Mr. Robot added more questions to the stack it already hasn’t answered in the third episode of the season.
We still don’t know where Tyrell (Martin Wallstrom) is, what exactly happened on 5/9 or any of the other questions we came into the season with. But now we have a whole slew of other questions on top of those: Who is Ray (Craig Robinson) and what is he doing that he needs Elliot’s help? Who is hunting people linked to fsociety — first Gideon (Michel Gill), who was innocent, and now Romero (Ron Cephas Jones), who was not? What is Evil Corp CEO Phillip Price (Michael Cristofer) up to with his emotionally damaged new PR rep Angela (Portia Doubleday)? And seriously, is Elliot (Rami Malek) actually locked up in some sort of institution?
After a history-lesson flashback that showed how Romero entered the fsociety fold — he was a brilliant hacker and he had a cursed arcade that was almost entirely off-the-grid! — the meat of the episode picked up with Elliot talking to Tyrell on the phone. Tyrell isn’t yet “where he’s supposed to be,” but he’ll be there soon. He won’t say where that is. He tells Elliot that he often thinks about the night they became gods. When the call is over, Elliot isn’t convinced that he even talked to Tyrell, since he talks to Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) and he’s not real, you know?
Elliot decides to experiment with a new method of controlling Mr. Robot by eradicating him completely with Adderall. The ADHD-treating stimulant does what it needs to do by inducing kernel panic — overloading Elliot’s brain so it shuts itself off — and getting rid of Mr. Robot, but it has side effects. Really severe side effects, like mania, sleeplessness, hallucinations of being drowned with cement and uncontrollable, blasphemous nihilism of the kind that ruins church groups. The Adderall program is unsustainable, and when the drug wears off, Mr. Robot is back.
Rami Malek, Mr. Robot
Meanwhile, the only person as paranoid as Elliot is Mobley, who thinks Elliot and Darlene (Carly Chaikin) are in cahoots with the shadowy hackers of the Dark Army to bump off anyone who may connect them to the 5/9 hack. Fsociety is in tatters and about to start tearing itself apart.
Over at Evil Corp, Price is playing mind games with Angela. He tells her he’s taking her out to dinner on a Saturday night, and she thinks it’s a sexual thing, but when she gets there — walking past a throng of protestors outside of the superfine restaurant — there are two other Evil Corp execs there. When they leave, Price reveals that they participated in the coverup of environmental pollution that killed Angela’s mother (and Elliot’s father). He gives her a disc with evidence of the executives’ white collar crimes and says that she can put them away for years. He seems to be teaching her to be ruthless. She doesn’t trust him, but she’s seduced, too.
We learned more about FBI agent investigating fscociety Dominique DiPierro (Grace Gummer) this episode. Mostly that she’s very good at her job and is so lonely she’s asking her Amazon Alexa (a sponsor of tonight’s episode) when the world is going to end. While trying to get information out of Romero’s mother about his murder, she stumbles upon a flyer advertising the post-hack End of the World Party at fsociety HQ, and she takes a ride out to Coney Island and finds the arcade.
But the biggest story of all this episode was Elliot’s new neighborhood acquaintance Ray. Ray is up to some sort of scheme where he and his mysterious partner have to beat up their own employees over disappearing bitcoin. He’s probably running some sort of Silk Road-like online black market, and he wants to recruit Elliot to fix his security flaws. Which, to be honest, might just be problems with bitcoin. It’s a very unstable currency. Like Elliot, Ray is haunted by loss and talks to a loved one who isn’t there, in his case his wife who died in a car accident. He’s also on dialysis. He knows about Elliot’s imaginary friend because he read Elliot’s journal, because after Elliot threw it away he got it from the chaplain, who’s a friend of his (the use of the word “chaplain” is the clearest indicator yet that Elliot is institutionalized). And he has similar ideas about control being an illusion. In his words, it’s “about as real as a one-legged unicorn taking a leak at the end of a double rainbow.” So now Elliot’s being manipulated by people both in his head and outside.
This dense episode ratcheted up the anxiety even higher than it already was. Everyone was on the verge of succumbing to complete panic this episode. And from the looks of things, it’s going to get so much worse. Elliot may have to experiment with Xanax next.
