California

California is both a destination of escape and a place of family return: Tanner goes there after abruptly leaving Fletcher’s home, and Travis becomes his host and potential mentor, while years later Edison travels there for Travis’s memorial. The state connects the younger generation’s television ambitions to the family’s history in the industry, then reappears as the setting for a reunion marked by Edison’s declining health.

Tanner’s Departure and Arrival

Fletcher tells Pandora that Tanner left without warning while Fletcher was working in the basement. Tanner took his computer and favorite T-shirts but left his cell phone behind, making himself difficult to contact or track. Fletcher suspects California because Tanner has become fascinated by the Appaloosa family legacy; he had even begun calling himself Tanner Appaloosa, reasoning that Feuerbach was not commercial. Fletcher believes Tanner has spent his modest savings and taken money from his wallet.

Tanner does reach Travis in California. Travis is flattered by the arrival of a young man who knows Appaloosa family lore and has kept Tanner’s whereabouts secret for a week. Tanner lives with his grandfather, but the arrangement is not simply an apprenticeship: he expects a family discount, contributes little to household chores, and has no other free place to stay. Travis complains that the immediate beneficiaries of Tanner’s arrival are Taco Bell and In-N-Out Burger, while he tries to raise money by auctioning television memorabilia.

A Television Apprenticeship

Pandora intervenes by sending Fletcher money and asking to speak with Tanner. She urges him to treat his interest in television as serious work rather than an excuse to sleep late or roam the streets hoping to glimpse Tom Hanks. Travis, she points out, knows the industry from the inside and can teach him; Tanner should learn its routines and meet his grandfather’s contacts.

Pandora proposes concrete work for the memoir Travis has long wanted to write: sorting his files, assembling fan mail, organizing scripts, improving his website, and potentially interviewing producers and actors about their memories of Joint Custody. She frames the work as an unpaid internship, with experience as its compensation. Tanner responds uncertainly, claiming this was his intention, but immediately asks what will happen about his father. California thus offers him both a foothold in television and a temporary refuge from the unresolved obligations he left behind.

Return to California

Two years after Edison’s extended visit to New Holland, Pandora next sees him in Los Angeles for Travis’s memorial. By then flying has become logistically difficult for Edison, so she buys him a business-class ticket, hoping the more comfortable journey and attentive service will help. Fletcher, Cody, and Pandora fly ahead and meet him at the airport in a spacious limousine. They take care to accommodate his slow gait and to make clear that he is not a burden.

Edison’s health makes the reunion painful: he has grown larger, suffers from emphysema, pulls an oxygen tank behind him, and removes the nasal tubing only to smoke. The family’s careful hospitality contrasts with the physical difficulty of his travel. California, which Tanner had approached as a place to begin a life in television, is now where Edison arrives under the strain of serious illness to mourn his father.

Family and Narrative Significance

At dinner in Los Angeles, Pandora and Edison meet Solstice. Her grief leads Pandora to recognize how little family Solstice had experienced: their mother died when Solstice was three, and her siblings had kept their distance while bonding with one another. Solstice refuses to criticize Travis, and without their father as a shared subject of complaint, Pandora and Edison find they have surprisingly little to discuss. The memorial therefore brings the siblings together while exposing the exclusions that shaped their family ties.

The reception takes place in the back room of Travis’s favorite Mexican restaurant. Tanner attends, interrupting his search for an entry-level television job; the restaurant is a twenty-minute drive from the apartment he shares. The surviving cast of Joint Custody also appears, but Pandora and Edison no longer find it satisfying to ridicule the performers they had once despised: those performers had been children, and the adults they became are barely recognizable to the siblings. In these California scenes, the television world that first attracts Tanner is also an aging family inheritance, gathered at a memorial where ambition, dependence, illness, and grief meet.