Who Is Mr. Robot’s Landlord? Recap of Season Four “404 Not Found”

Hello friend...

I have been writing about Mr. Robot for a very long time. You can read all my earlier writing about the show using this guide.

We have finally come down to this one final season, hopefully, we will get answers to many pressing questions (I put together this list of questions in advance of the final season)

Watchmen is fantastic.
— Sam Esmail (@samesmail) October 25, 2019

You can also follow me on Reddit (I am ypsifactj48, I usually hang around r/Mr.Robot and the Black Mirror and Orange Is the New Black rooms.

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

“Were you on Big Brother?”

Merry Christmas Eve?

Okay, not to jump to the very end but so far Elliot has lost:

Mobley, Trenton, Edward, Magda, Romero, Shayla, Angela and now Tyrell Wellick

I guess it is a good thing he still has at least two friends who live inside his head because he is pretty much down to just Darlene and whoever is left on his imaginary friend tree.

In case you missed the incredibly thick fog of despair throughout this episode, Elliot has almost lost whatever is left of the war entirely.

Perhaps you remember a scene during season two where Elliot dreamed that he was having dinner with all of his friends, Sam Esmail presented this dinner as Elliot’s ultimate outcome, his perfect endpoint. Now, sad to say, with one exception, the only place where he could attend that perfect dinner is in the afterlife.

And, I hate to do this, but I have to ask WHY? What has all of this been for?

First Elliot destroyed the economy to eliminate everyone’s debt, then he found out blowing up the economy made everything worse and E-corp and the Dark Army even more powerful, so then he reversed the hack...which made E-Corp and the Dark Army more powerful.

So, now, for some reason, he thinks the answer is to destroy ‘whiterose,’ and so far he has managed to get trapped once and probably twice (I still believe Olivia is a plant or handler).

At least we learned one thing for sure, somewhere under all the depression, bullshit, defense mechanisms, and nonsense, Elliot does care about the people in his life and despite all of his prodigious talents, almost all of the people that he cares about are now dead

What happens now? What was the point? Why did we do all of this?

And also, why in the world did they attack the truck in the first place? If disrupting the Dark Army surveillance meant they would be dead men walking…why not just let the surveillance go on while you use it to your advantage or subvert the information Dark Army gets from the surveillance? Yes, I get that Tyrell messed up and tipped the strategy, but it is not like it seemed like a particularly great plan and ‘whiterose’ has made clear she gets that Price’s ploy is likely really Elliot’s ploy.

My personal guess is that Wellick, facing a very similar conundrum as Dom is, decided to go on a suicide mission. I think Dom is deciding deep down if she still has any faith in the world left and Tyrell has decided for certain that he does not have any such faith left.

And yes, I get that some will suggest he is not dead…But lately, the suggestion of death has meant death on Mr. Robot.

RIP Tyrell Wellick. Sorry, you never actually got to become either CTO or CEO of E-corp.

“My Preference, You Are Hanging From a Rope”

Darlene is trying to find Elliot, and work out a lot of issues, but instead, she finds Tobias.

Tobias is a random guy she runs into on her end of this somewhat bizarre episode. He is a guy who dresses up as Santa to visit children's cancer wards for Christmas and then gets drunk with friends after. He sees Darlene trying to steal what he thinks was his car and tries to stop her. Darlene offers to drive him home if he will subsequently loan her his car to “fun an errand.”

Because he is drunk, he agrees, and they begin the adventure along to the song Joey by Concrete Blonde, which, unless I am totally crazy, is a band that was made popular for a short time after a cover they played of a Leonard Cohen song appeared in the Christian Slater movie “Pump Up The Volume.”

Oh, by the way, Darlene needs Elliot to help break into a place called Virtual Reality because Olivia’s clearance isn’t good enough for what they need her clearance to accomplish. Sidenote, way back many summers ago, there was a Mr. Robot VR experience game involving Darlene (does anyone remember anything relevant from that experience?).

It is also very clear from this episode that Darlene loves Elliot and that Elliot finally realizes he not only loves Darlene but that he has been terrible to her recently (true).

“Everybody Knows”

“Pump Up the Volume” was about a young pirate radio deejay named Mark Hunter, but his on-air radio name was “Happy Harry Hard-On.”

Mark was played by Christian Slater.

Dom’s partner in her IRC chat was named:

Happyhardonhenry806

Mark gets arrested at the end of the film but only after he tells all his followers that the world belongs to them and that they should “make their own future.”

Everybody Knows, the Leonard Cohen version was also featured in Pump Up the Volume...and as you may remember, Sam used the Leonard Cohen song Democracy in a trailer for Season 3.

What does it all mean?

I once hypothesized that Mr. Robot would be Sam Esmail’s answer to the cop-out at the end of Fight Club, in other words, where Fight Club ended with the bank's collapsing (literally), Mr. Robot wants to deal with the ethical consequences of collapsing the world economy?

Perhaps the point is that we don’t need saviors, revolutionaries, people in fsociety masks, or superheroes. At the end of the day, what we need is to all be at a table together, connected through our caring for each other and knowing that together we are responsible for our own future.

Or maybe it is that each of the remaining characters needs to stop and decide what they can do to make the world a better place (with diminishing time and resources).

Anyway, Dom has a long sex-chat with Happyhardonhenry806 (after first getting off thinking about Darlene). While Dom gets propositioned for an IRL meet by Harry (after a lot of really over-the-top sex chat), Dom fantasizes (at the time we think it is real) that the person she is chatting with is actually a woman and that they hook up. Right before they get from messing around to sex, Dom goes in the bathroom only to find out that her date is Dark Army and that she can never escape.

Her reality is her nightmare, and she knows no way out.

All she has at the end of the episode is herself in the mirror.

“Pike’s Hollow”

This was very much a Sam Esmail David Lynch homage episode, heavy doses of both “Lost Highway” and Twin Peaks (a town nobody can find, a gas station attendant who sends them on a wild goose chase, everything in shadows and fog).

There was only one other time I remember Elliot being stuck somewhere off the grid and that was when he chose to allow himself to be sent to jail for stealing Flipper from Lenny.

In both cases, it was nearly fatal.

But for intervention by Leon, Elliot would have been attacked and killed in jail (Leon literally saved his life).

But for intervention by Tyrell, Elliot would have been shot by the Dark Army soldier who was watching him from the van.

It is not even entirely clear why they decided to intervene to interrupt the surveillance, what was the plan? Motivations are getting murkier and murkier and things are getting desperate.

Anyway, somehow Tyrell took care of the Dark Army soldier and now Elliot has to burn the van, but Tyrell is gone.

Team Fsociety is down to one dissociative hacker, his sister, and Philip Price.

Okay, I think this was mostly an episode addressing character motivations and conveying that our team of plucky revolutionaries has hit rock bottom. They have very little hope left and have to take stock and figure out if there is anything left to fight for or any hope left that a fight could be successful.

That is all I have got tonight, have a great week.

Fun Society

Every week, I will write another recap until we finish this journey together.

If you have any interest in criminal justice reform I am also the host of the Decarceration Nation Podcast

If you like Orange Is the New Black, you can read my recaps of that series using this guide.

If you like Black Mirror, you can read my recaps of that series using this guide.

Pump Up The Volume "404 Not Found"