Mr. Robot Recap: 'eps1.9_zer0-day.avi'

The New York City of Mr. Robot is taking the beginning of the end times pretty well. The big plan to take out E(vil) Corporation is completed; there are protests in the streets, markets across the world are tumbling, and fsociety progeny is now running across the streets of Manhattan. Credit cards for all banks are no longer functioning, which combined with anarchist punks running in the streets should be a slight cause for concern, but I guess all of that isn’t too different than a sports championship.

Yet the person that caused all of this chaos doesn’t remember a second of it. ‘Eps1.9_zer0-day.avi’ acts almost as an epilogue to the first season rather than a conclusion. The climax of the season is not seen and instead the episodes picks up the pieces left in its wake. Elliot struggles to find any answers for his hunt for Tyrell Wellick. Angela is falling deeper into her position within E(vil) Corporation. The rest of fsociety is wondering what is the next day after you celebrate the world’s demise. And it appears that those at the head of E(vil) corp aren’t worried much about what’s happened to their company.

Elliot was on the hunt for Tyrell, but his real struggle was again within himself. Not only was it made clear that all of these interactions with Mr. Robot were just him physically yelling and hurting himself, but that people in the real world saw all these moments of madness. But if Mr. Robot and his projections of his mother and younger self are still in his head, it kind of makes much of the fscoiety interactions that much stranger. Why would the group stay with this clearly out of his mind person after all that’s happened? Fsociety as individuals did not interact much with the real world, so even Darlene’s adventure to connect with the Dark Army could’ve just been Elliot. There was nothing to imply that her relationship with them could not have been replicated by just Elliot. This has all been a solo mission with projections of himself to make it appear grander in scale.

That is a lot to speculate on. The excellent first season of the show brought up more questions than it ever really planned on answering, which is great. There is so much to speculate upon, but there is also so much to reflect upon from the season. In a way, though, the show was leading up to this “revolution,” so that it didn’t even show much of it, and that the higher-up at E(vil) Corp appear unfazed says that perhaps this plan didn’t really accomplish what they wanted. Even with a moment where a guy killed himself on national TV, the most chilling moment might’ve been the video that Elliot found of himself in Tyrell’s car — just a loop of him pushing himself off of a Coney Island pier. If he didn’t want to confront all his actions before then, that clip made such blindness impossible.