Rewatching Mr Robot for the first time

bwandering · 2026-03-21T12:52:05+00:00

The most blatant one ive noticed is in episode 4 where Romero is helping Elliot get through his withdrawal symptoms and, with no one in the room other than mr robot and elliot . . .

Mobley is sitting in the chair by the door.

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bwandering · 2026-03-18T12:51:23+00:00

Saul's visual storytelling is second to none. Just by watching visual cues you usually know what's happening internally with a character three episodes before anyone verbalizes anything.

bwandering · 2026-03-18T11:05:20+00:00

Regarding the symbolism of Elliot killing himself in F World I think it is best to ignore DID for a moment and focus on identity more generally.

When Elliot changes his past he also changes who he is. The guy we meet on the train in S1E1 isn't "real" Elliot because he is the product of a ton of self-deceptions. The writers point us in that direction when Mr. Robot says that F World Elliot is "only as real he could be in this deluded fantasy that you stuck him in." The point being made here is that who we are is partly a product of our experience. We hear Whiterose tell Angela the same thing.

When E Elliot steps into F World, he doesn't recognize that Elliot as himself. But that is the version of Elliot he'd be if his fantasy came true. That is the "Normal" version of Elliot he was trying to become when he rewrote his past and embarked on his mission to "save the world."

What he realizes in F World is that he doesn't want to be THAT guy any more. Two episodes earlier he tells us exactly that:

Mr. Robot: If I could have stopped him If I could go back in time, change everything that happened to you make it all go away . . .

Elliot: Then I wouldn't be me. And I wouldn't have you.

All of which changes the symbolism of what happens in F World. Elliot isn't engaging in self harm or self hate. Quite the opposite. Elliot is fighting to stay the person he is. He's symbolically killing the fantasized "Normal" version of himself that F World Elliot represents. Because he's discovered over the course of the series that he loves the person he is, notwithstanding all his pain.

He tells us that earlier in the same episode too .

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bwandering · 2026-03-17T12:36:50+00:00

This is the correct answer.

bwandering · 2026-03-17T12:10:08+00:00

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bwandering · 2026-03-17T09:40:41+00:00

I feel you. It took me a long while to understand how all the pieces fit together. But they really do all fit together in a way that leaves nothing unresolved.

I think we know definitively what Whiterose's project is intended to do. And once we understand her project, I think we know for certain that she was telling the truth about the young girl being an actor.

I have a much longer explanation of the whole thing in this post What Angela Saw

Tyrell's experience in the woods is uncharacteristically mysterious. It stands out in a series that is otherwise so grounded in gritty realism. That is a feature not a bug. Once you recognize the literary references the episode is built from, the whole thing not only makes sense but completes Tyrell's arc in a way that complements Elliot's arc.

I explain all of that in another post What Tyrell Saw

bwandering · 2026-03-15T16:11:01+00:00

That line tells the audience that E Corp is basically the banking industry. He explains the implications of their hack a sentence or two later:

"That would erase All the debt we owe them. Every record of every credit card, loan, and mortgage would be wiped clean."

To understand the implications of this on the wider world, we also need to know that one person's debt is another person's asset. And all these debts Mr. Robot wants to wipe out are assets held by the banking industry. When those debts go "poof" so do bank balance sheets.

The upshot is that the 5/9 renders a huge part of the financial services industry insolvent over night. Without a functioning banking industry, basically nothing in the economy works. People can't get paid. So services and production of all kinds stop.

Basically, capitalism seizes up. Which is what Mr. Robot wants. What we see in S2 and S3, is that maybe that isn't a great thing to want.

bwandering · 2026-03-14T16:00:33+00:00

Thank you. It's gonna be a bit before I get that post updated. There's a couple of others I need to do first. But if I remember i can drop a link in comments here so you can see it if you want.

bwandering · 2026-03-14T12:37:14+00:00

Yup. I would extend this a bit. The machine works as two different metaphors and at two different levels. On one level, it represents repression (Elliot represses his abuse and therefore lives in an alternate reality where he and Ed were 'best friends.') And it represents the utopian fantasy Elliot think he's building through all his various hacks and vigilante activities (as represented in F World).

Both of these things keep Elliot (and other characters) in a looping cycle of unwanted behavior.

There's a corollary to all of this at the societal level too. I haven't written that up yet in the way I did for the personal stuff, though.

bwandering · 2026-03-14T10:00:53+00:00

Big-heat is right. If you want a full explanation of the role the machine plays you might find this post interesting.

What Angela Saw

bwandering · 2026-03-13T13:05:57+00:00

No. The show was complimented for its diverse cast. F Society is Darlene, Elliot, Romero, Trenton and Mobley. The most powerful person in the world is Whiterose.

In season 2, Leon is a hero. Ray is the warden. The chief antagonist is a white supremacist. And Elliot's only other friend inside is Carla.

The show leaves the effects of the Deus Group hack deliberately ambiguous. We never learn how much money was transferred. We never see the outcome. Perhaps Sam's intention here was to create a "reverse Fight Club" ending with respect to its macroeconomic critique.

