"Who Is Mr. Robot’s Landlord?" Eps3.8stage3.torrent

Sorry for the delay, USA Network took forever to post the photos for the new episode (9:45 am).

This was one of the most confounding and confusing recent episodes of Mr. Robot (and If I read everything correctly Elliot has become quite a Machiavellian of late). 

In case you missed last week’s  “Who Is Mr. Robot’s Landlord?” here is my recap of Eps3.7_dont-delete-me.ko

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If you have not watched every episode of Mr. Robot or read Red Wheelbarrow this could contain spoilers *Spoiler Alert*

Tricky Tricky

It is easy to get misled watching Mr. Robot.

One of Sam’s favorite tricks is to make us feel like what Sam and Mr. Robot are doing is happening simultaneously when, obviously, if they are both on screen simultaneously, things are happening at different times.

In this particular instance, at the conclusion of “Elliot’s Excellent Adventure,” Mr. Robot took control of E-Prime and took the opportunity to do a little online research.

Ultimately, he figured out three things:

1. Elliot now knows how to reverse 5/9 by using the FBI server to get Romero’s data encryption keys.

2. The Dark Army is running the FBI

3. That he needs Tyrell Wellick and Elliot to join the team he is putting together to fight the Dark Army

Yes, it was Mr. Robot and not Elliot who set the wheels of this entire plan into operation (which also suggests that  Mr. Robot and Elliot are working towards a common purpose for the first time in a LONG time).

Sam misled us with simultaneous storylines to maintain the fiction that Elliot was in charge and the fiction that Mr. Robot and Elliot are working at cross-purposes.

Ever since that moment where Elliot convinced Mr. Robot that the Dark Army had betrayed them in order to stop Stage 2 (unsuccessfully), you could tell how angry Mr. Robot was to find out that the Dr. Army had hijacked his plans.

And let us not forget that last week Elliot admitted (again) that he IS Mr. Robot (remember, Dissociatives are fragmented wholes and the “alters” are mostly protective in nature).

<We appear to be approaching reintegration rather than disintegration>

What is it that Mr. Robot and Elliot are up to? Nothing too ambitious, they are just planning to take down the Dark Army.

The first step is to get Tyrell on board, so Mr. Robot goes to see Tyrell who was lying on the floor crying next to his baby’s crib (very sad).

I am sure it will come as no surprise that Mr. Robot manages to offend Tyrell so much that he pulled out the plastic gloves from those halcyon days during Season 1 when he used to pay homeless guys to let him beat them up and commenced to beating the hell out of Mr. Robot.

Luckily:

1) Mr. Robot suggests to Tyrell that the Dark Army is planning to use him for something or he would be dead before he gets pummeled.

And

2) Mr. Robot is literally saved by the bell when, of all people, Philip Price shows up at Tyrell’s place unannounced.

Oddly enough, it is Phillip Price who sets Mr. Robot on his new course with Elliot.

Hubris or Leadership?

Phillip Price: “You’re still thinking like a lone wolf”

Mr. Robot: “How should I be thinking?”

Phillip Price: Like a leader...

Mr. Robot: “I am a leader”

Phillip Price: “Where are your followers?” “You can't force an agenda, Mr. Alderson, you have to inspire one.”

A few weeks ago I wrote an article suggesting that Phillip Price was going to do something to seriously mess up ‘whiterose’ plans...and tonight he did.

Price spent the first few minutes insulting both Tyrell (you will be CTO in name only) and Elliot/Mr. Robot (see above) and then gave them a queer kind of pep talk (The writers did a really nice job here setting this all up in a flashback scene where Price insults Wellick in almost exactly the same way back in the day).

Why else would he do that unless his point was to point them both directly at ‘whiterose?’

Now, Phillip Price will never be confused with Knute Rockne (a famous old-time football coach known for one particularly inspiring half-time speech), but he was there to move pieces on the chessboard into position against the Dark Army.

Mission Accomplished.

Three  other nice things about the flashback:

1) The return of Terry Colby (“The Last Honest Man”)

2) Phillip Price going gaga for what is, most likely his daughter (but could still be something darker - notice later that Angela is walking around NYC with the book Lolita in her cart)

3) Nice to see Gideon again too (RIP)

Also, there is another clue, Price is trying to keep control of E-Corp (which is the opposite of his ‘instructions’).

So, after Price leaves, Mr. Robot goes home and continues his research until he starts to feel himself glitching and leaves Elliot a message (“They own the FBI”) setting the rest of the events of the episode into motion.

“Jesus H, I Think I’m Drunk”

Darlene is in big trouble.

For some reason, Darlene and Elliot meet up at Fsociety headquarters (despite it having been an FBI crime scene not that long ago) to discuss hacking the “Fort Knox of closed networks,” the FBI’s Sentinel data system.

Even more surprising, especially after everything she learned about herself after Cisco’s death, Darlene decides to talk Elliot into letting her hack Sentinel using what she has learned during her time as an FBI informant.

Darlene’s attempts to get into Sentinel didn’t go well.

I need to think about it a bit more, but I am fairly convinced that Elliot knew Darlene was going to fail and agreed to let her go on purpose.

I think the point was to make sure Santiago told the Dark Army that Elliot had a way to reset the E-Corp information and because he needed them to be confused about what he was actually doing (taking down or saving E-Corp or something totally different).

Yes, I am saying there is a better than average chance that E-Prime just sacrificed Darlene to gain access to the Dark Army accounts/servers.

Darlene manages to get close to gaining access to Sentinel by coming on to Dom.

