Requested By
M4themagical and jakkdl on our Discord server
What do I know about this series going into it?
It’s about an Anonymous-style hacking collective. There is something about the letter E, something about M&Ms and popcorn, and a transgender character named Whiterose. From the episode title I’m guessing there’s also someone named Elliot.
Recap
The wall of a bedroom. Offscreen, we can hear what sounds like sexual ecstasy but what captions describe as “choking”. A man walks into view of the camera, gasping for breath as both his face and his voiceover express horror at what he’s done. He showers the blood off of him.
Later, outdoors, he pulls out a keyring stolen from (I assume) his murder victim. The keyring has an address where he can find the victim’s car, which he steals and drives to a third location. Just as he exits the car, someone calls him: they’re waiting for him “at the beach” to take “wedding photos”. Based on the absurd phrasing and the tenor of the voice, I’m guessing this is his contact in the hacking collective, talking in code. But he lies to his handler, claiming he’s at his apartment and will be there soon.
Ah, but I’m mistaken on two counts. First, this isn’t a new location; he went to get the car and bring it back to the murder scene, so he can dispose of the body. He packs up the murder victim (who looks kind of like him) in a box and cleans up the evidence from the rest of the apartment. Second, he gets dressed in a tuxedo. So maybe that phone call wasn’t in code?
His imaginary friend shows up, and they have a chat that clears up a few important things. First, the wedding isn’t for a family member; he is the groom. Second, “Whiterose’s machine worked” and he is now in “a world where everything is better”.
Aha. You see, I thought the murder victim looked kinda like him, but figured that was just my prosopagnosia talking. But no: he’s either in a parallel universe, or he changed history via time travel. And he has just murdered his double in order to take his place. The imaginary friend tries to castigate him for this on moral grounds, but the main character (I still don’t have his name, but I’m starting to suspect he’s the titular Elliot) isn’t having it. I deserve this, and you’re not going to steal it from me! The imaginary friend points out that only one of the two of them is currently stealing things.
He takes his double-in-a-box out to the car, but a traffic cop stops him: she has to give him a ticket for parking in a fire lane.
He hands his ID over, but the cop says this “Elliot Alderson” is nothing like him.1 She then notices blood on his cufflinks and blood dripping out the bottom of the box. So she pulls out her gun, demands he get on the ground, and opens the box herself. Just as she sees the dead body inside, an earthquake hits and he flees.
Interesting. The imaginary friend earlier mentioned something about earthquakes. This scene implies three things: 1) They’re caused by the presence of two copies of the same person in the same universe; 2) Elliot killed his double partially in order to take his place but also to stop the earthquakes; 3) It didn’t work, because they’re still happening even though his double is dead.
Elliot flees into a subway station. Imaginary Friend is waiting on the subway train for him, trying to warn him that his plan can’t work, but he’s insistent: “I’m going to marry Angela,” he says, who is dead in his world but alive in this one.
Imaginary Friend wants to tell Elliot what’s really going on, but Elliot demands to be left alone.
Eventually, he arrives at the beach on Coney Island. But the wedding party is surreal:
Imaginary Friend approaches him and puts his sport coat on him, and tries to explain that none of these people are real and the wedding is never going to happen. Angela isn’t coming. In fact, Whiterose’s machine didn’t work. “Her game” - whatever that is - deactivated the machine, and this isn’t the real world; it’s an imaginary universe that Elliot created when he was going through morphine withdrawal at some point in the past. It’s not even meant to be a world, but rather a prison so that Elliot could take control of “him” – him being the real Elliot. So Elliot is not Elliot.
I have no idea what’s going on and neither does Elliot. But if I can summarize the little I do understand: everything in the episode so far has been happening inside Elliot’s head. The Elliot we’ve been following is a psychotic and evil alternate personality that has (metaphorically) murdered the real Elliot’s personality so as to take over Elliot’s body. So where is Elliot in the real world?
But Elliot doesn’t want to delve into the psychology of it. He sees Angela in a wedding dress off in the distance and chases after her.
Eventually he catches up to Angla, who reveals that the psychotic not-Elliot is actually the “Mastermind”. This is a highly significant revelation, says the soundtrack – significant to everyone but me. The Mastermind of what?
