Conflict

The event is here! The wait for the Deus Group hack is over!

Any episode with hacking is always fun and this week was no different. Elliot and Darlene camp out across the street from the Deus Group meeting and get ready to steal 100 phone numbers and more money than the GDP of almost every industrial nation on earth combined.

First, Darlene and Mr. Robot have a rough start as she quickly notices that Elliot isn’t talking to her and he won’t tell her why Elliot is taking a “rest.” He wants to leave it up to Elliot to tell her about what happened with Vera. Darlene keeps her own secret as well, for some reason not saying a word about Dom and the Dark Army experience that ended like, a half-hour ago. Darlene hides her own trauma well.

Price makes a surprise visit and hands them data about Whiterose’s Congo plan. He wants to cover every angle to make sure Whiterose is destroyed. He brings up Angela, much to Darlene’s confusion and Elliot tells her about Price being Angela’s father.

So the hack starts and the Alderson’s have to navigate a lot of sudden hurdles to complete the hack. Darlene runs to the new secret location of the meeting and brilliantly publishes a new fsociety video doxxing the Deus Group members to flush them out of the meeting so they can hack their phones.

Price keeps Whiterose busy and he proves that a man with nothing to lose is the most dangerous kind. It’s not a good idea to tell a guy you need information from that no matter what, you are going to kill him. Whiterose knows Elliot is up to something but doesn’t know what and as each stage of the hack comes out, she becomes more bewildered. At the start of this, her right hand woman walks out in disgust, unable to talk sense into her boss’s Elliot obsession for the final time. As Whiterose loses control, she gets desperate.

In a brazen attempt to manipulate Elliot, Whiterose claims that Angela is still alive and if they join forces, she’ll reunite them. Price even believes him at first utterance of this nonsense. This is a two-folded ploy. One, classic Whiterose manipulation. She did convince Angela to work for her, promising to bring things back the way they used to be (bring back her mother). Whiterose will say anything to get what she wants. The other side is that Whiterose believes she’s telling the truth. I’m convinced that the Congo project is some kind of time travel scheme. Whiterose is obsessed with the past and for her, the event that’s killing her is her lover’s suicide 30 years ago.

Elliot sees through the lie quickly. At first, he wants to believe. Then he considers the source. The person who not only killed Angela but the one who first twisted her mind into a person he didn’t recognize. She hurt Angela for her own gain long before ordering her death. It all comes together for Price and Elliot: Justice for Angela. Whiterose has gotten her way for so long she knows no boundaries. Elliot and Darlene are the final lines of resistance.

With the 1% essentially wiped out, Price gloats, happy he could finally hurt Whiterose. She snaps and shoots him in public.

With three episodes left, it’s a big mystery as to what’s next. The main goal has been accomplished. Whiterose is trapped, the final scene is the feds raiding her mansion while she puts on makeup. What happens to her? Suicide? Darlene has put the entire Deus Group on blast so Whiterose doesn’t have any friends or favors to call in. Her network is destroyed. Anything that isn’t a liquid asset is presumably gone, I don’t think she could afford a lawyer at this point.

Elliot and Darlene certainly have a lot to talk about. What are they going to do with Dom? Tyrell was talked about but no one knows if he’s alive. Elliot’s mystery personality was talked about at the start so we’re guaranteed to see that (and we better. Good luck on making this satisfying after all of this build-up). I overlooked a major clue on this front. Last post I mentioned the scene with Young Elliot and his mother in the skyrise meeting room from Episode 2. That isn’t reality, it’s Elliot’s mind. it’s some kind of meeting place for his personalities. Through the window, you can see the Freedom Tower and that wasn’t built when Elliot was that young. In this episode, Mr. Robot meets mom and Young Elliot there. So his mother is one of his personalities, one of the parts that make Elliot. She is an awful entity–his anger. Young Elliot is his stolen youth–his innocence and Mr. Robot is his ideal father–the figure made to hide the sexual abuse. The other personalities know about the fourth, the mother says in this episode that he hasn’t been awake in a long time. Mr. Robot corrects her, saying he woke up to talk to Vera and Darlene. None of the personalities knew about that, so this personality can move entirely undetected. So what part of Elliot does this personality represent, why was it created, and what will he look like? Mr. Robot thinks Darlene could be key to get him to come out.