Dale Butler

Dale Butler is one of Cardiff Electric's hardware engineers, pulled into Joe MacMillan's scheme to reverse-engineer a PC. He is a company lifer at heart: methodical, a little defensive, more comfortable with established procedure than with the reckless improvisation Joe and Gordon are proposing. He wants to do the job right and keep his job doing it.

Barnes plays Dale as the show's ballast — the engineer who says what a competent, ordinary employee would actually say when asked to gamble his career on a stranger's fantasy. That grounded skepticism gives the more visionary characters something real to push against, and makes the workplace feel like an actual workplace rather than a stage for genius.