'Mr. Robot' Recap: eps1.7_wh1ter0se.m4v
Elliot attempts to make sense of his life and rediscovers his haunted past.
Elliot rediscovered himself. Or maybe what he saw on the blank CD wasn’t real. Maybe he didn’t kiss his sister. Mr. Robot might not be his father. The camera following him this entire time could be another person. The path that Mr. Robot is on right makes it appear that all of that is possible or that nothing is real at all. When Elliot — ready to break apart at the seams from the very beginning — yells at the camera and TV audience, clearly the show is going in a direction that most shows wouldn’t even dare.
“eps.1.7_wh1terr0se.m4v” set up the important confrontation with White Rose the mysterious hacker that fsociety tried multiple times to meet. Elliot gets the meeting, a tense and terse three minute chat, which informs him of what he needs to do to eventually complete fsociety’s plan to take down E(vil) Corp. But before the meeting, Elliot watches all the strings White Rose pulls to orchestrate the meeting. White Rose is similar to the entire season of the show, where the plot about creating global financial chaos is just a bait to lure the viewer further and further into Elliot’s confused world.
The deeper the show goes into Elliot’s head the less the world around him starts to make sense. But the same is true of the show’s other main character Tyrell. The episode shoots Tyrell’s head in extreme focus with everything else around him out of focus, which heightened the moments where he was brought back into the real world: the coffee being spill on his suit, detectives showing up to his work then home. A similar effect was put on Elliot, and for a single moment he was taken out of this tunnel vision and when he opened his mind the world looked liked it does for most people everyday. There are faces and details instead of blobs of potential data for people like Elliot to hack, or for Tyrell bodies to prevent him from whatever power he craves.
But after Elliot has this moment of realization about how to take down E(vil) Corp, his world feels off. When talking to Darlene, she tells him to feel happy for once and she says “I love you,” and kisses her. Then she starts yelling at him and asking if he remembered who she was, and he pauses, stammers, and slowly realizes that he doesn’t remember her at all… until it hits. Darlene was his sister. Mr. Robot was his dad. Elliot hacks himself to discover he doesnt exist online. He tracks a blank disc to see if there anything about his past, and that’s when we see all these photos. Who even knows what is happening in the show or Elliot’s head, but the bleeding between both worlds is stronger than ever.