There’s a computer-y glitch. He finds himself on a crowded boardwalk on Coney Island, where everybody’s face – men, women, children, is that of Imaginary Friend. Somebody shoots him and everyone cheers. He wakes up, again on Coney Island, this time at night. We hear a countdown. Somebody throws him in a pit. I have no idea what’s going on.
A woman’s voice from the real world intrudes as he’s lying in the pit: Elliot, wake up! And he does.
He wakes up on a psychiatrist’s couch. He doesn’t recognize it at first, but eventually recognizes the woman sitting across from him as “not-really-Krista”. So this is still in his mind. “The others” have chosen Krista to represent them – what others? Aliens? Government agents? Telepaths?
Krista explains that the woman’s voice Elliot keeps hearing is that of Darlene. Darlene isn’t in the fantasy world because she is Real Elliot’s only connection to the real world, and this Elliot, evil-Mastermind-takeover Elliot, wanted to make sure the real Elliot never emerged again. But if that’s the case, why is fake Elliot trapped here too?
More explanations, accompanied by clips from earlier in the series: Elliot created a “protector personality” to replace his father, this being Imaginary Friend, who is the titular Mr. Robot. He then created additional personalities: a mother personality to abuse him, a child personality to take that abuse, and even more. A disembodied voice smugly tells Evil Elliot that Krista “doesn’t know about you”, but Krista immediately tells that voice (and Evil Elliot) that it’s wrong. She knows all about the additional personalities, including Evil Elliot. He’s the one who created “fsociety”, which I’m guessing is the name of the hacker collective, to try to save the world and make it safe for Real Elliot.
There follows a series of clips from across the show’s history, of people questioning who Elliot is and recognizing that his personality isn’t the same as it once was. So has Real Elliot ever appeared in the series at all? Has everything from episode one been Evil Elliot?
Krista says that Evil Elliot needs to give control back to Real Elliot, but he refuses. This causes the psychologist’s office to start shaking, but Evil Elliot doesn’t care: It’s my life, and I’m never giving it back to Real Elliot!
He wakes up in a hospital bed, scratches on his forehead. He glances at his patient ID bracelet, then the monitor, then the news reporting that a nuclear meltdown was “narrowly averted”, then sees Darlene asleep by his bedside. He wakes her up and grabs her hand: this is real, isn’t it?
Whoever Darlene is, she cares deeply about Elliot, which makes me wonder about his relationship to her and to Angela.
Darlene tells Elliot why he was unconscious: Whiterose’s machine was plugged into that nuclear reactor, and Elliot cut the power to the machine, stopping the meltdown but causing the machine to explode. Whiterose is “officially dead”, and her machine has been “pulverized”. Elliot survived because the room he was in had “advanced shielding”, but what he did saved the world.2
But Elliot looks at his ID again. He pulls his hand away from Darlene. Is the Mastermind personality finally feeling remorse for what he did to Elliot? He tries to tell Darlene that he’s not real, but she misunderstands him: they apparently have a recurring thing where Darlene has to reassure Elliot that he’s in the real world and not hallucinating:
As additional proof, she lists all their friends who have died.
But the Mastermind corrects her that this isn’t what he meant. “But I’m not,” he says. “I’m not him. Darlene, I’m not Elliot.” This kind of talk would be freakout territory, but then he adds, “I’m only a part of him,” which makes it sound more metaphorical. But Darlene doesn’t need to take it metaphorically, revealing that she’s always known the truth: You’re not the Elliot I grew up with. You don’t act like him, you forgot who I was, and I always knew that you were a different personality in Elliot’s body. She never said anything because they were spending time together and being closer friends.
The Mastermind asks why they weren’t close before.3 Darlene says it was her fault: she didn’t know how to deal with Real Elliot’s trauma. “Is he okay?” she asks. The Mastermind says he made a safe place for Real Elliot, with everything the latter ever wanted.4 Darlene, genuinely treating Real Elliot and the Mastermind as two separate people, says she misses Real Elliot. The Mastermind admits that Real Elliot doesn’t have everything – talking about Darlene, but he doesn’t make it explicit – and tells Darlene that he loves her.
Darlene leaves, and there’s a fade to white. Fade in on Elliot’s personalities lined up and looking over New York from a penthouse apartment window. The voiceover talks about changing the world by not changing yourself, and I don’t follow this part at all.
