Who Is Mr. Robot’s Landlord? Recap of Season Four “402 Payment Required”

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)

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*

“Trying to Stop a Speeding Train By Standing In Front Of It”

Well, it wasn’t exactly rocket science, but I was right Phillip Price is working with Elliot (and his now larger crew) to take down ‘whiterose.’

I do, however, like the idea of social media and online life being the silent coup, the great in the open conspiracy, that corporations used to supplant governments and subjugate the public. To a great extent, this theory is functionally correct. 

Usually, when you have a debate about privacy, some wiseass will inevitably say, “if you have nothing to hide, who cares about invasions of privacy.” The truth is that it is of no matter at all if what you do in your private time is illegal or not, influencers with information can use what they find to leverage your cooperation at critical moments. In essence, we have spent a little over three seasons watching Elliot socially engineer people using their online information which he compiled in a matter of minutes. Imagine what corporations do, without you even knowing it, every single day using all of the information we have allowed them to compile every single day of our lives since the invention of the smartphone. 

Look at what we have learned from the Russian troll farms, people can be moved and hyper-targeted using data freely available online, it can change economies, it can crush lives, it can change governments. The first political campaign to truly effectively use this information to “manufacture consent” was President Obama but Cambridge Analytica and President Trump (with the help of Russia) took it to an entirely different level in 2016 and just like Koch Industries largely funded and informed the Tea Party movement, who is to say that corporations or sub-national actors are not generating Trump-leaning conspiracy theories? 

But that is really just the short con, the long con is moving people to work, buy, and sell. Our entire informational and entertainment infrastructures are entirely embedded in and made up of advertising specifically created for our tastes. Everything we connect with pushes us in subtle and unsubtle ways towards commerce, politics, activism, and community. There is not that much functional difference between the fields of human batteries suggested in the Matrix (bodies used to provide energy for an ascendant robot civilization) and our society full of human consumers powering corporate profits suggested by the show Mr. Robot. Putin wants his piece of the Deus Group...The Deus Group, in a sense, “owns” everyone who is connected to a networked set of devices. And the Deus group, is like Janice, always listening. 

One, I think intentional, take throughout the entire episode is people entering their security codes into Apple devices. In essence, this could be the ultimate insult, we have created a security infrastructure, complicated barriers between us and our systems. The corporations have us so on a leash, if this is correct, that we set up security to protect our ability to be manipulated.

Anyway, for those who don’t remember, Darlene “accidentally” killed Susan Jacobs because she did not know that Jacobs had a heart condition. Apparently, in order to take down ‘whiterose’ Elliot will have to recreate the long-deceased memory of Ms. Jacobs and use it to break into the Deus group when they all meet to decide Phillip Price’s successor.

“It’s Mom, She Died”

Darlene hated her Mom so much that once she, more or less, allowed herself to be kidnapped without much of a struggle. Darlene was so happy to have been kidnapped that you would almost have to believe she had “pre-Stockholm syndrome” (that she was just dreaming of the day she might be kidnapped).

In Red Wheelbarrow, at one point, Darlene ran away because her Mom wanted to kill a cat (I think it was a stray) she loved. What is worse, if I remember correctly, her Mom made her face it in a particularly cruel way once she showed back up.

One of my running theories, since Edward did not push Elliot out of the window, is that Elliot’s Mom was responsible for the traumatic break which resulted in Elliot becoming dissociative. I have nothing beyond anecdotal evidence for that theory yet, but it certainly seems possible.

It would be hard to imagine all of the complicated dynamics in this family, but one of the true remaining mysteries of the show is how Elliot became Elliot, Mr. Robot, and apparently Tyrell Wellick (more on this in a second).

Most of this episode is about Darlene and Elliot reconnecting and coming to grips, at least a little, with the death and internment of their mother’s remains. Elliot is less openly upset despite Darlene literally hating her mom. In some ways, I am almost more interested in how this all really started than I am in what ‘whiterose’ is actually up to.

I assume we will be finding out more soon, but for Elliot to dissociate, there has to have been a traumatic break (and one serious enough so that he needed to use multiple figments of his personality as buffers between himself and the world). Knowing the origin of Elliot’s rage, and what made him so radically vulnerable that he needed to dissociate into a semi-unified set of personalities is the real key to everything else.

