I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me
It can be the smallest of things that mark people out as family. An unusual laugh, a verbal tic, perhaps a regal nose. In the case of Elliot and Darlene Alderson, their shared trait only comes out in certain circumstances: it’s something only keen observers would see. That said, once you have noticed the siblings share a tendency towards homicidal activity, it’s very unlikely you will forget it.
As far as we are aware, in his career as an insurrectionist hacker, Elliot has only killed one person. This week, his sister assumes the role of the central character for the first time and, in a solitary episode, manages to kill two. Talk about sibling rivalry!
To say things have taken a turn for the worse for the remaining members of f.soc seems fair, even for those who haven’t had their heads stoved in by a baseball bat.
The episode begins with the group blowing the lid off Operation Berenstain, a surveillance project that spied on more than 3 million people. F.soc are back in the news and once again: “It’s bigger than Snowden.” But their happy hours come to an end when E Corp’s special counsel, Susan Jacobs, walks back into her front room. Darlene and her cohorts had hijacked her house and not expected her return so soon. So they do what any budding revolutionary movement/agents of terror would do: tie her up next to her swimming pool. Within a short while, there’s the inevitable escape attempt, with a person that successful obviously going to imagine themselves superior to their kidnappers. Sadly, that ends in concussion for Jacobs and a realisation on the part of the f.soc-ers that they don’t really know what to do with her next. They try hacking everything she owns for something to blackmail her with, but sadly no dice. So, as the leader, Darlene takes it on herself to Taser the poor woman, not only damaging Jacobs’s weak heart but knocking her out cold in a swimming pool. Darlene leaves the corpse to drift.
Not that it ends there. On-off lovebirds Darlene and Cisco go on a date night to the vet with the ask-no-questions incinerator. In this week’s solitary piece of good news, it turns out that all the dogs f.soc released when they were last in the building (destroying their hard drives after 5/9), have voluntarily returned to the building. Which is kind of touching when you think about it, and not in any way dispiriting. Anyway, burning a dead body gives Cisco the idea of inviting Darlene back to his. She accepts, after hesitation, but can’t resist hacking her lover’s laptop the next morning and finding he’s still in conversation with the Dark Army. Oh and taking pics of her while she slept. Darlene decides she might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, and batters Cisco in the head with a baseball bat.
Given the predilection for illusion in this drama, it’s difficult to say whether Darlene has always been violent or has only now been pushed to it be events. Either way, she’s in deep now and this show is quickly running short of heroes.
And when I awoke I was alone, this bird had flown
We are at least encouraged to feel sympathy with Trenton and Mobley the two other remaining members of f.soc. We flash back to their first encounter, Trenton proving her hacking chops by pulling the old phoney benchmark-testing website trick. You know, that one.
The pair, it seems, are more simpatico than we might have thought. After the death of Jacobs, Mobley pleads with Trenton to do a runner, Trenton is determined to stay with her family. On returning home to collect his stuff, Mobley is immediately picked up by the Feds, but it turns out our Dom really knows nothing about him beyond his DJ name. Trenton, meanwhile, is being watched by the men in black, which could turn out to be altogether more dangerous.
In one final show of solidarity, Mobley messages Trenton to tell her the jig is up. They’ve been “burned”, he says, before wiping his phone and dumping it in the pannier of an unsuspecting cyclist.
So I lit a fire, isn’t it good
With the action concentrated almost entirely on the f.soc-ers, we don’t get to see much of anyone else this week. We do at least get a brief scene with Angela though, a woman with the habit of finding the most decorous bars in New York. Tonight’s venue is turned out like a 1920s political rally, with enough bunting for a hundred May poles. Angela is there on a date with an undercover FBI agent, it turns out, but she’s not at all interested in him. Instead she stumbles on friend of her father who, despite being a 60-something plumber, shares Angela’s expensive taste in drinks. After a mutual shaming (“You sold out to your mother’s killers”, “Yes, but you’re poor”), Angela goes on to find another silver fox to hit on. Quite the journey this woman is on.
Order v chaos rating: 6
There’s talk of imminent blackouts and state troopers on the streets, but it’s hard to tell whether that’s real or just Mobley’s paranoia. Meanwhile the infrastructure of the city is still functioning and people appear to be going about their daily lives. And Dom Di Piero can still get hold of her lollipops.
Self-harm index
White. No Elliot means no violent interactions with variant personas.
Questions
Are we supposed to believe that Darlene can read Chinese? What is the Dark Army’s “stage two”? Will there be a big climax to this season and if so, what? Did you, like me, both find this episode simultaneously a bit of a stretch and pretty much entirely gripping?
