When Cameron shows up out of the blue (man group) at Gordon’s birthday party (a party Donna didn’t even try to attend) she blows a hole in the feigned stability he has been living out over the last three years.

Joe tries to do what he has always done, relate intimately to Cameron through the technology they co-produce (since neither has ever been able to handle the full weight of uncoded intimacy between them).

At a particularly poignant moment, Cameron finally spells out the problem, saying:

“Do you want to talk about what we are really talking about?”

If that statement had been uttered three years ago, it would have had none of the impacts it does here. When I heard her say that it was crushing, heartbreaking. How many times have we all seen two people who, no matter how much they actually love each other, just have lost the ability to really honestly talk to each other?

In the case of Cameron and Joe, both of them deep down know that they love each other but neither of them has ever been able to fully get out from behind the protective wall of bullshit that keeps them both emotionally safe but totally miserable.

Cameron was willing to go to Japan and marry a person she didn’t even love just to avoid the vulnerability of being with someone who puts her at real and constant emotional risk. The mythos makes love seem easy, but this is what love so often really is. Powerful, meaningful, painful, and unfulfilled.

Seeing Cameron wakes the old Joe up, but Gordon thinks that Cameron puts Joe at real risk (exactly the point) and seems to suggest that he fold up the tent and put away Don Quixote’s jousting lance to join him in the ‘real world’ of ISP building.

Earlier, on a camping trip, Gordon accuses Joe of always needing to be right again (as if nothing is ever enough).

But Gordon is fundamentally misreading this new Joe.

What motivates Joe now isn’t the desire to be right, it is being obsessed by the three things that he has gotten terribly wrong.

1. His relationship with his Father

Joe tells a beautiful story to Cameron (during a phone call that seems to proceed non-stop for at least two full days) that starts with the death of his father and ends with his desire to become a father. He talks about how his father always seemed too big for him to ever measure up to (and that he never wanted to be a Father because he didn’t want to intimidate his own children in this same way). At the end of the story, he suggests that he has finally reached the conclusion that nobody ever has to be that big.

The Joe who was once like Donna (only even more ambitious) is gone, all the is left is humility and sadness and I totally understand where he is coming from. My own Father and I fought constantly until I finally chose not to talk to him for what seemed like a very long time. Thank God I finally grew up and realized, whatever his (or my) flaws, he was the only Father I was going to have before it was too late (luckily, my Father is still alive).

Joe never got to reconcile or accept the one father he had before it was too late and it is literally haunting him.

2. His relationship with Cameron

It seems so clear that while he has never been able to bring himself to say the words that he needs to say (I love you Cameron) he is so deeply and totally in love with her and always has been.

When he was younger, way back in the Dallas days, like Cameron would later, he ran from Cameron to virtually any other woman who couldn’t threaten him to the core like Cameron could.

Again, I really feel his struggle here, knowing that you love someone but allowing yourself to be open to what feels like it may totally destroy you is so hard. Anyone who experienced traumatic childhood events knows exactly what I am talking about, intimacy means trust and trust often means that we have to open ourselves up to radical vulnerability.

The walls we build to protect us from vulnerabilities have to be strong or we would never feel secure inside them. Joe’s walls are a mile thick but you can almost hear him screaming Cameron’s name from deep inside them in every scene.

There is no way, absent years of watching two great actors build such a complicated relationship that little moments like these could matter so much, but for anyone who has watched the entire series, but when you hear “it’s too late” at the end of their discussion it was crushing for me.

3. His Relationship With Ryan Ray

Ryan Ray’s suicide is the unspoken truth which has changed Joe from swaggering (but insecure) futurist genius to introverted basement dweller.

He is starting to understand how important really caring about people is because he lost his father and he lost Ryan without really ever expressing his love for them.

He is living in the basement connecting with a ghost of Cameron and actually investing in his relationship with Gordon because Cameron and Gordon are all he has left and he has finally learned that caring and connecting matters.

He doesn’t really know how and it often happens in awkward bursts (showing up at Gordon’s birthday party) but he is present and vulnerable for the first time in his adult life. He is finally emotionally open and it is wearing on him because he is still terrified of the consequences.

What if all he has of Cameron at the end of the day is memories of her and a wall full of post-it notes?

What if Gordon has a health crisis and leaves him all alone?

What if they both end up rejecting him?

What if it really is too late?

He is opening himself up and trying to fight off the ghosts of his worst fears.

This is Joe at his most beautiful.

Cameron - Little Miss Flawless 1970