Well, damn.
Apparently all Mr. Robot needed to shock the crap out of us again was to take a break from Elliot and his Mind Palace. After last weeks disappointing Brain prison has been real prison all along! episode, the show leaves the be-hoodied boy wonder off camera entirely to focus on the other Alderson sibling: the magnetic but mysterious Darlene. And lest you thought all the crazy wound up on her brothers side of the gene pool, boy, have we got a tale for you.
Were familiar with Elliots MO at this point: Committing a morally dubious act? No problem. Just tune out and let your imaginary friend do all the dirty work! Darlene, on the other hand, performs her darkest deeds with eyes wide open. (No wonder those eyes looked like two haunted wells out of which that girl from The Ring might emerge at any moment.) The raggedy remnants of fsociety are still holed up in the smart house they ganked from E Corps top lawyer, and with their newly acquired access to the FBI, its hackin time. Darlene, Trenton, Mobley and Cisco eavesdrop in on a conference call in which the Feds discuss Operation Berenstain (no relation to the bears), a program in which theyre surveilling millions of American citizens tech chatter in a blind attempt to uncover the perps behind Five/Nine. The gang shoots a quick video with our anti-heroine in the Monopoly man mask and fire it off to Vimeo.
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But all is not well in the society of f: No sooner does the vid go viral than the homes owner Susan returns from vacation only to find her beautiful pad infested with hackers. These guys may be great at breaking into systems, but they havent a clue what to do when faced with an actual person; all Darlene can think to do is try, as always, to own her.
Mr. Robot has given us a million scenes of people typing frantically into laptops, and props to Sam Esmail and his crew for always finding a way to make it feel fresh. Shots of the collective poring through Susans emails for dirt are intercut with a very shaky Angela singing karaoke at a bar a halting, piano-backed rendition of Tears for Fears Everybody Wants to Rule the World (which, in this show, is extra true). The editing ramps up the feeling of brittle helplessness that pervades the episode: Darlene may be in charge of the worlds second-most-powerful hacker collective and Angela may have climbed her way to the top of the corporate ladder, but neither really knows what to do with the power theyve accumulated.
For Darlene, the answer turns out to be going full-on homicidal. Shes had it in for Susan ever since she was four years old and saw the lawyer on TV, laughing at the moment the verdict exonerating E Corp in the toxic waste case was delivered. She explains this to her in a speech worthy of a Batman villain except shes the good guy here, right? The liberator with the dead dad? Thats harder to parse after Darlene tasers her foe straight into the pool, with full knowledge that since Susan has a pacemaker, an electric shock is a death sentence. Her body is disposed of in the same dog cremation ovens that they used to destroy fsocietys hard drives in Season One a brutal juxtaposition between wiping data and wiping human beings. People arent like computers; they dont behave according to a logical set of rules, and they dont burn nearly as easily as silicon and plastic.
Theres one more string left to unravel: Cisco. He invites Darlene to crash at his place for the night, but as she finds out from a quick perusal of his laptop, hes reporting her whereabouts to the Dark Army. Cue our newly minted murderer bashing her boyfriend in the head with a baseball bat, and credits.
Fsociety has fully imploded, and this episode sends out a loud and clear signal: They need their Elliot back. This is the first episode to not feature its star, which was a bold and canny move. As broken as he is, Rami Maleks damaged-goods narrator is the glue that holds this whole operation together and now weve seen what the world looks like without him.
Stray thoughts:
Watch Carly Chaikin closely: Though Darlene only speaks in sureties, her true feelings about what shes done are all over her face. Like Malek, Chaikin is an incredibly expressive actor, and she brings so much more to the character than whats on the page.
Angela goes on a date with a dude who we later find out is spying on her for the FBI. But she ditches him to put the moves on an older man she meets at the bar, played by Mad Mens Mark Moses. A word of advice, Ange: Learn from Peggy Olsons mistakes and do not climb into bed with Duck Phillips.
A neat little allegory for how persistently corrupt systems hang on: The dogs that the hackers liberated from the pound last season all ended up getting recaptured in the end. And remember Rons, the coffee shop owned by the guy who ran the kiddie porn site Elliot shut down in the pilot? Its still very much up and running. The more things change .
Previously: Check and Mate