![]() Over and over again, the show has played with images of boxes and doors, with people framed inside doorways and crossing over thresholds and staring at the electronic boxes they use as portals and time machines and ways to connect. Cam’s box of stuff followed her back from Japan, only to be run over by a truck. We saw Joe and Cameron, boxed into their separate spaces, trying to figure out how to bridge the gap. ![]() In the first few episodes of season four, Halt and Catch Fire played with images and ideas related to boxes. Joe walks around looking like he’s being buried alive. Donna has the brittle, edgy energy of someone who knows she can’t let herself stop moving. Everyone shuffles around the house unsure of how to even start. It starts right afterward, with the necessity of processing the sheer physical mass of his life: his clothes, his dishes, his furniture, his weird priest statues. It doesn’t begin with the funeral, which often feels like the closure point in many TV stories about death. Most of the episode is about the process of loss it’s an episode about the horrible, unavoidably practical things that happen after someone dies suddenly. He’s too complicated and flawed to be easily summarized as any one thing, and “Goodwill” starts by reminding us of that. The first big piece of storytelling we get after his death shows us Gordon slamming the door on his wife and baby daughter and driving away into the night without a word. Most of that comes out of the 1994 story, but the foundation comes from Halt and Catch Fire’s refusal to retroactively turn Gordon into a perfect, faultless being, or to encapsulate him in some comforting anecdote. It’s elegiac and gutting and stonily unflinching about the hollow feeling of recent loss. “Goodwill” is a gorgeous episode of television. Then, about 18 years later, Gordon is gone forever and Donna is left with the girls once more, trying to hold everything together. He’s gone and Donna is left behind trying to soothe their crying baby. Joanie wakes up crying, and Gordon leaves in a furious fit. Gordon is filled with the idea of “building a machine” all Donna can see is the depths of babydom and how lonely she feels. Gordon wants to stay Donna thinks they should maybe move back to Texas. Joanie is just a baby, Haley hasn’t been born yet, and in the emotionally vulnerable moments after a visit from Donna’s parents, they get into an argument about who they want to be, about responsibility and practicality and vision and choices. It opens with Donna and Gordon in their apartment in California. “Goodwill” mostly takes place in the immediate aftermath of Gordon’s death, but the episode is framed by visits to the past. Photo: Tina Rowden/AMC Film Holdings LLC.
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