‘Mr. Robot’ Season 3 Finale: Reveals, Reversals and Reconciliations

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Season 3, Episode 10, ‘eps3.9_shutdown-r’

The frenetic Season 3 finale of “Mr. Robot” was thick with reveals, reversals and reconciliations, and left no tone unturned as it cycled through suspense and tragedy, high melodrama and horror spectacle. (Heeere’s Irving!) The final shot — not counting the post-credits stinger — struck an optimistic note as Elliot consummated the season’s radical reset theme by handing E Corp the keys to undoing the 5/9 hack.

But it was the scene just before that got at the essence of Season 3, by boiling things down to the core elements of “Mr. Robot”: A hoodied Elliot, monologuing with his alter ego in the bowels of New York.

“One good thing came out of all this,” he said. “They showed themselves, the top one percent of the top one percent, the ones in control, the ones who play God without permission.”

“I’m gonna take them down,” he said. “All of them.”

The takedown will have to wait for Season 4. But if there was one thing that linked the various players this season, it was that whatever their plans, dreams or aspirations, in the end they were simply tools for the gods of this story, people like Phillip Price and especially Whiterose, who aim to control the world and perhaps even the nature of time and space. Characters who thought they were smashing capitalism, winning back their family, bringing back their dead parent or fighting the good fight against cyberterrorism, learned that they were essentially pawns being pushed around a chessboard.

Over the course of the season Elliot, Mr. Robot and Tyrell Wellick discovered that their anarchic schemes had been orchestrated, or at least co-opted, by E Corp and the Dark Army. (Wellick got it from both sides, going from E Corp pariah to Dark Army patsy to E Corp figurehead.)

This week it was Angela and Dom’s turn to learn the extent of their manipulation, and it gutted them both, with Angela abandoning the dream of resetting her devastating past and Dom confronting a nightmarish future as a Dark Army mole. Even more plugged-in characters like Santiago and Whiterose’s sidekick Grant found out that though they thought they’d taken control of their situations, they were ultimately disposable.

From a narrative standpoint the revelations clarified a story that at times has gotten unwieldy this season, as evidenced by all the plot it had to shovel in the final two episodes. But by the end the reporting lines were clear: All of them led to Whiterose, with the possible exception of Angela, who now hates her and perhaps will align herself with her freshly revealed father Phillip Price. (I hadn’t put that one together, but why shouldn’t Angela get her own daddy issues?)

The finale picked up roughly where we left off last week, with the Dark Army targeting Elliot and Santiago trying to manage Darlene, adding Dom to the mix when she tried to intercede. I’m guessing Santiago’s brutal knockout of Dom took care of any remaining viewer sympathy for him, clearing the way for what came next: Irving channeling Jack Torrance in dispatching the agent with an ax to the chest.

He was just getting warmed up. Irving laid out the terms of Dom’s new Dark Army contract by treating Santiago like an especially stubborn piece of firewood, illustrating what would befall her loved ones should she stray from the plan. It was probably the goriest few minutes yet seen or heard on “Mr. Robot” — the sound design was the grisliest part — and it did the trick, while also retroactively redeeming Santiago somewhat. Assuming he saw something similar once upon a time, it’s hard to fault his choices.

Back in the barn, Leon applied similar leverage to Elliot, threatening to kill Darlene until he offered to hack open a path for the Washington Township plant to move to Congo. This turned out to be Whiterose’s goal all along. Unfortunately for Grant, he didn’t realize this until his henchmen were dead and his boss and (apparent) lover was on the phone, giving him the pre-suicide kiss off.

“Know that I will find you as soon as our project is complete,” Whiterose said. “But for the here and now, our time has come to an end.”

It was yet another vague reference to the reality altering scheme we first glimpsed in the season premiere, as well as confirmation that we won’t be getting any more details about it for now. We also still don’t know what Whiterose told or showed Angela last season to turn her into a true believer, though that’s less annoying than the explanation for Angela’s baroque disintegration over the past few weeks. Apparently it stemmed from feeling bad about her role in the E Corp bombings.

Now, the dementing effect of deep guilt is a worthy subject — many great and inspiring novels have been written about it. But as we discussed last week, Angela’s bag-lady turn was too cartoonish to inspire much beyond puzzlement, at best.

“Find a way to live with what you did,” Price told her in his first piece of paternal advice. We’ll try to do the same.

In the end the big reset that’s been presaged all season did transpire, but it was not a science-fiction or supernatural phenomenon — à la “Back to the Future,” or the “Superman” clip we saw near the end — but a coding one. Elliot sent the necessary recovery data to E Corp, a move enabled not by Romero, as we’ve been told, but by Mr. Robot.

That revelation was the latest sign of the growing reconciliation between Elliot’s two halves, who cooperated throughout the finale and are now communicating sans the mutual contempt that has defined their relationship. After spending most of the past two seasons in opposition, their acknowledgment of their commonality signals Elliot’s growing acceptance of his dark places, and his light ones, too.

“As much as there is a part of you in me, there is a part of me in you,” Elliot told Mr. Robot during their Wonder Wheel chat. Mr. Robot echoed the sentiment later, explaining why he built an escape clause into the 5/9 hack.

Elliot is too smart and has seen too much to think that undoing the hack will magically return everything to like it was before. (Which, as Darlene’s prostitute friend noted during their clumsy chat, wasn’t all that great for many people.) As for what it will do, exactly — or whether E Corp will even go through with it — your guess is as good as mine.

But Elliot’s cleareyed focus on retribution and the future (any future) was a final note of uplift in a season that has mostly been about shattered illusions. From the beginning, “Mr. Robot” has aimed to capture the feeling of being alive in these times, not just the techno-paranoia but more important the loneliness and anxiety of life mediated by screens and governed by ever more opaque forces and puppetmasters. (Note the Shepard Fairey-esque Putin graffiti.)

The defining emotional note of Season 3 was the crushing realization that your life is not your own, that you’ve been made a tool of shadowy power. It’s an insert-your-own-metaphor sensation, a response to everything from politicians who care more about megadonors than their constituents to social networks that turn your very identity — your thoughts, your tastes, your family photos — into a product to be packaged and sold to advertisers.

“Mr. Robot” has its flaws but even when it’s not totally working, it still feels more urgent than almost anything else on TV because of how it speaks to the bewildering experience of living in an age of information overload and fake facts, in which curated streams increasingly stand in for human interaction.

Which is to say, maybe there’s a part of Elliot in me, too. Or maybe I just need to get off Twitter.

A Few Thoughts While We Get the Chills

• In case it wasn’t clear, that was Fernando Vera (Elliot Villar), the drug-dealing escaped convict who had Shayla killed in Season 1, who showed up right at the end. I have no clue how he will fit into the story now but I do know that all his cosmic jive notwithstanding, that guy is terrifying.

• “I know how to fix this,” Santiago said in the barn. “So do I,” Irving replied softly, which was chilling even before I knew what he had in mind. Bobby Cannavale has been tremendous throughout, though maybe Irving’s “sabbatical” in Barbados means he’s done with the show for awhile.

• Here’s hoping we at least get some more back story about Irving’s relationship with Whiterose. “Remember Dollface, I was you years ago,” he told Grant. “I’ve already done my time.”

• So what did you think about the finale and Season 3 as a whole? Is Elliot finally on the mend? Are you O.K. with Angela? Which Sandals resort do you prefer for your sabbaticals? Please fire away in the comments and, as always, thanks for reading.