All your crazy theories about ‘Mr.
Robot’ are wrong.
We were prepared for apocalypse.
Credit: Michael Parmelee/USA Network
A tumble down the rabbit-hole, maybe even a trip through a wormhole.
Instead, the season 2 finale ofMr.
Robotgave us the anti-apocalypse.
Oh, sure, there were revelations.
So it was slightly anti-climactic, too.
The emotional peak of Darlene’s season?
Not a surprise, although it does keep some of Tyrell Wellick’s mystery alive.
Where’s he been?
Hanging out at “Mt.
Olympus” for some of the time, it would seem.
Behold Stage 2 of The Dark Army’s master plan!
It wasn’t about hacking the fabric of the space-time continuum it was about shredding documents.
But the explosion didn’t happen.
(Not on camera, at least.)
In doing so, Tyrell did to Elliot for real what Elliot thought he did to Tyrell last season.
But we might need to get used to it.
Funny how our brains work like that, and how cleverMr.
Robotis at dramatizing that.
Do you know where you’re going?
Or are you just making this up as you go along?
Where are my answers?
Screw you and your art, Sam Esmail!
Just satsify me and confirm my theories, dammit!
THIS IS ALL ABOUT ME, NOT YOU!
Ever the sensitive soul, Tyrell’s violence against his partner left him shaken.
They had a shared destiny!
They had such great grok!Elliot, why have you forsaken me?
Such was the ironic enlightenment of “pyth0n_pt2.p7z.”
We were expecting an electrifying, transcendent corker.
Instead, the snaky little devil deconstructed our more fanciful expectations of the show.
The finale was a pretty little “Nope” machine.
Was there aBack To The Future IItime travel/alt-reality twist?
Was Dom pals with Elliot and Darlene when they were all kids?
(But Dom does share a passion forThe Careful Massacre of the Bourgeoisie.)
Nope, nope, and nope.
Just a deluded, despairing dude with daddy issues, just like Elliot.
Oh, and wouldMr.
“[You] are not on some TV show.This isn’tBurn Notice.
There are no blue skies for you out there.
Characters like you are not welcome here.”
It’s about characters.
Surrealism, meta, and far-out ideas are meant for thematic, metaphorical, and subtextual purposes only.
NoStranger Thingswackadoodle is intended.
It was the culmination of a “FGod!”
season that equated religion with a “a poorly written sci-fi franchise.”
In debunking genre-stretching notions,Mr.
Robotsaid, nope, we’re not going to be that franchise.
The two-part finale was a one-two punch.
Part two was a return to order.
Robotwas all of last year.
Trenton revealed that she had made a game-changing discovery.
“If what I discovered is real, do you know that means?
It means we could potentially undo this whole thing and put everything back the way it was.”
Once again, we were being goaded to think: time travel.
Frederick and Tanya, ya burnt!)
Of course, it’s possible I’m readingMr.
The finale used Kraftwerk’s “Hall of Mirrors” to comment on Elliot.
The refrain: “Even the greatest stars lives their lives in the looking glass.”
This song is so on the nose, you wonder if it inspired the whole damn show.
How long has Sam Esmail been waiting to play that tune?
Robotand our conception of what kind of story it is.
But the verses also surely speak to Esmail, too, and his relationship toMr.
Robot, how it’s a personal work born of so many inspirations.
And not justFight Club.
Did this scene mean that Tyrell was hallucinating Mr. We got a new version of the same scene, only with Elliot in place of Mr. Rami Malek’s soft impression of Christian Slater was impressive.
The distinct persona he adopts when Mr.
Robot takes over Elliot commanding, confident, slightly scary is cult leader compelling.
You get how the members of fsociety or anyone could fall for him.
I think we can conclude that Tyrell’s lunatic God talk was the result of ideas that Elliot-as-Mr. Tyrell is mentally unbalanced.
He also aspires to be a “master of the universe” like Phillip Price.
Elliot recognized this and fogged Tyrell’s brain with hyperhuman, overman blue sky dreaming.
Thus Spoke the Mock Zarathustra.
But so were cloudy skies and clouded minds.
Robot’s way) of nagging him (with a luminous detail!)
to get back on mission.
The menu that contained the cipher which Mr.
Robot cracked last week another metaphor for fan puzzling was from a place called “Red Wheelbarrow BBQ.”
+Tyrell took Elliot to their secret lab in a building in what appeared to be lower Manhattan.
+The finale paid off one of the season’s implicit quasi-sci-fi references, if only to blow it up.
Elliot came off like a lunatic in his showdown with Tyrell.
“He doesn’t exist,” he told Mr. “I’m the only one who exists.
It’s time to finally take back control.Realcontrol.”
Well, remember the name of Ray’s black market website?
“Midland City.”
That’s a location in the far-out and often very meta fiction of Kurt Vonnegut.
He believes it to be true and goes nuts.
The novel builds to a metafictional apocalypse.
The novel ends with an illustration of Vonnegut crying.
Vonnegut returned to Midland City inDead-Eye Dick and destroyed it with a neutron bomb.
cheering as they watched E Corp. HQ crumble to the ground.
(In my recap of that episode, I wondered if the Mr. NEXT: I am the moth.
JOANNA, SCOTT AND DEREK
+The most disturbing story in the finale was the Joanna-Scott Knowles stuff.
Joanna confronted him on messing with her reality.
And in this cunning, queasy way, Mr.
Robot gave us one more allegory for TV showrunning in a season full of them.
She scripted his confession, performed it for him, and asked him to perform it back.
Basically, Joanna played director, guiding an actor through a performance.
And after some initial reservation, Derek bought into it, completely.
Three thoughts: 1.
Is this what it’s like to be directed by Sam Esmail?
Joanna should moonlight as Whitrerose’s hypnotist.
She claimed that the FBI was running one to smoke out Tyrell.
He’d been accidentally shot by a stray bullet fired by a neighbor.
Did you guys believe all of her?
Was she bluffing and fluffing her story as part of her smaller “python” play on Darlene?
Their war pivoted on the matter of proof.
But this begs a question:
+If Tyrell is alive… how do we explain the shell-casing then?
Did Elliot shoot Tyrell or not?
Dom began by being transparent about herself, albeit the purpose of playing Darlene.
Darlene pushed back: She knew she was no great shakes.
But Dom insisted she could prove otherwise.
She brought her into the inner sanctum of their investigation.
There was a grease board charting the fsociety conspiracy and even more filled with notes.
To my eyes, it looked a lot like the writers room of a TV show.
What Darlene saw got under her skin.
The conspiracy board overwhelmed her.
Fear of betrayal by the people she loves the most is her exploit.
And Elliot lying to her about an alliance with Tyrell would qualify as betrayal.
and she worked it.
What do you think it says about Darlene?
About the relationship between fan and show and vise versa?
Robot, you’re my flame, and I’m your moth.
Can’t wait for the game to resume again next year.
See you again next season?
