Halt and Catch Fire S2E2 - "Run Time" Recap

Joe meets the father of his fiancé Sara, Jacob Wheeler, who is insistent that Joe take a job offer from him so he'll be able to support Sara once the two are married. Sarah doesn't quite approve of him doing this but Joe thinks that this could be an opportunity for him to get to work in sales. In actuality, this new job consists of him doing data-entry in the basement.

Gordon goes in for a check-up because of his nose-bleeds. Of course the best thing for him to do is to cool it with the cocaine. He tells the doctor that he only used it briefly but the doctor is still insistent that Gordon not use it any further. But when Gordon returns home, he heads to the garage to begin working on a computer and snorts some cocaine in the process.

Cameron has brought Boz in to be the new boss of Mutiny, since she and Donna don't want to do it themselves, but Donna is angry that Cameron didn't talk with her about it. It also doesn't look great to have a former convict running their company. The two have to head to a meeting with a venture capitalist that may be interested in funding Mutiny. Beforehand, they're stressed about their drastic difference in outfits. While Donna has dressed up in a fancy dress suit, Cameron's all grunged up with holes in her jeans. But the meeting devolves when the misogynistic Mr. Bondham asks about their "biological imperatives" to have children, which could be a disruption to business. So needless to say, the meeting doesn't quite go the way they had hoped.

Gordon turns up to Mutiny, insistent that he has a fix for a glitch in the Tank Battle game. Of course this is done as a result of a cocaine-binge. But he has to leave Mutiny once he gets a call from the school that his kids were apparently almost-kidnapped but it was actually Stan, whom Gordon had asked to pick the kids up from school.

Donna and Cameron return to Mutiny and find that a hacker named Tom Rendon has hacked their system and upgraded the gym, after which he proceeded to give the game away for free. They hunt down Tom's address and confront him at his home. He just wanted to get their attention and hoped to get a job offer. Cameron is still angry from the disastrous business meeting and threatens to sue Tom but once she sees that he has potential, she begins to reconsider.

Lev, one of the workers at Mutiny, opens one of Boz's letters to Cameron and gets caught by Boz while reading it aloud to the rest of the group who had already decided it was too personal to keep listening in on. Things aren't working out so well for Boz at Mutiny, as he just isn't meshing well with the rest of the group. Cameron catches them and send them all out, even yelling at Lev for his rudeness. Cameron and Boz had written to each other while he was in prison, something Cameron used to do with her father while he was in Vietnam, where he died. We also learn that Cameron's real name is Catherine, something no one but Boz (that we know of) knows. She began using the name Cameron after he father died, as it was his name.

After Tom hacks the games once again, this time allowing multiple users to play the game on a single phone line, Cameron pays him a visit and decides to offer him a job, but without asking Donna. Donna is not happy once again, as she had been spending the whole afternoon researching legal strategies and warns Cameron that she won't be sticking around if Cameron keeps making decisions without talking to her first.

Joe's job isn't going quite as well as he wanted. He even has to help clean the bathroom and has to ask permission to use the microfiche. Sara tells Joe that her father is punishing Joe because of her ex-husband scamming money out of him because Sara had let her guard down. Joe decides that his future father-in-law is putting him to the test and Joe is more than up to the challenge. We start to hear some of that devilish charisma creep back into Joe's voice and we couldn't be more thrilled! Even though Sara wants to call her father and tell him to stop, Joe sways her not to.

When Donna comes home from work, Gordon tries to claim that he has a home-cooked meal he worked hard on but Donna knows it's takeout, as she saw the containers in the garbage. When Gordon learns about the gamers who had figured out a way to play the game for free, Gordon gets struck with inspiration and heads to the garage to begin doing some tinkering of his own.

Halt and Catch Fire airs on Sundays on AMC at 10PM.