Please don’t spoil my day, I’m miles away
Elliot spends the whole of this week’s episode awake. And “woke” too. He’s worked out how to kill Mr Robot, and the murder weapon is Adderall; a drug that heightens concentration, most commonly associated with fighter pilots and cramming students. It allows Elliot to focus, to be in a single identity, but it also prevents him from sleeping. With that comes unfortunate consequences. Like saying what you think out loud.
Attending his Christian therapy group after six days without sleep, Elliot hears a confession of racially aggravated assault. In a non-confrontational environment and, with the confessor having apparently been condoned by God, the rest of the room let this horrible revelation pass. Not Elliott. “If I don’t listen to my imaginary friend, why the fuck should I listen to yours?” he says . “Fuck God, he’s not a good enough scapegoat for me.” And with that, and the realisation that this was not an internal monologue, he leaves the room.
It was a telling scene. Not just for its Tyler Durden-esque railing against the heavens, but because it put into clear focus the parallel between Elliot’s personal trauma and the bugs in society’s system. It’s the idea at the heart of Mr Robot – that complex systems are flawed – and it applies to the personal, the political and beyond.
Up until this point, Elliot’s aim has been to kill the bugs. It was his job at AllSafe, his plan for Evil Corp and Mr Robot. But on leaving his counselling session he walks straight into the imposing figure of Ray and things take a new direction. We still don’t know much about him, but it seems fair to say Ray is not just an amiable repair man. We see him intimidate a bruised and beaten hacker and demand an unnamed website be returned online. In confessing to Elliot that his wife died, he admits that he too talks to people no longer alive.
More importantly, he also tells Elliot the bugs can’t be fixed. He tells him that life isn’t about falling and getting back up. “The whole thing is a fall. A perpetual state of grasping in the dark. It’s not about getting up, it’s about stumbling, stumbling in the right direction.” The best you can hope to do is to keep going forward. Which, by my reckoning, means accepting Mr Robot.
Leave me where I am, I’m only sleeping
Also having difficulties with sleep is Dominique de Piero. The new character, an FBI agent, was introduced last week as smart, confident and high-functioning. This week we meet her in bed, masturbating to anonymous sexts, filling her gut with coffee at four AM, asking her digital assistant when the world will end. Her late-night anxiety is magnificently staged. We see Dominique in the dark, lit up only by her devices. She pulls herself from bed, gets washed, applies makeup and the light rises. She’s put on her armour! She’s ready for the day! But then, one savage change of camera angle lets us see that the light comes from a bare strip bulb. The scene was just another illusion.
Still, when she gets to work, Dominique is a pro. Investigating the death of f.society’s Romero, apparently shot dead on his mother’s patio, she is a step ahead of the crime-scene investigators. She knows the hard drives will be booby trapped and she knows to return to the scene and probe Romero’s mother some more – an inquiry that leads first to the discovery of Darlene’s End of the World party and then to f.soc HQ itself.
If Dominique can unravel the conspiracy that brought the world to a halt with one house visit, goodness knows what she’ll be capable of after a good night’s kip.
Running everywhere at such speed, till they find there’s no need
We get to see a moment of vulnerability from Angela too. Every inch the corporate star, you’d imagine the new Angela never having to put makeup on. She just woke up like that. But there she is, before a mirror, telling herself “you are likeable you are attractive you are beautiful”. It’s a positive affirmation (something Ray is also into) and it appears to work.
It certainly gets her to a private dinner with Philip Price, her boss at Evil Corp and self-confessed “master of the universe”. She expects a bit of sleazing. Instead, she gets introduced to two senior executives then told to bring them down. To sweeten the pill, Price reveals that the pair were in the room when E Corp decided to cover up the poisonous leak that killed Angela’s mother. Last season, to avenge her mother was all she wanted. This season, having made her pact with the corporate devil, she doesn’t know how to process such an opportunity. Angela’s instinctive reaction is one of suspicion as to Price’s motives. She’s right to doubt the ornery scumbag, but it seems only to reinforce how far removed from her former self she now is.
Notes and observations
A correspondent, appropriately going by the name Anonymous, shared with me this Medium post about suffering from Dissociative Identity disorder. I’d encourage you to give it a quick read too.
I loved the passage of Elliot in the grip of Adderall mania. It reminded me of two other scenes I have loved: Jesse playing a first-person shooter in Breaking Bad and, perhaps the inspiration for both, Danny Boyle’s imagining of Leonardo DiCaprio as some kind of wired Mario Brother in The Beach.
Order v chaos rating: 7
Last week’s calm on the streets of New York turns out to have been a period of shock. This week, the rubbish is piling up, electronic payment systems are still down and protests are growing outside the symbols of corporate power (like the best semifreddo joints in town, for example).
As for the inner life, Elliott seems set to embrace the chaos. We shall see...
Self-assault index: amber
With Mr Robot largely absent, Elliot was not physically assaulted this week. That said, he still did overdose on Adderall, imagine himself having concrete poured down his throat, make himself sick then eat the pills again.
Some questions to explore: what is Price’s plan for Angela? What is Ray’s plan for Elliott? If f.soc are exposed by the feds, is that game over? And what will Leon watch once he’s finished Seinfeld?