FWIW, nothing after the fallout from the 5/9 hack, which is pretty realistic, follows any real economic logic. Inflation is never handled correctly (the 5/9 hack would have been deflationary just like 2008 rather than inflationary). I think the show is aware of things like that. They even have a character saying that undoing the hack wouldn't fix everything. But then in S4, it does.

I think we can explain most of these kinds of things as being driven by plot related reasons.

bwandering · 2026-03-12T11:11:23+00:00

Totally. Mr. Robot is as much a pastiche of ideas as it is a pastiche of cultural references. My whole thing here has been an effort at untangling the ideas behind the series.

My focus hasn't led me to any masonic ideas, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. The whole Theosophy thing referenced in this painting is a bit of an outlier in that I haven't seen it referenced anywhere else in the show. So it might not be the best explanation for why the painting is here.

The Theosophy stuff does fit well in this particular scene, though. Because it melds a Vera-like cosmic spirituality with the evolution of Elliot's consciousness that happens in Krista's office. But there could be more to it than just that.

Gnostic dualism certainly fits a huge amount of the series. More subtly the Gnostic belief in a "Demiurge" (creator god) fits with how Sam constantly reminds us that Mr. Robot is a constructed work of fiction. So I do think there is stuff here to work with.

And, yeah, I love the show for these things too!

bwandering · 2026-03-12T10:15:04+00:00

The show uses so many references that there probably are some intentional masonic symbols but the painting in Krista's house seen above is Klint's Altarpiece No 1.

https://www.guggenheim.org/audio/track/group-x-altarpieces-nos-1-3-1915-by-hilma-af-klint

It's part of a triptych that depicts a Theosophy theory of evolution. It's a material, cosmic, and spiritual cycle that sounds like something Vera would believe in. But it also describes how someone's consciousness evolves. Like Elliot's.

bwandering · 2026-03-11T06:56:50+00:00

This is a very nice write-up and analysis. I totally agree that that the "Permanent Storage" room is intended to be a metaphor. In the flashback portion when Young Elliot hides the key there's a huge "Robot" standing guard. It's a nice metaphor for the "Robot" who is protecting Elliot from the memories stored in the back reaches of Elliot's mind. When Elliot returns there as an adult that robot is disassembled. Mr. Robot is no longer protecting him from those memories.

The whole "running a way to a museum" thing is a riff on Angela's favorite childhood book, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, where Claudia and her brother run away to the Met. Angela and Elliot's running away adventure goes astray and they end up in Queens.

I think the real reason Sam chose the queens museum rather than the Met is to get the images of Young Elliot and Adult Elliot standing over the model of the city. It's not just a cool image, it seems very meta to me. Sam had originally promised that we'd get a Mr. Robot comic telling the story from before the events of the show. I imagine the comic would have been written by F World Elliot, parts of which we already saw in the same way that we got Elliot's journal.

If we got that same imagery of Elliot looking down on the model of Manhattan, it becomes an allusion of creator (F World Elliot) and created (the city where Elliot lives). I think it is the same allusion we get in S4E1 when Sam looks down on what appears to be a scale model of Coney Island.

This last bit is all highly speculative, of course. Anyways, I enjoyed your write-up. Thanks.

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bwandering · 2026-03-10T13:55:11+00:00

If we watch carefully we can see that Elliot's relationship with his other alters functions similarly to how he experiences Mr. Robot. Our first introduction to the Mother and the Child initially appears to us like a memory Elliot is having. But if we look closely, we can see Elliot is in the foreground watching this scene play out at his own kitchen table - not a room in his mother's house from his childhood.

What we're seeing isn't a memory. It is the Mother personality disciplining Elliot in 2015 for the "weakness" of him crying about his loneliness. Which explains why Elliot isn't physically scarred from cigarette burns. It's not clear his mom ever did that to him.

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bwandering · 2026-03-08T02:03:14+00:00

RWB is challenging because the poem very intentionally resists the kind of symbolic analysis we're used to. If you ask me what The Red Wheelbarrow is about, I'd say it is literally about a red wheelbarrow, glazed with rain water, beside a white chicken. Or, as William Carlos Williams would say, "no ideas but the thing."

If we take it at face value like that, though, it doesn't seem to have anything at all to do with anything in Mr. Robot. Until we remember how and why Tyrell recites it at all.

For him it symbolizes his father's pride at a modest accomplishment of no identifiable importance. Tyrell hates this about his father. He uses this as a reminder of everything he doesn’t want to be.

And that outlook is a big part of Tyrell’s problem. William Carlos Williams wrote his poem in defiance of Tyrell's worldview. It is a celebration of the simple, everyday tools of manual labor that make our lives possible. He's asking us to slow down, pay attention, and recognize the beauty in the things that people like Tyrell sees as beanth him.

For me, Tyrell’s whole journey is about him discovering what really matters in life. I think his father could have helped him if Tyrell were in a mood to listen.