She meets Dom for drinks and when her first attempt to copy Dom’s ID information fails she changes tactics and seduces Dom. After they hook up, Darlene wakes up and tries to break into Dom’s safe. Dom catches her and takes he back into FBI custody. 

For some inexplicable reason, after first being warned by Elliot, she decides to let both Dom and Santiago about Romero’s encrypted keys and how to find them.

I hope that Santiago’s refusal to act (finally) tips Dom off that he is corrupt (remember back in the day when Dom figured everything out in mere seconds?).

Sad to see this all of this happen, it certain;y makes sense for Dom to fall for Darlene’s gambit (or play along) because she so desperately would want or desire Darlene’s interest to be genuine but at the same time she would be innately suspicious of Darlene’s advances.

Even worse, it sure sounded like Santiago was begging Irving to solve the Darlene problem for him.

There have been a ton of theories about Darlene dying this season and I mostly agree that she seems to be following a tragic path.

Also a quick tip of the cap to Dom for having such a cool Patsy Cline poster in her apartment. 

“It’s You Who Is Trying To Stop Our Plan”

Angela Moss is paying the price for being a true believer, she has been lost for a few weeks in a loop between her own faith in ‘whiterose’ promised future and the part of herself who understands her complicity for causing Stage 2.

Unfortunately, her “solution’ to her dilemma is to faithfully believe that ‘whiterose’ is (or will be) healing the present by regenerating the past.

In other words, Angela’s need to maintain faith with ‘whiterose’ has reduced her to a paranoid conspiracy theorist. She has become a crazy disheveled person wandering the streets of New York City mumbling to herself.

Elliot finds her outside his apartment and he starts to quiz her about what she believes is happening but their sojourn is interrupted when they walk into his place to find his old pal Leon sitting on his couch and apologizing for messing up his flow.

Angela decides to ask Leon a string of barely coherent but challenging questions all while Elliot is trying to get her to get the heck out of there before Leon loses patience with her crazy questions and decides to kill her.

Angela, now convinced that even Elliot is surveilling her, decides to pack up her most important belongings, leave her apartment, and start wandering the streets of NYC permanently (with a shopping cart).

One of the few visible items that we see Angela put in the shopping cart is her copy of  the novel Lolita (Nabokov's book was also on her desk in Season 2’s ‘whiterose’ encounter (as was the “just hanging around” poster that we now see was part of the crazy decor of  her apartment). (Angela also appears to be experiencing the same “glitching” camera effect that Elliot experiences when he is switching between himself and his Mr. Robot personas).

Almost immediately, Angela runs into a guy (dressed like Cisco was in Season 1)  trying to sell her a mixtape (just like Cisco sold her and Ollie a mixtape that allowed the Dark Army to hack into E-Corp via Allsafe during Season 1). After informing the seller that she won’t fall for the mixtape trick again, a van door opens behind her and two men in suits ask her to come with them (given the Ciscoesque set-up, I am assuming, like, at the end of Season 2, she is being picked up by the Dark Army but who knows for sure).

Angela’s response is “we’re ready.”

Something very strange is happening here, has Angela:

* Gone totally crazy?

* Become Dissociative too (possibly sharing her body with her Mom or younger self)?

* started living in multiple timelines or in parallel universes (remember one of the things Sam suggested was that they would not introduce time-travel this last in the show, which could suggest that time-travel has always been part of the show).

Regardless, it appears that Angela is now with the Dark Army, E-Corp, or a new third party

There Is No Stage Three

Elliot just used a Trojan Horse to fool the Dark Army (he offered them the gift of his laptop and then used it to crack their network).

Elliot Insists on meeting with ‘whiterose’ to discuss Stage Three while simultaneously sending Darlene to reverse the 5/9 hack at a place that he knows has been captured or is “owned” by the Dark Army.

So why would Elliot want the Dark Army to simultaneously think he is trying to both save and destroy the E-Corp?

I suspect that it is so they would be curious enough to need to find out what he was really up to (precipitating the need to copy/scan his hard drive).

Leon takes Elliot to meet with Grant, not ‘whiterose,’ and Grant and his associates make a copy of Elliot’s hard drive (in order to see what he is ‘actually’ up to) and rebuff his invitation to help with Stage 3 (taking down E-Corp by taking down E-Coin)

Getting the Dark Army to image his hard drive was the trojan horse.

Once they opened the right file, it allowed Elliot to access the Dark Army network.

Or as Elliot put it:

“Now I own the Dark Army.”

It also now appears that Grant is not just a business associate but also the lover of ‘whiterose.’ He calls her out on the bad decisions that he feels she has made lately and concludes by suggesting that it is time for them to kill Elliot.

Dr. Strangelove

It can’t be inconsequential that one of the first things that Elliot sees on his computer screen is a map of the United States and a map that shows almost every section of the country covered in what looks to be explosions <okay I was wrong here, I have seen a screenshot and it is all the computers that the Dark Army has infected and captured - they have computers all over the world>

Three new things about the Dr. Strangelove theory:

1) ‘whiterose’ is furious that the Washington Township operation isn’t getting moved to the Congo quickly enough. I am still more than a bit confused as to why the facility has to be moved to where the materials are, but hopefully, that will all make sense soon enough.

2) During the pre-show highlights, clips about Cobalt, Coltan, and the Congo were all spliced in.

3) At one point, a newspaper headline is shown talking about the US engaging in an imminent retaliatory cyber-attack on Iran.

Not entirely sure where this is headed. I still think the Dr. Strangelove theory is in play (where ‘whiterose’ creates dirty bombs and tries to detonate them in the United States igniting a war between Iran and the United States that escalates.

Okay, one episode left and this episode left me with more questions than answers.

It should be interesting (to say the least).