[Spoiler Alert: If you have not seen the Mr. Robot tv series on USA Network, stop what you’re doing. Go find it, watch it and come back. Otherwise, serious spoilers ahead.]
Prologue: This month’s column was written and completed 5 days before the Mr. Robot series finale. If you’ve watched the final two episodes, you’ll likely have insights and answers beyond the speculation that follows. In this month’s column we’re breaking down episodes 8 through 11.
Season 4 – Episode 408 (Request Timeout)
As the episode opens, we’re in flashback to 1995. Once again—as we’ve often seen in the series—there’s a cinematic nod to Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. This time it’s not Danny Torrance running through the Overlook Hotel trying to escape his threatening father, but a young Elliot seeking defense from what we’ve come to understand as a parallel parental threat.
There’s a general sense of time dysphoria in this episode specifically, and in this season in general. As we’re flashing back to 1995, we’re mindful that the central plot is still anchored on the seemingly endless and episodes-long Christmas Day of December 25, 2015. Are there really that many hours in a day to accommodate all that’s happened and continues to happen? We’ll have to do the math.
In our flashback to 1995, we find ourselves with young Elliot in the basement of New York’s Queen’s Museum. Inside the expansive storage area are relics from the 1939 New York World’s Fair, with one such artifact being Elektro the Moto-Man. As part of the fair’s The World of Tomorrow theme, this robot embodied the technological potentials of the future. In the fair’s “Futurama” pavilion, there was a “time machine” that allowed visitors to travel through a 1960 city of the future. While this episode’s journey back in time offers only thematic allusions to time travel, it puts the concepts of past and future in front of us and perhaps reminds that there’s an implied “time machine” at the heart of Whiterose’s ambitious project.
Aside from playing with and distorting our perceptions of time, there’s a general sense of unreality threaded throughout this episode. Time spent at the Queen’s Museum—past and present—suggests this place isn’t connected to the real world. It’s open late on Christmas? And there’s absolutely no one else in the place? There’s not a security guard, attendant or any staff member present while Elliot—young and old—wanders throughout the building unencumbered. Like The Twilight Zone, maybe we’re “traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight but of mind.” Wherever we are—and wherever Elliot is—it doesn’t appear to be a part of the natural and recognizable world.
Episodic time distortion continues as Dom faces her gravest physical challenge at the hands of the demented Janice. After Janice strategically plunges a dagger into Dom’s chest, a race against time follows. Janice estimates that Dom has about 15 minutes to live. A simple stopwatch timing of the survivability duration seems to surpass that estimate, contributing further to the perception that time increments have become a meaningless unit of measure.
Near the end of this episode, Mr. Robot is trying to console Elliot. Robot says, “If I could go back in time, change everything that happened to you…make it all go away…”
Elliot replies, “Then I wouldn’t be me. And I wouldn’t have you.”
This bit of dialogue foreshadows some further clues we’ll receive (in the next episode) about Whiterose’s time-altering project. If someone were to travel back in time, it would be assumed they would bring their life history with them in the form of their own personal life knowledge. But, if someone’s consciousness could be placed into an alternate timeline, would their life history follow them? Elliot’s response to the prospect of time travel—as raised by Mr. Robot—seems to answer a question Whiterose will later pose to Elliot. Let’s keep that in mind as we move along to the next episode.
Season 4 – Episode 409 (Conflict)
As this episode opens, we watch as Mr. Robot opens two double doors. As he steps out into a long corridor, he hesitates long enough for us to notice that he’s casting two shadows. If we’re only looking at Mr. Robot, we might not see the shadows. While there’s a lot of drama happening in this (and the next) episode, there’s just as much happening in the shadows that’s hugely relevant to time travel theories. If we get swept up in the drama, we could miss some details hiding in plain sight within intercut dialogue or screen shots that only appear in a flash.
Let’s take a look at our first bit of evidence. In a phone conversation between Zhang/Whiterose and Elliot, Zhang makes a proposal. “You stop whatever it is you’re planning, and I give you information that will prove to be very valuable to you.” Zhang goes on to say, “Let me earn your trust by sharing first. It is about your friend…Angela. You see, Elliot…you think Angela’s dead, but she’s not.”
Elliot responds angrily, “You sent me a picture of her dead body…”
Zhang says, “And you believe what most people believe? Only what is right in front of you? I expected more from you.” Elliot responds back again arguing that Angela is dead. Zhang says, “No, Elliot. Angela’s alive. And if you allow me, I can take you to her. Would you like that, Elliot? Would you like to see Angela again? To hear her voice? To hold her hand?” Zhang continues on, “I know you have regrets Elliot, and pain. I know there are things in your life you wish were different, just the same as Angela, and I can show you a way that you can make it all go away, just as I did for her. You can reset everything and live in the world you deserve, a world without all the pain you’re carrying, without your past, without your regrets. Please, Elliot. Let me show you the world that I showed your closest friend.”
Whiterose is talking about the big mysterious project that she showed Angela. If we take Elliot’s response to Robot’s wish—of going back in time to change everything—it would seem to suggest that the project might not be offering the continuity that time travel might afford, where you travel to another time with all of your personal timeline intact. The promise Whiterose suggests—of effectively resetting and erasing the past—could be interpreted more as a transfer of consciousness into another timeline. And as Elliot said in the previous episode, “Then I wouldn’t be me.”
Before we go on to our next bit of evidence, there’s yet another Back to the Future dialogue reference. Elliot and Robot are navigating a tight timeline for their retribution hack against the Deus Group, and Robot says to Elliot, “Why do we have to cut these things so goddamn close?” Did the dialogue between Whiterose and Elliot entice us away from time travel, to the point where Sam Esmail felt the need to pull us back in with yet another BTTF reference? As if to say, “don’t forget time travel.” We’re not letting go of time travel, but some of what we’re hearing is certainly opening up some new possibilities.