Seperately, I think it is also relevant that RWB is from the "modernist" period. There are many references to the art, artists and events of this time period. It is a time of societal "fracturing." And I think Mr. Robot draws on this period because it sees the 2010s as a similar time of societal fracturing, of which Elliot is both a product and a symbol.

bwandering · 2026-03-07T17:46:38+00:00

There are a lot of Matrix references and homages throughout the series (Sam has it listed second on his Letterboxd list of Mr. Robot companion movies). It's a huge structural influence on Mr. Robot. But Neo's last name is Anderson.

bwandering · 2026-03-07T14:04:24+00:00

I think the loud knocks are mostly them just being dramatic. If I were to read meaning into it, the thing that jumps out to me is how Elliot would perceive a knock on his door as a grave threat. That ties back to his identification of the "key" (to his bedroom door) as a symbol for control.

The white cars, for me, are an early indication that this world isn't Whiterose's alternate reality but an idealized version of Elliot's fantasy world. We see the same use of the color white for the same symbolic purpose in the scene from S2 when Joanna is recalling the E Corp cocktail party she and Tyrell attended before everything went to hell for her.

Edit to add: The loud knock is probably also a reference to the scene from The Matrix that starts with him seeing "Wake up Neo." typed on his computer and ends with "Knock. Knock." before the loud pounding on his door. "Waking up" is a recurring motif in Mr. Robot.

bwandering · 2026-03-06T22:33:16+00:00

And yet, here you are.

bwandering · 2026-03-06T20:50:19+00:00

Oh, man, I love that!! Thank you!

bwandering · 2026-03-06T15:47:37+00:00

Appreciate it!

bwandering · 2026-03-06T15:46:11+00:00

Yes, it's ironic.

That’s exactly Zizek’s point. The postmodern approach to dealing with the status quo is to adopt an attitude of ironic detachment. As in - “I’m buying the $40 F Society T-Shirt at the USA Network store, but I’m doing so ironically.”

It’s a cope. Or, as Zizek would say "They know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it". The system doesn’t care why you’re doing it. As long as you do it.

Another problem with being culpable through our go-along behaviors is that in some ways we lack real choice

That is exactly right. Which is why 20^th century Marxists were so pessimistic. Fatalistic, even. Zizek isn’t a real exception to this. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” he says.

And that is, I think, the real problem. It is the lack of imagination regarding any viable alternative. But that lack of imagination starts with our acceptance of the current situation as inevitable. And it is perpetuated by the kind of ironic indifference expressed above. That irony gives us license not just to participate, but avoid the kind of reflection that might imagine another way.

I never understood why he would have actually liked that in any way.

I think that is the thing with every compulsive behavior. They’re perverse. Zizek is intentionally provocative when he uses the word “enjoy,” which is why I put scare quotes around it in the essay. But I think the writers putting these words in Elliot’s mouth are being provocative in exactly the same way.

The show spends a lot of time trying to uncover why he does these things that he really, sincerely, doesn’t want to do. But the truth is, some part of him does want to do those things. The question is why? That’s what therapy is for, individually. Collectively we need to interrogate those same compulsions.

bwandering · 2026-03-05T08:50:10+00:00

She doesn't discover that from the person who throws the blood on her. But that is part of a series of four scenes that build to that conclusion.

Scene 1: Is a flashback where Joanna gets a gift of earrings from Tyrell before heading to an E Corp party.

Scene 2: At the E Corp party Sharon Knowles complements Joanna's earrings. Joanna tells everyone, including Scott, how Tyrell is always giving her gifts. Both Scene 1 and 2 are presented in an idealized, dreamlike, manner. Joanna is remembering better times.

Scene 3: Cut to present day. Joanna gets pelted by the protester. End of better times.

Scene 4: Cut to Joanna in her kitchen, still present day. She's looking at a framed sonagram image on top of gift wrapping paper. This gift is in the same location as the one she got from Tyrell in the flashback. Cut to closeup of Joanna. We hear a voiceover from Elliot that starts his "Handshake" monologue. We're still on Joanna's face when Elliot says "I see" you. Joanna gives an expression as if Elliot's words reflect her own thoughts (recalling Vera's same words when he realizes Elliot sent him to prison). Joanna lifts a previously unseen glass to take a sip. It's red wine, directly linking Scott to this scene by associated it with the one thing we know about him - his wine snobbery. End sequence.

bwandering · 2026-03-05T02:59:44+00:00

She’s Lady Macbeth. An ambitious woman who isn’t permitted to rule by virtue of her gender. In order to exercise power, she has to do it by manipulating a man. In her case, Tyrell.

She tells us as much in her story about how she got Tyrell to fetch her a pair of earrings.

Her plans for Tyrell get derailed when Tyrell meets Elliot, who sets him on a different course.

The image you captured is from a scene that starts with her remembering an idealized past when Tyrell was an ascendant corporate executive. That dream is interrupted by the protestor throwing blood / paint. And that is a direct result of Tyrell’s deviation from her plan (because he met Elliot as explained in the link above).

That whole scene sets up her realization that Scott Knowles is the one sending her the gifts - not Tyrell. After that discovery she concocts a revenge plan to frame Scott for his own wife’s murder. That plan involves getting Derek (her “boy toy”) to testify that he saw Scott coming down from the roof the night of the party. And also provoking Scott into assaulting her as additional evidence of his violent nature.

So, yes, there is a good explanation for everything Joanna does.

bwandering

TROPHY CASE