And then the episode seemingly ends, but there’s a surprise coda: Elliot – or some version of him – enters a movie theater and sits down next to his other personalities (Mr. Robot, the mother, and the child). The camera jitters in strange ways. Unclear scenes go by as we zoom in on the film projector, then zoom out from Elliot’s eye. Darlene approaches the camera’s point of view and says “Hello, Elliot”.
Unresolved questions
Has the Mastermind actually given up control of Elliot or not? If so, what made him change his mind? How long has the real Elliot been suppressed? What will Darlene and the real Elliot’s relationship be like?
Throughout the episode, Krista and the Mastermind talk about the Real Elliot personality as if it still exists, but is trapped inside and unable to get out. Yet it’s clear that that has been the state of affairs for some time before this episode. So what change was symbolized by the Mastermind killing Real Elliot in the opening scene?
The ‘fsociety’ plotline was barely touched upon in this episode, other than to reveal that Elliot has been running the entire thing all along, unbeknownst to himself. What is the group going to do going forward?
If I understood correctly – and I’m sure I didn’t, not entirely – Elliot never intended to destroy Whiterose’s machine but rather to use it. But he’s hailed as a hero for stopping the nuclear meltdown by destroying it. Will the truth about his involvement be revealed?
Is Elliot actually in the real world this time? The “advanced shielding” thing sound like a kludge to me.
Ratings
These ratings evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. The analysis accompanying each rating is written from that point of view as well.
The ratings do not necessarily apply to the episode if it is watched in the proper context. And it should go without saying that none of them apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
Story: 3/10. Focused as it was on exploring Elliot’s5 psyche – and given that almost nothing we saw was real – this episode was never intended to have a plot in the sense of a coherent sequence of events.
Writing: 8/10. Over the first half of the episode I was all prepared to attack the writing. Unrealistic speech, convenient coincidences, problems with the logic. But then the writers turned the tables on me by revealing that the world was all in Elliot’s head. Which neatly answered all of the questions:
Since when does a cop demand ID when giving out a traffic ticket? Since the mastermind’s subconscious was trying to warn him that he couldn’t live in a utopia, that’s when.
What is the logic behind the earthquakes? There doesn’t need to be one – the world isn’t real.
How did the backup cop cars arrive so quickly and know exactly which random pedestrian to corner on a New York City street? Sure, the cop could have called in “he’s wearing a tuxedo”, but the real reason is that only one of the people in this world actually exists.
And so on. There are a dozen other conveniences, but it all has a coherent explanation. Throughout the scene, the subconscious part of Elliot that controls the world wants to get him into just enough trouble to prevent him from resting on his laurels, while simultaneously making sure he escapes from that trouble unscathed. The sequence comes off as the most ridiculous fiction because it is meant to be so.
I can’t pretend I understood the symbolism of everything that happened there, or in the following five scenes (why does everybody on Coney Island look like Mr. Robot? Why not like Elliot, or any of the other personalities he invented?). But I can give the episode the benefit of the doubt on that, because the parts that I did understand proved that a lot of thought went into them. That was true throughout the episode, not just in this scene.6
Production: 8/10. Good performances by the actors playing Darlene and Elliot, and even by the traffic cop (whose performance was more realistic than most actors would have put into such a small role). Very good special effects in the everybody-is-Mr.-Robot scene. And as with the writing, the film editing in certain places was doing something I didn’t entirely understand, but it did it well.
Characterization: 6/10. It’s difficult to know how to approach this rating. On the one hand, the entire episode was dedicated to exploring the Mastermind’s personality. On the other hand, this meant that I knew nothing about anybody else’s personality. I couldn’t tell you anything about Krista or Angela, because I never met them – only illusory representations of them conjured by Elliot’s mind. Similarly, Mr. Robot isn’t a person; he too is a subconscious conjuration. Do I treat those as separate characters or as addition aspects of a single, deeply-explored character?
The additional complication is how little I understood what I was being told. If Real Elliot hasn’t been present since before the series began, who have viewers of the series been watching all along? It can’t be the Mastermind, because he didn’t know he was the Mastermind. So was the main character of the series yet another personality, that Elliot set up to take orders from the Mastermind? And has the Mastermind now put that character away in a box as well?
