History TearJerker / HaltAndCatchFire

** Joe and Haley launch a caper to recover one of Gordon's sweaters from goodwill after Joe accidentally donated it, as Haley had hoped to keep it. They are unsuccessful, but Haley makes her peace with the loss of the sweater. Joe, on the other hand, spends the rest of the episode deeply depressed.

** Gordon and Joe's plans to rush out a browser were hindered by Cameron's return to Japan, and Gordon instead developed an Internet Service Provider while Joe kept waiting for Cameron's prototype browser to arrive. The ISP was actually successful, but then America Online came along. By the end of the season premiere, Gordon watches as his company collapses.

** In the wake of Gordon's death, Joe ejected Haley from Comet and completely redesigned the site in accordance with the vision that he and Gordon came up with in "Who Needs a Guy". Haley is understandably pissed about this and decided that she wants nothing more to do with Joe, forcing him to reach out to Cameron to help with redesigning the site. Secondary to this, Haley finally works up the nerve to ask her crush out, and is rejected.

* Lev gets beaten up by a group of people who pretended to be the guy he was interested in.

* In "And She Was", Donna and Cameron have a heart-to-heart on the grass, wherein Donna admits that she lied to Cameron and manipulated her, and apologizes for it, and Cameron forgives her. It could have been a CrowningMomentOfHeartwarming... except then it's revealed that this is all a drug-induced hallucination. And then she returns home and discovers that Cameron is so hurt by her actions that she's moved out of their house while Donna was away.

* After Donna, Gordon, Joe and Cameron get to COMDEX, [[spoiler:they manage to rouse interest in the Giant, only to have the rug completely pulled out from under them with Whitmarsh, Donna's former TI supervisor, announcing the "Slingshot", a clone of the Giant which will be cheaper and easier to sell. As a result, Gordon and Donna have a complete blowout in the hotel room, and he has to strip out the extras that made the Giant unique. Cameron nearly has a HeroicBSOD over the fact that the Giant is now simply another MS-DOS clone that can be $100 cheaper than the Slingshot. Joe is forced to agree with Gordon in the interest of salvaging ''something''.]]
* [[spoiler:Gordon and Donna get car-jacked, and then Joe decides to burn the first shipment of Giant computers.]]

* Gordon desperately tries to seek a human connection [[spoiler:after finding out that he has brain damage]]. When Gordon takes his daughters to their maternal grandparents' house, Gordon tries to seek a connection with his mother-in-law Susan [[spoiler:only to find that she wanted him to pay her and Gary back for the failed Symphonic project]].
* Gordon and his brother Henry have a falling out [[spoiler:over the former having an affair with the latter's ex-girlfriend]]. The incident scars Joanie and Haley [[spoiler:so much that the former wants to keep quiet about it so her parents don't fight]].
* When Joe comes to Mutiny to discuss Westgroup's new network rental terms, Donna [[spoiler:has an emotional meltdown.]] The situation gets worse [[spoiler:when Joe pulls the plug on Mutiny]].
* Lev [[spoiler:gets beaten up by a group of people who pretended to be the guy he was interested in.]]

* Gordon's [[spoiler:deteriorating mental condition leads him to see conspiracies that aren't there and believe that Donna is turning against him.]]
* Gordon loses track of his car in a parking garage [[spoiler:and ends up injuring his ankle in a little-used stairwell. Since cell phones were a luxury item in the mid 1980's, Gordon has to struggle up the stairs to get someone's attention. After being loaded on a gurney, Gordon has an emotional breakdown when he finally finds his car as the paramedics take him to the hospital.]]
* Donna [[spoiler:finds out about Gordon's affair, and it nearly precipitates a divorce. His daughter Joanie does not take the outing of that secret well either.]]
* Joe getting to the lawyer's office [[spoiler:to find Sara has already signed the divorce papers.]]

** Cameron tries to go home to claim her father's old motorcycle, but suffers so much anxiety at the prospect of seeing her mother and stepfather again that the bike gets sold, she and Bos have a fight, and she ends up disappearing for a week and nearly blowing things up with Donna. And then, during her efforts to make amends for her disappearance, she finds out that [[spoiler:Donna lied to her about Diane vetoing her attempts to fire the [=SwapMeet=] guys]]. By the end of the episode, she's huddled up in a fetal position.

** Ryan, who's been missing for a while, finally turns up at Joe's place. At first, it seems like they're going to have a heartwarming reunion, until Joe explains that Ryan's only two options after violating the CFAA are to either disappear or admit to his crimes and face a year in jail... after which he will be banned from working in the computer industry for five years, and forbidden from working with Joe ever again. He tells Ryan to sleep on it. [[spoiler:Ryan instead publishes a manifesto confessing to his crimes and then jumps off of Joe's balcony, killing himself.]]

** Cameron and Donna seem to be on the verge of reconciling, when [[spoiler:Donna incautiously suggests dumping Joe if Cameron doesn't want to work with him.]] An argument breaks out between them as Cameron points out Donna failed her SecretTestOfCharacter, and Donna leaves to cry in her car.

* In "Who Needs a Guy", a broken air-conditioner at the Comet offices spurs Gordon into one of his finest days in recent memory. Stimulated by the challenge of trying to repair the damn thing, he makes peace with Haley and convinces her to come back to work, comes up with a plan for revitalizing Comet in the face of Rover's powerful new algorithm, and ACTUALLY FIXES THE AC. Feeling on top of the world, he resolves to celebrate by going home for a night in with Katie... and then he starts suffering another one of his episodes, this time in the form of a vivid hallucination, imagining as he walks through his house that he's going back in time, first to when he and Donna were still married, then back to when they and Joanie and Haley were all still living in Texas, and then back to when Haley was a baby. [[spoiler:And then he dies.]]

** In the wake of [[spoiler:Gordon's death]], Joe ejected Haley from Comet and completely redesigned the site in accordance with the vision that he and Gordon came up with in "Who Needs a Guy". Haley is understandably pissed about this and decided that she wants nothing more to do with Joe, forcing him to reach out to Cameron to help with redesigning the site. Secondary to this, Haley finally works up the nerve to ask her crush out, and is rejected.

* In "Miscellaneous'', Cameron is tired of Atari refusing to release her game and decides to have a copy leaked to ''Electronic Gaming Monthly,'' figuring they'll be able to help pressure the company into releasing it. To her shock, the review cites the game as a complete mess and Cameron cries to Joe on how the project she devoted so much time to has become a disaster.
* In "Tanya and Nancy", Bos becomes desperate to save the Rover project and manipulates Cameron into writing a crucial algorithm for him. The fallout is ''bad''; while it helps Rover get funding, Cameron resents being that Bos used her, Donna is ''livid'' when she finds out that Bos gave Cameron information about Rover, and Joe is pissed that Comet now has to face off against a well-funded competitor.