Above us only sky
You start off trying to change the world for the better. Along the way there are distractions, complications, and at some point there’s a discussion about becoming living gods or whatever. Then, before you know it, you’re planning to kill hundreds of people in an explosion. It’s a story as old as time.
And it’s the story we were being told in the second season of Mr Robot, which wrapped up this week in an episode full of answers but short on satisfaction.
The first answer was to the biggest question: what is Stage Two? Very similar to stage one, it turns out, though instead of hacking E Corp to destroy its information, the plan was to blow it up. This plan was concocted by Elliot Alderson (or at least the aspect of his personality known as Mr Robot) and Tyrell Wellick, a former executive of E Corp who was very much not killed by Elliot in the run-up to stage one.
Elliot had believed that Tyrell was dead. I believed it too. But we were both just a couple of rubes because Tyrell was alive and in possession of a gun which fired a bullet into Elliot’s gut. Elliot blacked out, which caused Mr Robot to fritz out too, but our hero isn’t dead.
We know this because the first thing Tyrell did was call Angela Moss, who seemed thoroughly unflustered by the news. This caused me some disquiet. It was obviously a shock to find the closest thing Elliot has to a love interest being involved in an apparent plot to wound him. But not only did I find this dramatic leap difficult to process, it also sent me scrambling backwards thinking: so there was a plan about what to do should Elliot resist stage two? And Angela was key to it? But she only met Whiterose in the last episode? And when did she learn that Tyrell wasn’t dead?
There’s also the further complication that I had been coming to believe that E Corp were in on the hack, and that causing chaos was all part of Philip Price’s greater game. If so, why try to rebuild the business through the accumulation of paper records? Perhaps it’s so he can have his cake and eat it (give people E Coin loans and revive their dollar debts too) but if so, I’m kind of pulling this together on my own here.
Whatever the machinations, at the end of the second season our hero is unconscious, in a pool of his own blood, sold down a path towards terrorism by a voice he cannot ignore. So much for a happy ending.
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one
Mr Robot is a smart show, maybe at times too smart for its own good. There’s so much to love in it, so much detail, so much verisimilitude (particularly in the hacking detail), but sometimes I feel like I could do with a little more hand-holding to work out what’s going on.
Sam Esmail, the show’s creator and writer and director and producer and everything else, has given a post-season interview to Variety in which he makes it clear that “we wanted to resolve all of the mysteries we’d been setting up all season”. And he did, to an extent. Not only do we know what Stage Two is, we know for sure Tyrell is alive, who was sending the messages to Joanna Wellick (that’s bereaved E Corp CTO Scott Knowles), where Trenton and Mobley are hiding out (in California, at a fast food company) and who killed Romero (a neighbour, by accident).
Each answer turns out to be partial though, and in turn beg many more questions. I’ve listed those about Angela, but there are also questions about where Tyrell has been, why Joanna cares so much about framing Knowles, what this magic Stage One control-z Trenton has managed to uncover is, and how Leon got out of prison and found them in the first place.
Of Angela, Esmail tells Variety that:
“You can just never quite read her. [Portia Doubleday] does it in such an exquisite fashion that we played up the notion where she’s a character that’s riding down the middle. On the one hand, you could feel that she’s flipped and turned to E Corp, and on the other hand, no, she’s trying to bring them down. We played with that the whole season. We thought that was so fascinating. We’re double-downing. Our assumption by the end of the season was that she’s siding with the Dark Army. As we move forward to the next season, it’ll be interesting to play that dynamic. Is she really with them or is she not? It’s just something with Angela’s journey, we can always keep people off balance in terms of what directions she’s actually going in.”
I don’t think anyone could argue that Angela has not been as Esmail describes. The question is more how much the audience enjoys being thrown around in its perceptions like this. The uncertainty over E Corp I liked; if she was working with them it was to put some kind of mental block on her grief. If she was working against them, it was an effective ruse. But to now set up the same dilemma with another antagonist (only less motivation) I’m inclined to find the whole thing a bit wilful.
Whatever happens, I’ll always have Dom DiPierro. The FBI agent interviewed Darlene this week and tried to bring her onside in the ongoing investigation against f.soc and the Dark Army, “one of the biggest events in world history”. Darlene is, to put it mildly, disinclined to engage. “Go suck a dick” is how she puts it. But a late introduction to Dom’s spider diagram of crime suggests that maybe the lady is for turning. Stay tuned for a bad-ass double act in season three.
The remaining questions
What is WhiteRose’s endgame? What is going on at the Washington Plant? What happened to Angela and Elliot’s parents? Can Trenton make the world whole again?Will Mr Robot wake up when Elliot does?
Note to the reader
It’s been great to do these recaps with you this season. You’ve been an informed and informative community and you’ve kept coming back so thanks. We got some things right and some things wrong but I hope, like me, you’ll be back for another round next year. I’d be particularly keen to hear your highlights of this season in the comments.
