‘Halt and Catch Fire’ season 3, episode 8 reaction: Looking further at Ryan Ray’s act

While we had a beautiful, haunting vista at the end of Tuesday night’s new “Halt and Catch Fire” episode, coupled with a powerful message / suicide note sent out to the masses, you can easily argue that the most powerful moment in the actual act of Ryan Ray taking his own life took place off-camera. It is for that reason that, even after the episode aired, we did not want to believe it had happened.

Yet, all signs point towards the fact that Ray did in fact jump, and this is something that Manish Dayal (who played the character) confirmed further to Entertainment Weekly. Upon reflection, our interpretation of the act stems from his desire to be perpetually at the center. This is a forward-thinking man who wanted nothing more than progress, to impact the masses, and do so in a way that was just. In some space he may have thought of himself as a tech revolutionary. After he made the move against MacMillan Utility’s board, the FBI started to breathe down his neck and he refused to allow Joe to take the fall for his actions.

Ryan could not live without being at the forefront of advancement. Therefore, Ryan could not live in stasis. He jumped.

Here is what Dayal had to say about his own story towards the end of his arc, per the aforementioned website:

“I knew that Ryan was a very internal, withdrawn, but also very brilliant young man. When I first joined the show, I knew that he had these wide ideas, these ways of revolutionizing Mutiny and taking it to the next level, and I could tell from the dialogue that he was a young man of passion. So at the end of the season, I got a call from [creators Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers] telling me how he was going to leave the show, and at first I thought, ‘There’s got to be another option for this guy.’ Why doesn’t he just go to jail? Or why doesn’t he take Joe’s advice and run away? But those are not things that somebody like Ryan would even consider. It’s hard for him to think like everybody else, to think rationally when he’s in this grave danger, when the cops are after him, when his lifeblood is being taken from him.”

How Joe moves forward from this will be a defining part of the upcoming two-hour finale. You must remember that he, like Ryan, is a man on his own wavelength, and will make his moves based on calculations for ambition. He does not always think in terms of human consequence.