Halt and Catch Fire S2E4 - "Play with Friends" Recap

Mutiny must rebuild from the group up. This means that the employees who choose to stay will have to forgo their paycheques in exchange for shares of the company instead. One worker, Yo-Yo-, leaves because he thinks the company won't go anywhere and he has student loans to pay off. Boz proposes they send someone out to be a door-to-door salesman to recover their most lucrative users. Naturally, he volunteers himself. At the first house, he's able to convince the boy's "Luddite" mother that online-gaming is a good way for him to socialise and she decides to allow the boy to renew his subscription.

Cameron wants to cut the Community rooms, deeming them a risk to their network, but Donna doesn't want to because this is her idea and because it's been growing ever since she implemented it.

Joe gets a big idea about converting the servers at the oil company to be used by other users and he goes behind Sarah's father's back to do it. He recruits Gordon to help him by converting the mainframes for outside users to dial in. Gordon doesn't want to help at first but when he hears about Donna's Community programs getting cut, he decides to go ahead and help Joe in exchange for mainframe support for Mutiny. But he doesn't let Donna know about this. While Joe must agree to keep quiet about this, Gordon will have to do the same about this conversion at the oil company.

Cameron runs into Tom at the grocery store, where he has been picking up extra shifts. She is later implored by Donna to try out the Community before deciding to cut it, also challenging her to ponder whether she's just trying to cut it because it didn't come from her. Cameron tries it out and uses it to talk to Tom. But in their chat, she sends the following message about Donna, "Gordon = The guy who hung two kids on her and now she's trappeD!" The final "D!" typo is also a command that causes the message to be sent to everyone at Mutiny, much to Cameron's horror. This further humiliates Donna at work, as everyone stares at her awkwardly as she reads the message. Donna later tells her to never talk about her children again and to come to her directly if she has an issue to address.

During a round of Nerf gun battles, Cameron and Tom end up in a closet together and decide to come up with the next big idea for Mutiny: the first online multiplayer shooting game. Some time later, they share a kiss.

Gordon passes out in the server room while doing some work and when Joe asks him what happened, he downplays it but is shown to later be pondering going to a doctor to rule out anything serious. During this, he's talking to Donna who is still in the bathroom. He shares the news about he's leveraged a deal with his latest job (with Joe) to help get her more server space. She tells him it's amazing news, all while keeping secret the fact that she's just taken a pregnancy test that has come back positive.

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

