So, here’s the thing. Mr. Robot, a show with a history of big reveals (Darlene is Elliot’s sister, Mr. Robot is his dead dad, Whiterose is also a high-ranking Chinese security official, etc.), gave viewers another one last night: Elliot was not “staying with his mother,” as he had claimed to us in his voiceovers since the beginning of the season, and his “regimented routine” was not so much his own doing as it was a required part of his daily life. He was in prison. And still is. (At least for now.) He had just concocted the whole other scenario either to hide the truth from himself or from us, and as soon as the curtain was pulled back, all the pieces started falling into place.
Buuuut we kind of knew it all already, didn’t we? Theories about Elliot’s potential incarceration have been floating around since literally the day after the first episode of the season, with the conventional wisdom leaning toward either prison or asylum. (I was in the “mental hospital” camp, so let’s call this a half-whoops on my part.) Now, theories float around about every show these days, and most of them aren’t worth the yarn used to connect them together on a living room wall. But this one stuck and felt more obvious as the season progressed, to the point that when they showed us, it felt more like a “Yeah, okay” than a “Holy crap!” Doesn’t necessarily mean the plot was bad, just that it was a little less fun because this time some of the audience beat the show there and was waiting for it to catch up.
In any event, though, we’re all here now, and even if you saw the broad outlines of all of this coming, there are still some questions that need answering after it happened. So let’s do that!
Why exactly is Elliot in prison?
I guess this is the big question. It doesn’t appear to be for the hack, because if it was the rest of fsociety would be in more police trouble, and there’s no way Darlene would have been able to visit him, assuming that really happened and wasn’t just another Elliot vision. And it doesn’t appear to be for whatever happened with Tyrell, because there was the thing at the beginning of the season where President Obama was talking about Tyrell in the press conference, and Joanna getting the divorce papers certainly indicates he’s still just missing. So if it’s not the two big things, then… what?
It’s important to remember here that there are, uh, kind of a lot of reasons Elliot could be in jail. It’s been mostly forgotten what with all the E Corp business and Whiterose such and such, but he did hack the police as part of a plot to orchestrate a massive jailbreak to spring a violent drug dealer who killed his girlfriend and left her in the trunk of a car with his fingerprints all over it just outside the fence of the prison. Like, I’m not saying it’s definitely that. There’s a million things it could be, including a Whiterose master plan to take down Ray, or years of hacking catching up to him, or something that we don’t even know about yet. Although maybe, possibly, it would explain that loud, cop-like knock on his door at the end of season one.
What is/was Ray’s deal?
Back when I was thinking Elliot was in some sort of mental hospital or halfway house, I assumed Ray was something along the lines of a counselor or mentor. That would have explained why he was out in the van and why he had that office. Now I have three theories:
– Ray was the warden and we had a Shawshank situation on our hands, in which he was using inmates with useful skillsets to further a criminal operation designed to enrich himself, and Elliot bringing him down was his big Andy Dufresne moment. After all the similarities to Fight Club last season, it would be another notch in the old movies-I-talked-about-in-college belt for the show.
– The entire thing with Ray and his dog was also in Elliot’s head and he imagined it while sitting in his cell.
– Something else!
I think I have my bases covered here.
If we’re being honest here, wasn’t the bigger reveal the one about Leon, Elliot’s Seinfeld-obsessed lunch companion, secretly being a Dark Army bodyguard and/or assassin working for Whiterose?
Yo. Yes. Leon was already a Top 3 character on the show before last night (Joanna, Darlene, Leon, in some order), and then he went and stared down a crew of racist bitcoin aficionados and later sliced them all up and left them in a heap on the floor as they were preparing to deliver what I’ll politely refer to as “prison justice” to Elliot. And he also said the sentence, “Just remember, cuz, you’re sitting under the Sword of Damocles.” God, if you’re listening, I need a Leon in my life. I don’t ask for much.
Anyway, this thing with Whiterose is probably a big deal, and has a lot of implications down the line, seeing as Whiterose has ties to E Corp (who Elliot hacked) and Agent Dom (who is investigating said hack and is poking around Angela’s workstation). Especially if the letter Elliot received is about him getting released. It is beyond time to get the band back together.
Scale of 1-10, how hosed is Angela?
Maybe a five or six right now? Agent Dom does not seem like someone I’d want on my tail. And her new boss in risk management seems like a tool. Although who knows? She’s been standing up for herself a lot lately, between telling Darlene she knew about fsociety because of the masks and turning down Price’s birthday dinner offer after hanging her dad out to dry on the settlement. (The Price thing was weird, right? He has a fake birthday? Like, we’re all going to collectively let that slide because the prison thing happened later, but…yeah. Really weird.) But she also has that weasel-y ex who can tie her to the hack. Let’s slide her up to a seven.
Joanna definitely tracked down and murdered that lady who threw blood on her in the episode’s opening, right?
I have never been more certain of anything in my life.
Do we trust Elliot when he says this is the last time he’ll keep anything from us?
Well, here’s the other thing. And this is an important one, because it’s actually two questions. The first is the one in bold, do we trust Elliot? And that answer should be “no.” We have no reason to, not only because he’s been a willfully unreliable narrator on a few occasions, but also because he has serious mental issues that cause delusions, which we see through his eyes as “reality,” until the truth is revealed. The whole point is that we don’t — and can’t — trust him.
But that brings us to the second question: Will it be the last time he keeps something from the audience, anyway? This one feels a little more like a maybe, or at least a “for now,” because at some point the show will have to stop going to this device in the same way, or else any remaining surprise or shock they can pull from it will be diluted. It’s tricky, this business of twists. Give the audience a good one, they’re hooked and desperate for more. Give them too many, especially ones that get sniffed out weeks in advance, they lose interest. Mr. Robot is somewhere between those two poles for me right now. Fingers crossed for the rest of the season.
