Hello, friends. Or rather, goodbye. The final two episodes of Mr. Robot aired last night while it was amazing, my heart hurts. What am I supposed to watch on Sunday nights now? Either way, below are some MAJOR SPOILERS, so beware.
After last week’s ending, of Elliot coming face to face with other Elliot, we are reset back to our Elliot waking up in this alternate reality. It’s also the first time Elliot has addressed the audience all season. We see him discovering things, like that his monster/father is still alive in this world, as is his mother, who has a very caring disposition. He seems totally skeptical of it all until he learns Angela is alive and well and that they are getting married the next day. He goes to Elliot’s apartment to hack his alternate self and eventually comes across a file with drawings of himself in his black hoodie, of Darlene, and the fsociety mask.
After confronting each other, Elliot kills his alternate self. We then get greeted with a regular street cop version of Dom who’s suspicious and eventually gives chase to Elliot. Mr. Robot shows up and warns him that he doesn’t belong here. Unconvinced, he finally finds Angela in fsociety’s old headquarters, where she too tells him that he’s not the real Elliot. Still unconvinced, we finally find Krista, or this world’s version of Krista where the bomb is dropped.
Our Elliot is “the other one.” He’s the other personality known as the Mastermind. So that means the real Elliot has five personalities swimming around in his mind: Mr. Robot, Magda Alderson, young Elliot, us, and the Mastermind. The entirety of the season has been dominated by this personality who showed up with an intent similar to Mr. Robot’s: to protect Elliot from this harsh world. Although he just couldn’t give it up, and he still doesn’t want to. So we see our Elliot wake up in a hospital where Darlene is. She never existed in this fantasy land that was created for Elliot by the Mastermind, because Darlene’s bond with Elliot is the only thing that can pull him out.
Darlene holds his hand and tells him this is all real, that everyone they’ve lost over the year is real, and the hack and stopping Whiterose was all real. But he knows that he’s not real, and tearfully Darlene reveals she’s known this all along, but they were bonding and that’s all she really wanted. She couldn’t deal with what Elliot was going through and sort of abandoned him, but this new personality gave her the opportunity to re-enter his life. We then cut to all the personalities standing in a line as the Mastermind notes that maybe it wasn’t about changing the world, but about changing himself.
We all go to a theater and watch at lightening-speed, all of his memories seemingly seep back into Elliot consciousness and when he finally opens his eyes we are met with Darlene’s face as she says “Hello, Elliot.” TEARS! This was cinematic genius on the small screen, y’all!
I always get nervous about series finales because it’s just so easy to mess it up. Prime examples being Lost and Dexter, but I couldn’t have been more satisfied! I’m glad it didn’t end up veering into the sci-fi, which I definitely thought was the case after the way last week ended. And while we never really got a good explanation about Whiterose’s machine, I’m perfectly fine with that. Yes, we were essentially duped from the start, but if you look back to the first season, you’ll see plenty of instances where everything makes sense.
This is the third series I’ve loved that I feel ended too soon, but at least it went out on its own terms and was truly magnificent. Goodbye, indeed, Mr. Robot.