Not Acceptable
This is an episode of moral quandaries and boy does it get rough. Elliot has always been an anti-hero. While he’s held the moral ground in most cases, a lot of his hacking is “for the greater good.” He’ll extort/blackmail people to get what he wants and now that he’s on an intense time table with no room for error, he’s never been more aggressive.
He needs more from Olivia so he goes to visit her again. Getting access at Virtual Realty wasn’t enough, he still needs the digital key to the door to get in so he needs Olvia’s boss to log into work so he can steal his password.
He left Olivia on good terms, she didn’t know what he stole from her so she has no reason to be wary of him. When we last left her, I even wrote that he met a kindred spirit. She’s been through things that Elliot can relate to and I came away from it noting that he made a personal connection with her (I’m ignoring the sex in this btw) which is rare for him. When he shows up at her apartment, coffee in hand, he cuts to the chase. He tells her what he did and what he needs her to do and in order to force her to do it ASAP, he’s spiked her drink with an opiate. If she doesn’t call her boss and get him to log in, he’ll rat her out and her kid will be taken away from her for good.
The fallout is intense, to say the least. Elliot tries to make himself feel better–justify his actions–my slandering her job. ‘What do you think offshore bank accounts for megacorps are for? You know you work for an evil company, you’re complicit.’ In many cases he Elliot doesn’t see what he happens to the people he leverages, but here he’s face to face with it and he now has to walk around with that guilt. This scene is one of Elliot’s worst.
As I said last week, the threads are coming together. First, Dom goes straight for Darlene and we’re in another horrific scenario of blackmail. Janice tells Dom to take Darlene’s phone to find Elliot (who they really need) and kill Darlene. She has until 3:30 to do it (a little more than an hour iirc) and Dom understandably freaks out at the thought, as does Darlene. This scene was the most intense of the night for me with some of the best acting on the show. At the end of it, we’re probably in an even worse scenario. Let’s just say Janice is very punctual.
Finally, we’re with Vera and Krista and this goes pretty much as I expected it to. There’s a ton of menace going on here as Vera simply wants the goods on Elliot. At one point she tries to switch the tables and use her profession on him but it doesn’t work at all. She had a glimmer of hope for about 3 seconds that she could get the upper hand on him but she was grasping at straws trying to get into his childhood. Vera is also wrong too but to a lesser extent. He thinks the two were a couple, which is completely wrong and at first he doesn’t believe it. It doesn’t take too long for her to figure out she has no leverage and gives up her files on Elliot. Vera is about to find out about Mr. Robot.
Out of everything that is going on, this plot seems the most like a tangent to the entire Mr. Robot universe. The big question is, how important is this really? If this wasn’t happening, would we miss it? There would be fewer episodes, that’s for sure. The only answer is where is this going and that’s tough to nail down. What’s Sam Esmail’s point with this?
The main point I can think of goes along with what Elliot just did to Olivia. Fallout and consequences. Now Vera is 100% a piece of garbage and I’m totally on Elliot’s side with what he did to Vera to get rid of him. Until now, just about everyone Elliot dealt with in this way, Elliot didn’t have to worry about. They were done. They were gone. Vera is now the opposite of that. Vera knows he can use Elliot as a tool for his own power gain now he’s forcing himself back into Elliot’s life. Vera is now the consequence of Elliot’s actions. In life, things don’t always have a clean end.
Plus, we have the plotline of Elliot having a third personality that was snuck in a few weeks ago in the episode where Mama Aldersonr dies. The personality that kept the news that Vera was back from Elliot. Clearly this plotline was made to give Sam Esmail something to explore with of Vera. He put that (complicated) seed in there for a reason. But what is it? Where is he going with this? Some kind of message about power struggles? The scourge of criminal violence and drugs? At this point, I think it’s impossible to say. We have to go with, In Esmail We Trust on this one.