When last we saw Elliot Alderson in season one of Mr. Robot, the leader of the hacker group fsociety had loaded in the code that would take down the conglomerate that controlled much of everything in our society, E Corp (which Elliot sees and hears as Evil Corp throughout the series), and erase all consumer debt.
As season two of Mr. Robot begins, we see that fsociety has accomplished the revolution it envisioned. Debt is indeed gone, thanks to Evil Corp being hacked. The world is a different place. The financial markets have crumbled. And Elliot (Rami Malek) isn’t quite certain just how large a role he played in the upheaval. There are three days he can’t account for, when another side of his personality apparently took completely over.
The big reveal of Mr. Robot‘s first season was a story development that many fans and critics expected, but was nonetheless surprising in how it represented the lead character’s fragile mental state. The title character, Mr. Robot (Christian Slater), the leader of fsociety that recruited Elliot to join their cause and take down Evil Corp, turned out to be a creation entirely of Elliot’s imagination. More specifically, Mr. Robot was a manifestation of another personality, like Fight Club‘s Tyler Durden, embodied by Elliot’s dead father.
By the end of season one, had Mr. Robot completely taken over control of Elliot? That may have been the only way of finally going through with fsociety’s plan, of erasing whatever last strains of conscience that prevented Elliot from hitting “Enter” on his keyboard and loading in the hack that destroyed Evil Corp’s servers and took the world out of debt prison.
Season one also concluded with the question of whether or not Elliot (or Mr. Robot, depending on how you choose to look at it) killed Tyrell Wellick, the young Evil Corp executive who ultimately helped fsociety topple the corporation from within after his ambitions of becoming its chief technology officer were thwarted.
As season two begins, a flashback reveals that Wellick was there when Elliot loaded the hack, saying the code looked “as if something’s come alive.” Elliot then reached into a popcorn machine where a gun was hidden, and… we don’t know what happened next. And that’s the only scene in the episode during which we see Wellick. Those hoping for answers to that particular question were left hanging, though it certainly appears that he is indeed alive. Unless it’s yet another delusion — or personality — of Elliot’s fractured psyche.
The story of “eps2.0unm4sk-pt1.tc” (love those episode titles) kicks in approximately a month after fsociety’s hack — now known as “The 5/9 Attacks” — was unleashed. The hacker group has indeed been credited with the attack on Evil Corp and the ensuing financial crisis, but Wellick is also being blamed as the inside man who helped fsociety pull off its plan. As mentioned, however, Wellick is nowhere to be found. That leaves poor Allsafe (which was in charge of Evil Corp’s cyber-security) CEO Gideon Goddard, Elliot’s boss, as the patsy in the nation’s eyes, which becomes shockingly, fatally clear.
https://youtu.be/YibylhkLwGo
Elliot has gone into hiding as well, no longer trusting himself to control the Mr. Robot side of his personality. He’s gone completely off the grid, staying with his mother (who we know from Elliot’s delusions psychologically abused him as a child) in Queens. His life is completely about a banal routine, dominated mostly by meeting his new friend Leon (played by rapper Joey Bada$$) for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and listening to him talk about discovering Seinfeld and how the show about nothing has blown his mind.
Unplugged from any computer or the internet, Elliot occupies his mind by keeping a journal and regularly visiting his therapist (Gloria Reuben), who wants to know why he would seek sanctuary with the mother who forever scarred him emotionally and psychologically. Elliot thinks his mother’s strict control and regimen is exactly what he needs to prevent Mr. Robot from taking control again.
But he soon learns that journaling and trying to account for everything that happened during the day — even conversations with Mr. Robot, who’s trying to get him back to leading fsociety — only works when he’s awake. A man named Ray (Craig Robinson) knows who Elliot is and is trying to recruit him for “work.” But more troubling is that the two had a conversation during a night Elliot can’t remember. Whatever Ray was selling, Mr. Robot was apparently buying.
But is Ray real? That’s a question which has to be asked on a show like Mr. Robot.
While Elliot is trying to take control of his life and keep Mr. Robot at bay, Darlene (who we learned was Elliot’s sister toward the end of season one) has assumed leadership of fsociety and trying to warn her fellow anarchists that their job isn’t finished. Though their hack severely disabled Evil Corp and crashed the financial markets, the government is getting ready to bail the conglomerate out. Too big to fail and all that. The revolution is about to be temporary. “What we did made it worse, not better,” Darlene says.
But fsociety is ready to load in another encrypted hack that will crash Evil Corp even further unless the company pays a ransom of $5.9 million. Evil Corp agrees to pay because another crash would be catastrophic, but when an executive brings the money to Battery Park, he’s told to light the cash on fire. As humiliating a spectacle as that is, Darlene seems to wonder what was truly accomplished. The movement has become self-satisfied and still needs a leader, which is what Mr. Robot is trying to tell Elliot.
The season two premiere didn’t answer all of the questions left dangling at the end of last season — such as who was knocking on Elliot’s door at the very end of the episode — but was that really expected? Showrunner Sam Esmail (who is directing all 12 episodes of season two, further cementing him as the auteur of this series) has a longer, larger story in mind that is going to play out over the entire season. Besides the questions still left to be answered, the two-part season two premiere presented even more, adding further twists and more depth to a show that was already fantastically intriguing and more than a little troubling because of its very close resemblance to the world we live in.
