'Halt and Catch Fire' season 3 episode 4 spoilers, plot news: Bos, Gordon, and Joe learn the 'Rules of Honorable Play'

"Halt and Catch Fire" season 3 is almost at its halfway mark, and each character's inner motivations and personal story arcs are starting to take shape.

"Rules of Honorable Play" couldn't have been a better title for an episode that exposed John "Bos" Bosworth's (Toby Huss) true state of mind, Gordon Clark's (Scoot McNairy) uncanny knack for patching up an escalating office disunity, and Joe MacMillan's (Lee Pace) surprising capacity to throw a potential investor out the door in defense of his gay son.

Bos, the former senior vice president of the now defunct Cardiff Electric, may not be settling quite well into his new role as mentor and "paternal figure" at Mutiny after all, according to an observation made by Vulture. A simple, seemingly harmless exchange between him and Joe may have revealed that the old man could be masking a subtle discontent for his current position.

Although he was still brimming with the usual humorous punch lines, he has remarkably lost his passion for champagnes, tobaccos and parties, and perhaps, even for his own trademark jokes. But he's keeping up with the façade in order to stay afloat in his new Silicon Valley home.

On the other hand, AV Club praised Gordon's "fitful ingenuity," despite his worsening health condition, when he stepped up and led Mutiny's warring coders to a rousing game of laser tag in the hopes of building one solid team out of the original Mutiny crew and the techies from the newly acquired company, SwapMeet. It solved the problem only for that moment, but Gordon later relished this small victory over a few beers with Bos.

Meanwhile, Joe's business-mindedness took the backseat when a powerful MacMillan Utility investor came to his office and made homophobic slurs directed at his son. The company suffered a 37 percent loss because of this, and the fact that the bigoted investor happened to be their government contact did not help their case at all. But Joe went back up the saddle and devised a plan to recover the loss with help from his new talented coder Ryan Ray (Manish Dayal).

According to a synopsis posted on TV Guide, "Halt and Catch Fire" season 3 episode 4, titled "Yerba Buena," will see Donna and Gordon indulging on a staycation, while Bos accompanies Cameron back to Texas to resolve a personal issue that concerns her father's memory. Joe and Ryan will also be exposing a revelation.

"Halt and Catch Fire" airs every Tuesday at 10 p.m. EDT on AMC.