Mr. Robot: _m1rr0r1ng.qt

Synopsis: Elliot has to face the challenges of his past, and become accustomed to his new found family.

Rating: ★★★★★

This week’s episode finally brought Elliot and Tyrell’s storylines crashing together, in a compelling reversal of their dynamic.

After Tyrell’s wife’s self-induced labor gets him out of talking to the cops, she tells him a story about the baby girl she gave up for adoption at fifteen, and tells him she wants a divorce. Back at work, he gets fired for all the commotion caused by Sharon’s death.

His desperation and grief forces him to turn to Elliot.

Elliot, in turn, and been reunited with his father and sister. He’s confused, but Mr. Robot and Darlene definitely seem to care about him – maybe things are looking up.

When he and Mr. Robot go to visit the old family home, Elliot shoves him out a window, in return for Mr. Robot doing it to him as a child. At the same time, Angela and Darlene also break into the house, looking for Elliot, who they believe to be missing. Only when they find him, it’s Elliot who’s limping and bleeding. And alone.

As it turns out, Elliot’s been off his meds (literally) for months now, and has become a regular Tyler Durden.

In order to keep up with Darlene, and talk himself into doing some of the awful things he needed to do to take down Evil Corp, he created a second personality – that of his dead father. The unstable guy with good intentions but no morals. Mr. Robot is Elliot’s father, but he was a salesman at an electronics store, not a hacker – and he’s not real.

This lends so much credence to every time Mr. Robot has stood there egging Elliot on while no one paid any attention – a literal voice in his ear.

And it certainly shines a whole lot of new light onto every scene between Mr. Robot and other characters when Elliot wasn’t present.

It would be fascinating to watch the whole season again knowing this – especially the episode where the gang breaks into Steel Mountain and everyone’s in the car complaining to Mr. Robot that Elliot can’t pull it off, while listening to Elliot on the walkie-talkie – how did that even work?

Where they even real? Darlene talks about “all of us” but when Elliot goes to the arcade at the end, there are only two computers set up.

In every scene with Mr. Robot and Elliot does anyone ever acknowledge Mr. Robot?

It also adds a lot of significance to the final line in which Elliot tells Tyrell he ‘just wanted to save the world’ – that’s not a cliche or a meaningless platitude if you consider all of the scary things Mr. Robot has done are actually things that Elliot has done, and that’s his justification.

He and Darlene started fsociety because they wanted to save the world. This makes the awesome trick of treating the audience as Elliot’s computer program into order to create his narration, more than just a trick. It was foreshadowing from the very beginning that something else important, like the show’s namesake, wouldn’t be real either.

The very first line of the show after Elliot says hello is “But you’re just in my head, we have to remember that.”

It’s all coming together.

Tyrell has forced his way into fsociety now, which does not bode well for anyone. But you can bet Darlene’s going to have some choice zingers for him. Personally, I’m also hoping that Angela’s “extremely lucrative” job offer from Evil Corp leads her to join fsociety as well, and be a badass double agent and fsociety’s main benefactor.

That would be stellar.