The second season of Mr. Robot is a mystery so far. We have a great number of questions, and one really big theory, but we still don’t have much of an idea where we’re headed, which, I guess, is the point. This week’s episode, the fourth of the season, gave us some little morsels, though, as well as a flashback and the return of a familiar face. Let’s dig in.
1. My primary complaint with the season to this point has been that Elliot’s story, and his ongoing war for control with Mr. Robot, is kind of dragging. We are now four episodes into the season, two of them extended to run a full-hour without commercials, and all we’ve really learned, if we want to summarize it very briefly and not be very charitable about it, is that Elliot is still messed up and Mr. Robot isn’t going away. Now, I’m very happy to give Sam Esmail a lot of room to run here, both because the show often goes to very cool places to explain it (Adderall binge funhouse, this week’s fantasy sequence), but I was getting to the point last night where I was just waiting for them to get back to Darlene and Angela.
And that’s why I breathed a huge sigh of relief when Elliot marched into Ray’s office and agreed to help him with his computer… thing (Ray’s a very private man) all for the purpose of contacting Darlene and eventually deciding to hack the FBI. Yeah! There we go! That’s my guy! Let’s hack the friggin’ FBI! I wish they had set that whole scene to “The Boys Are Back in Town.”
This is all probably worse for Elliot in the long run. He’s abandoning his program and putting himself back on the grid at a time when that appears really dangerous for a member of fsociety, and he’s got a menacing guy sitting about six feet away ready to smash him up if he screws around. Worse for him, but better for me. And that’s what’s important.
2. The episode opened with what I guess we can call an fsociety origin story, which also served as a brief misdirect. I’m sure you, like me, thought that loud knock on Elliot’s door was the one from the end of season one, but noooope, we’re doing a flashback, pre-AllSafe, to when Elliot first laid the groundwork for the hack. The big thing here was Elliot, full-on dressed as Mr. Robot (mask and all), explaining that the follow-through on the hack will be just as important as the act itself. He didn’t specifically say, like, “Make the E Corp dude light money on fire in the park and set it all to a thematically-appropriate Phil Collins song,” but that’s why Darlene is the best.
3. Speaking of Darlene… man. Elliot going away and taking himself out of the equation almost entirely has left all of the responsibility on her to cover-up and continue a multi-front war against a secretive international shadow organization full of billionaires. That does not seem very fun, especially now that members of the team are getting killed and the FBI may or may not have an illegal surveillance program up-and-running to target them. And she can’t even enjoy a quickie in a restaurant bathroom without some hacker foot soldier stressing her out about it all before they’re finished. Darlene has problems.
Also, mostly unrelated, but was it weird that the show bleeped out all the f-words but let Darlene drop a c-bomb? I assume there’s a difference for the censors between calling someone that word and using it to describe your actions, but still. That really froze me for a sec.
4. If we’re being really honest here, Angela is the most interesting character on the show right now, with Darlene running a close second and then a long gap until we hit number three. The little daily-affirmation exercises she’s doing are weird, but also fascinating, and I hope we find out soon where that’s all coming from and where it’s going.
But the bigger story is whatever she’s doing at E Corp, playing a kind of double agent between Phillip and the lawyer she’s working with on the lawsuit about the leak. I’m not even 100 percent sure which side she’s playing. Because she got the two guys arrested after Phillip gave her the incriminating information, and she’s meeting with the lawyer in private to go over the deal to find how E Corp is trying to screw them, but then as soon as she finds it she takes it to Phillip to try to negotiate a sweet new office. I mean, I think she’s fighting the good fight, but I don’t know, you know?
5. It’s clear that White Rose and Phillip from E Corp have both shady dealings going on and an increasingly strained relationship, but I don’t see how I can be expected to focus on all that while White Rose is out here dropping vicious burns on people.
6. In the latest installment of my ongoing series Mr. Robot Uses Music Better Than Any Other Show On Television, heeeeyyyy that heavenly little tinkling ditty that was playing during Elliot’s Mr.-Robot-Free kumbaya fairy tale was Green Day’s “Basketcase.” Did you catch that? Because I only picked up on it at the very end and then backed up to confirm. Poor Elliot. Even when he has utopian fantasies about eating a pleasant dinner in an alley with all his friends (and, uh, enemies-ish) while the E Corp tower crumbles to the ground, his brain is still scoring the whole thing with a song about anxiety and panic disorder.
7. Joanna also has issues. Money issues, to be specific, which are being caused by Scott, a day-drinking former coworker of Tyrell, who won’t release Tyrell’s severance package to her for the small nitpicky reason that Tyrell strangled his wife on a rooftop during a party last season and got away with it even though everyone knows he did it. Come on, Scott! Time to let bygones be bygones, bud!
Also, while I still maintain my position that Joanna is terrifying and has probably murdered upwards of 20 people using only the power of her icy-blue shark-eyed stare, we did see a more human side of her this week. Crying, talking about being in love with a broke schlub bartender/DJ, etc. It’s a new Joanna. For now. Let’s keep an eye on this.
8. One of the coolest small things about Mr. Robot is the work they do with the title screen. There’s no theme song or anything, so the way the show signifies the end of the cold open is by just popping the title on the screen during the action. It’s almost always done a very cool way, cinematographically, and this week was no exception. Sam Esmail knows what he’s doing a little bit.
9. Leon liked the Seinfeld finale! Not entirely sure I saw that coming. Nor did I see him being a kicked-open fire hydrant of information about chess and the Age of Enlightenment and deep philosophical quandaries about the purpose of life. (I think I would have enjoyed Philosophy 101 a little more if my professor had used the line “You might as well fade the f-ck out right now” during a lecture.)
Minor theory time: We’re sure Leon exists, right? Because I was very sure until he was staring into Elliot’s soul in this scene. I’m still pretty sure he does, but like, how could I know at this point? The show has burned me before.
10. The FBI found the arcade because the fsociety hackers were either “brazen” or “stupid” for naming the hacking group that took down the world’s after a sign that is literally right on top of their headquarters, depending which school of investigation you subscribe to. But more importantly, the FBI’s search of the premises turned up a bullet. This is a nice reminder that we’re now going on like four episodes without knowing what happened to both Tyrell Wellick and that gun that was hidden in the popcorn.
Suspense.
Drama.
And so on!