Hopefully, we will get more clues soon.

Oh, also, Dom tried to be honest with her superior at work and it caused his death (Janice is always listening).

“I Got Mom’s Ashes”

Okay, so Elliot is a trio, and the third personality could be Tyrell Wellick.

Let me rephrase, it could have been a literal reveal, and the third personality could be the child Elliot (who hangs out with his Mother instead of Mr. Robot…which would mean a fourth personality). But, I am fairly sure that was a placeholder, and the actual identity is supposed to be Tyrell.

I say this because in the reveal scene, young Elliot, who I guess is theoretically an adoptee named Muhammad (if I remember correctly from last year’s surreal flashback episode...in other words, the flashback was Elliot trying to reconnect with his actual family...or at least that is my current operating theory) is sitting at the seat in the conference room which was occupied by Tyrell Wellick at the end of episode one and at the beginning of episode two of the first season

Now, I will be totally honest, this seems like total nonsense to me. 

Why? Because there are way too many scenes where people interact with Elliot and Tyrell as separate people throughout the series. Now, this could be a dodge, there are certainly times where, for instance, people seem to be talking to either Elliot or Mr. Robot while the other is present...but they never refer to them as Elliot and Mr. Robot. People have referred to Elliot and to Tyrell Wellick in the same room. In point of fact, after Elliot disabled the first Fsociety hack on Allsafe, Tyrell was asking Elliot questions in front of Ecorp and the entire Allsafe staff (Tyrell, in fact, dismissed Angela so that he could talk with Elliot). 

In addition, “where’s Tyrell Wellick” was a huge game throughout the second season and Wellick sightings happened while Elliot was in prison (although, in a sense, it makes sense that Tyrell would disappear at the same time Elliot disappeared). Tyrell Wellick was all over the news and is referenced as a hero by multiple secondary characters, how in the world could he both be Elliot from Allsafe to Angela, Darlene, and the entire staff there and also be Tyrell at Ecorp with nobody the wiser?

Also, and in addition, how could Elliot be married and speaking Swedish with Joanna with nobody knowing? Regardless, this does solve one serious problem, Elliot has done a TON of bad things despite his desire never to do bad things (see 71 buildings, the 5/9 hack, the jailbreak, and much more). Elliot needs a personality that could do the dirty work, apparently, that could be Tyrell. 

All I have to say is that the explanation after the full reveal had better make a whole lot of sense, there is a TON of contradictory data to work through. I had this discussion MANY times with people on Reddit over the last few years and we always decided it couldn’t be true based on other people reacting to both Elliot and Wellick separately in the same scenes.

Okay, if I am totally wrong, I will apologize in advance, but there is no doubt that was literally the chair Tyrell was in (surrounded by lawyers) in episode two of the first season.

There is the question of why Elliot sees himself as a well-dressed crazy Swedish man. I am going with Occam’s razor, just like Edward was his beloved step-dad, Tyrell was the infamous father who he didn’t like but who taught him the Red Wheelbarrow poem.

Okay, I woke up this morning and have decided the Tyrell story doesn’t make sense…I have decided there is an answer and it comes from an article I wrote in June of 2017 called “Understanding Friendship.” - here is a quote from that article:

“In fairness, we don’t really know that “we” (the television audience) are the object of his dialog. In fact, it is possibly just narcissism to assume that he is talking to us when he makes aside (he could easily, in fact, be talking to another alter or with another entity or spirit residing in his own head or slightly outside of the camera’s coverage of the filmed scenes). It is certainly worth considering that it could only be our own collective narcissism that leads us to believe that Elliot is actually talking to each of us directly (Let us not forget, this is a show full of manipulation and misdirection).”

Elliot’s friend has never been us, it has been the child version of himself from his surreal dreams, the kid at the desk. There are MANY times where Elliot has said he will need or needs his friend to do things which he will not be able to do alone. The trick is that we see Elliot with his father, just like we have seen Elliot with his friend (see the trip to the beach). The “trick” was assuming the friend was t ”US.” It was not us.

One final option, his third personality is Magda (his Mom).

I would put the odds:

Mohammed 40%

Magda 40%

Tyrell 20%

That is just my guess for now. Totally riffing off of Darlene talking about adoption papers.

That is all I have for tonight, it was a lot, and Janice is still terrifying.

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.