If so, that might explain one thing that Not Krista said. After listing most of Elliot’s personalities, she mentioned the existence of others, plural. But the only one I know about that she hadn’t yet listed was the Mastermind himself. That implies at least one more, who could have been the main character of the series (except for those moments when the Mastermind came in and out of control, as shown in the flashbacks).
And finally, who was Not Krista “representing”? A whole host of additional personalities? Something else entirely? I don’t just lack the answers to these questions; I don’t even know if the questions are correct.
Anyway. The fact that so many questions are being raised (and not in a nitpicky way – these are questions borne of interest and curiosity) is more than enough for me to give the episode a higher-than-average Characterization score. The only reason it’s not higher is due to lingering uncertainty.
Accessibility: 3/10. Wow. At first the episode seemed so straightforward, right? This guy has shifted into a parallel universe and murdered his double to take his place. The earthquake was a bit weird but I could take that in stride; I’ve seen many a scifi universe with a “no two copies of the same person at the same time” rule that manifested in far stranger ways. But the episode took a hard left turn as soon as Elliot ran up the aisle past dozens of identically-dressed wedding guests and just got weirder from there.
I’m well used to finales that give their audiences long-awaited explanations that I don’t fully (or even partially) understand. I’m well used to finales that mystified me. But those usually don’t show up together, or if they do they don’t show up at the same time. This may be the first finale I’ve reviewed where the very scenes that explained what was going on were the most bewildering.
The intended audience probably came away very satisfied! But this episode was definitely not made with the first-time viewer in mind.
Closure: 8/10. Rewriting everything you think you knew about a series is a very good and satisfying way to close one out.7 Though I imagine a few questions remain, even for people who know the series back to front.
Do I want to watch the series now?
To a certain extent I regret knowing anything about the hacking collective before going into this; it would’ve been interesting to watch this episode truly cold. I probably would have come away from it with the impression that the series was almost entirely a character study about a mentally ill man named Elliot, with the “fsociety” and nuclear meltdown stuff only a backdrop.
But then again, maybe that is what the series was about, and I’m stubbornly holding onto what I originally believed in the face of evidence to the contrary.
I’ll say this: I’m far more interested in Elliot’s personality issues than I am about fsociety. I’ve never been a fan of the V for Vendetta motif. On the other hand, I am curious as to how well the finale’s revelation holds up in retrospect. Were there cases where the Mastermind did things that Elliot genuinely could not have done? Or did the creators have this twist in mind from the very beginning, four seasons earlier, and take care never to do anything that contradicted it? If the latter, how did they keep that up for four seasons without it being too obvious?
So if the series really is about Elliot much more than about fsociety, then I’m definitely interested in watching it from the beginning, with those questions in mind.
Note the very specific phrasing. Not he looks nothing like you; he is nothing like you. I thought it was strange and my mind started going to various scifi explanations, like, did the cop run the ID through a scanner hooked up to some kind of personality database? But later in the episode this will turn out to be a very elegant clue as to what’s really going on.
The whole world? From one nuclear meltdown?
“What did he do?” is how he phrases it, which is a very strange way to put it. Why would he assume that Elliot did something? Sometimes people just aren’t friends.
And then killed him?
Or whoever’s.
For example, when the Mastermind admits to Darlene that Real Elliot doesn’t have everything in his utopian prison, I expected him to spell out, “He doesn’t have you.” Kudos to the writers for not making that explicit and trusting the viewer to put two and two together. Too many shows just wouldn’t be able to help themselves.
I do wonder how many viewers already guessed that Elliot was the Mastermind. I’m guessing that after four seasons it was not an uncommon theory.
For what it's worth, the consensus is that the "personality" that has been the main character for the entire show IS in fact the Mastermind (the vigilante hacker persona) -- and over the years since locking the "real Elliot" in the back of their mind, because they were in the pilot seat most of the time, the Mastermind kind of started thinking of himself as the "real Elliot". That's what not-Krista realizes, and helps him realize, near the end -- that's he's not the "real Elliot", he's never been, we've never seen him on-screen, the real Krista never spoke to him, it was the Mastermind all along. And when not-Krista mentions "others", it's a bit of an implication that the viewers themselves are also just a figment of the Mastermind's imagination, "voyeurs" feeling satisfaction from the Mastermind's vigilante hacker successes, which gives an in-universe explanation for the Mastermind's narration adressing "the audience" directly, and occasional fourth wall breaks.