They leave the west behind
“Just call me Dom.” Of all the characters in Mr Robot, the most straightforward, the least messed up (it’s all relative), is the FBI’s Dominique Dipierro. So it seems just a little unfair that she ends this episode hunkered behind a breakfast bar in a shootout with two masked paramilitaries.
We do not know the identity of her assailants, but we can guess. They burst into the FBI’s temporary residence in Beijing as Dipierro’s detachment look to explore the links between the E Corp hacks and the Dark Army. It just so happens that the very head of the Dark Army, Whiterose, is also the minister for security in the Chinese government and has a vested interest in shutting the Feds down. Small world huh? I wonder whether he could have anything to do with it.
Dom, with her aversion to marriage proposals and penchant for lollipops, is not someone to be messed with, however. She’s of the Clarice Starling school of federal agent sangfroid. By the end of the episode she has already taken out one of the assassins, and I wouldn’t bet against her shooting the other down before getting up and nibbling on a Danish. And after that, she will be straight on to Whiterose.
Her suspicions have already been raised thanks to an odd midnight encounter in his ministerial home. First of all, he showed her his clock collection, not so much a set of objets d’art as one massive explosive timer. Then he tried to probe into Dom’s background while shuffling through a collection of priceless Chinese dresses belonging to his sister. Except he doesn’t have a sister. That was a fact Dom made sure to establish.
As a rule of thumb, it is preferable to avoid antagonising the Chinese state if you possibly can. But it does appear that if Dom survives this shootout, antagonism there will be.
Honey, disconnect the phone
Back in New York City and Darlene and Angela are making moves. Darlene wants to hack the FBI and identify the fsociety mole. At the same time, this may lead her to more information about Operation Berenstain. Angela is the secret agent necessary to complete the mission and Darlene has the leverage necessary to persuade her into action. All Angela is required to do is walk into the FBI’s base of operations at E Corp and discreetly deposit a device that will allow fsoc 2.0 to get into the Feds’ network. In return, Darlene will erase any information about Angela having inserted the Dark Army’s dodgy CD into an Allsafe drive in the first place, the act that set the whole hacking catastrophe of 5/9 in motion.
Angela, as I wrote last week, has become the ultimate corporate hardass. On top of that, she has this look – platinum blonde high ponytail, trouser suit, skin the colour of bone china – that pitches her someplace between executive and adversary in the Matrix. She is certainly not about to be outwitted by her dumbass ex. His philandering kicked off the entire CD farrago in the first place and now he’s on his uppers. Oh, and snitching for the Feds. The only problem for him is not being any good at it, and so when he turns up in a bar with the apparent intent of rekindling his affair with Angela, he kind of ruins the moment by shoving his phone under Angela’s nose and asking her about the disc. She smells a rat straight off. He’s recording the conversation, on voice memo of course, but not for long. Within seconds his phone is in Angela’s drink, ruining a perfectly decent whisky and coke.
Darlene’s tough-nut credentials have never needed proving. But she’s at it again this week. She hacks Angela’s machine before enrolling her in the hacking scheme. She delegates an fsoc 2.0 bro to the Washington end of her operation with a supportive “don’t be such a pussy”. She’s even refurbed the apartment she broke into a few episodes ago into quite the glamorous hacking HQ. Now all she has to do is extract the secrets of the national law enforcement agency. But that’s for next week.
You don’t know how lucky you are boy
With all the women taking centre stage, Elliot’s return to hacking and the revelation that Ray is not quite the nice guy he thought he was comes as something of an afterthought. But yes, the big man who won Elliot’s confidence with his big puppy eyes and therapy-speak, turns out to be the owner of the blackest of black markets. Slaves, guns, drugs, you can buy anything on his site, which is precisely why he told Elliot not to look at it. But Elliot couldn’t help himself and so he has been lifted from his bed by two goons and given a right good pummelling in the street.
For me, Mr Robot doesn’t need another subplot. It already has enough on its plate trying to keep the main story – told through Dom, Angela, Darlene – on the rails, plus the increasingly weird Mrs Wellick narrative to boot. Unless Ray is somehow linked to the Dark Army, then I don’t see how Elliot having to battle against him really makes a compelling contribution to the story. But then, I thought Ray was a bitcoin dealer, so what do I know?
Order v chaos rating: 5
As the 5/9 hack is increasingly spoken of as a past event, there is no longer a sense that society is teetering on the brink (or if there is, we’re not seeing it). That said, federal agents getting shot up by assassins in China is something of a major diplomatic incident. So I’ve nudged the gauge up a couple of notches.
Self-assault index: Green
The worst thing that Mr Robot did to Elliot this week was type ‘lkx;fhjvcskjlfhsdfkhdswfkopudshf’ on his keyboard.
Questions
Where is Tyler Wellick? Who is Tyler Wellick? Where is Tyler Wellick?
