6 months is the length of time it had been since the MC's last message with Zoey when he told Bella about her in Episode 3. From the Interlude, we know that must have happened a relatively short time before Zoey's confrontation with Emma; Zoey talked about going 'weeks' without contacting the MC in the prior scene, not months. And it's been roughly a month since Episode 3 (though the MC has had a new phone for most of that time).
The problem is that Zoey's stated reason for limiting her contact with the MC was to help him strike out on his own, which was based on Bret's advice. But after the confrontation with Emma Zoey learned that advice turned out to be a mistake. Yet she never rethought her decision with regard to the MC; instead she sat on her ass until she ran out of money and HAD to go home.
That's the problem with the Interlude. DPC presents it as Zoey coming to recognize her feelings for the MC, but what he actually showed us was Zoey killing time with her friends until she had no other choice. Sure, she thinks highly of the MC from time to time, but as they say actions speak louder than words. The Interlude isn't about the MC, and as a result Zoey doesn't come across as being motivated by him, either.
DPC has a bad habit of relying on informed attributes rather than reflecting those attributes in game (sort of like how Sage is allegedly surprised if the MC rejects her despite her love life being nothing but rejection). The MC and Zoey say the other is important to them, and thus we should ignore it when neither puts much of a priority on the other. Unfortunately, this time it really bit him on the ass. Not only did the Interlude take time away from the 'main' story development at a particularly important time, but it wound up undercutting the importance of the character it was supposed to be reinforcing.
That sounds nice, but is there any evidence that actually supports it?
Zoey has no introspection throughout the Interlude and as a result her entire relationship with the MC now looks shallow. She walked away from him to pursue her dream, tried to distance herself based on the advice of a relative stranger, and never reconsidered that policy until she was on the train back home. When Bret asks her what's wrong near the end of the Interlude, Zoey talks first about money, then about not liking the surfer life as she expected, and finally of letting her grandma down.
The MC is a not mentioned. He's not even alluded to until that scene on the train - and even that is too ambiguous for my taste. Her talk is entirely of 'home,' and when she gets home the first thing we see her do is hug her mother. We don't see her try to contact the MC until after she's flopped on her bed and looked at the photo of her grandma. Given that Zoey earlier mentioned how she'd been talking to her mother more than the MC, this reinforces the notion that her feelings for him were an afterthought. I don't think this is what DPC intended and I'm not saying you have to share my interpretation of events, but IMHO the game just doesn't back up the notion that Zoey's relationship with the MC was anything more than a crush.
I'm serious when I say the main girls have blown past her in terms of intimacy with the MC. We'd have been so much better off if DPC had left her time in San Diego up to our imagination and introduced Zoey when the MC met her again in Season 3.
