I’ll be
upfront: I didn’t like Joe at first,
despite wanting to. I’m a fan of Lee
Pace, and since his involvement was what led me to the show in the first place,
I naturally wanted to like his character.
But Joe didn’t grab me at first.
He struck me as a bargain-bin imitation of the sort of
ruthlessly-ambitious antihero type that’s been done much more successfully with
characters like Don Draper. All of which,
I know, is a weird way to start a Favorite Characters post, but it’s true. At the start, Joe didn’t do anything for me
at all. It wasn’t until much later that
I started to get more than glimpses of potential in his character (some
Joe-related spoilers.)
We’re
introduced to Joe, from the beginning, as a shark. He obviously envisions himself as a visionary
of the tech industry, looking to leave his mark in a big way but not having
many (any?) scruples about how he accomplishes that. When he first shows up in Texas and talks his
way into Cardiff Electric, he’s already burned his bridges at IBM and absconded
with one of their computers, aiming to crack it open, determine precisely how
it’s made, and develop a perfect clone for a rival company. His big ideas, however, are marred by the
fact that he actually knows very little about making computers and needs to
find engineers and coders in order to make his vision happen.
A huge
ego, heaps of deceptive charm, a ton of ambition, wildly flexible morals, a
talent for manipulation, and a pesky lack of actual knowhow – all facets of a
reasonable cocktail for a compelling character who falls somewhere between
antihero and villain, and these traits have been used to good effect on other
shows/other characters. But here, it
doesn’t quite work, not at first. As a
character, Joe scrapes by on Lee Pace’s charisma, not bringing enough to the
table to be truly engaging in his own right.
His vision is too scattered, constantly changing the specs for the
Giant, wanting the impact he’s going to make more so than the thing he’s making
to get him there. His backstory is too
mysterious with too little payoff, dabbling in a poor-little-rich-boy angle but
not doing much interesting with it. His
machinations are too often pointless, scheming and manipulating almost for the
sake of it rather than to further a specific goal.
Again,
this kind of character can work very well (and be very popular,) but it never
fully works with Joe. It’s not until the
show starts moving him away from that archetype that I start to enjoy him. It’s in the moments building tooward that
transition that I start seeing his potential as a character. The times when he pushes too hard or his
scheming backfires and blows up in his face, when he’s played by a shrewder
player than him, when he has to deal with the consequences of betraying his
colleagues. These are the things that
begin to change him, being humbled or left out in the cold, and overall, I
think the show does a pretty decent job of fostering that change in a way that
feels believable. After the first
season, the show spends a lot of time
with Joe in his own plots separated from the other main characters, and by the
time he works his way back to them, he’s had a number of very rude awakenings
and is no longer the same guy.
And the
new Joe is someone I like a lot better.
I mean, Joe will be Joe – still chasing the idea that’s beyond the cutting edge (even if he
doesn’t know what that is,) still able to turn on the “close the deal” charm
with the best of them, still anxious to make his mark – but he’s also a lot
more collaborative and more likely to consider others in his decisions. He’s been through the ringer, largely as a
result of his own actions, and he’s come out on the other side ready to do it
right this time, or at least less wrong.
On a
final note, I like that Joe is bisexual
and that, while his most enduring relationship on the show is with Cameron, the
show doesn’t treat his attraction to men differently than his attraction to women. Even if we don’t see much of it, we do know
that he’s had relationships with men that he’s deeply cared about, and his
queerness isn’t portrayed as being in any way “tied” to his more villainous
tendencies in season 1. In fact, in the
first season, one of his most sympathetic moments comes when he reconnects with
Simon and the two hash out what happened between them, an early glimpse of the
heart we see more clearly later in the show.
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