SwapMeet's Doug and Craig, she may have also lost one of the very few people she thought she could trust.
By the end of the episode, Cameron was reduced to a scared little girl curled up in the safe confines of her top bunk bed. She took out a ring, which was presumably an engagement ring she got from old flame, Tom Rendon (Mark O'Brien), put it on and smiled before drifting off to sleep.
"Halt and Catch Fire" airs every Tuesday at 10 p.m. EDT on AMC. Below is the official sneak peak for episode 6 titled, "And She Was."