Next, let’s lift some intercut dialogue between Whiterose and Price outside on the steps as they were leaving the building where they had met.
Price says to Whiterose, “You know, I almost let myself believe you…when you said Angela was still alive. I know what kind of conman you are, how you operate. Even though I saw your men drag her dead body away, I still wanted to believe what you were saying. When you spoke to Mr. Alderson, I felt the power of your promise. And all I could think of was, well maybe that’s what my daughter felt when you came to her. The desperation to have all her pain go away, to have her past rewritten—and that’s why it works, right? The one thing every person has: regret. You weaponize that and then you use that weapon against them to destroy them.”
As we learn more about what Whiterose’s project might be capable of, it raises questions of parallel timelines—maybe even parallel universes—in addition to time travel. Does the reference to Back to the Future sandwiched in between this dialogue become less a simple thematic reference and more a focus of time travel analysis? If you can go back in time to effectively wipeout events, does that change history for those who lived it, even if the past they lived gets “erased” and recorded over with new events? Does the baggage of the psyche cease to be baggage if the events that created and formed its condition are removed from existence? Is that what this project does?
Turning back to the drama for a moment, this episode represents the end of a series-long story arc, with the stealing back from the Deus Group of all of the money they had been stealing from society for so many years. And Price delivers this line to Whiterose, “Finally. I found a way to take what’s most important to you. Your project, your dream of another world—it’s as good as dead. Think of it this way, Zhang. You didn’t lose the game. You just ran out of time.”
Season 4 – Episode 410 (Gone)
Let’s continue our laser-focused analysis into Whiterose’s project. In the previous episode, Price met briefly with Elliot to give him a flash drive that included extensive documentation related to the project slated to ship from the Washington Township Nuclear Power Plant to the Congo. In this episode, we watch as Elliot scrolls through this material on his laptop. We’re shown the screen for a brief moment. Working from a screen-capture, here’s my best attempt at a transcription of what appeared onscreen:
Washington Township Data Management
Figure 5: MCM estimated CPU (5a) and disk space (5b) resources required into the VLHC era, using the current computing model projected out for the next 15 years.
The anticipated upgrade and relocation of the VLHC for Run 14 in the DR Congo will produce a step change for PRISM and MCM. The two experiments will upgrade their trigger systems to record 5-10 times as many events as they do currently. (Already in Run 13 VLHCcc will process more than 100x the number of collisions than it does at CERN and other LHC facilities.) Additionally, AVA will read our Pb-Pb collisions continuously at 50 kHz. The beam intensity will rise substantially, giving branch crossings where the number of discrete proton-proton interactions will rise to about 200, up from the Washington Township facility. The governance for the operation of the detectors and for the…[unreadable]…of the reconstruction software. It is anticipated that…[unreadable]…VLHC will deliver about 300 fb-1 of data each year.
In Episode 406, we only caught a partial glimpse of diagrams, formulas and mathematical equations on Whiterose’s big board. Here, in this brief shot from Elliot’s computer, we get quite a bit more detail and clarification concerning the scope of the project. The acronym VLHC stands for Very Large Hadron Collider.
Quoting Wikipedia, “The Very Large Hadron Collider (VLHC) is a hypothetical future hadron collider with performance significantly beyond the Large Hadron Collider. There is no detailed plan or schedule for the VLHC; the name is used only to discuss the technological feasibility of such a collider and ways that it might be designed…. Given that such a performance increase necessitates a correspondingly large increase in size, cost, and power requirements, a significant amount of international collaboration over a period of decades would be required to construct such a collider.”
Based on the very clear documentation we’ve been shown, we can now reasonably conclude that Whiterose is working to deploy a Very Large Hadron Collider. The obstacles to this realization have been size, cost and power—all of which can be overcome by amassing global wealth, acquiring land and natural resources to support such an ambition, and securing the power requirements needed to fuel a project of this tremendous scale. Moving the project from the Washington Township Nuclear Power Plant to the Congo appears to satisfy these prerequisites. One big question remains: What exactly does the hacker of time plan to do with this machine?
Road Trip
Before hitting the road, Dom and Darlene meet up with Leon at a motel. As Dom walks in, Leon is rolling joints, and The Land Before Time is playing on the tv. There’s nothing specific here to further the development of time travel theories, but the concept of a place existing “before time” is interesting at face value. This also serves as a foreshadowing of what takes place in the next episode—when time seemingly stands still.
Leon is the driver as he, Dom and Darlene take to the road. After driving for a while, Leon needs to make a rest stop. He says, “Gotta steal me a mirror real quick.” Dom looks at him like he’s speaking a foreign language. “What, do you not know your Vonnegut?” he asks. Leon clarifies that he needs to take a bathroom break, and laments that, “nobody…reads anymore.”
As steady viewers of the series have come to expect, there are no throwaway lines in Mr. Robot. Case in point is this Kurt Vonnegut reference. I’ll let Kurt Vonnegut explain it.
“Trout did another thing which some people might have considered eccentric: he called mirrors leaks. It amused him to pretend that mirrors were holes between two universes.
If he saw a child near a mirror, he might wag his finger at a child warningly, and say with great solemnity, “Don’t get too near that leak. You wouldn’t want to wind up in the other universe, would you?”
Sometime someone would say in his presence, “Excuse me, I have to take a leak.” This was a way of saying that the speaker intended to drain liquid wastes from his body through a valve at his lower abdomen.
And Trout would reply waggishly, “where I come from, that means you’re about to steal a mirror.”
And so on.
[Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions]
We could interpret Leon’s usage of this Vonnegut reference as an amusing turn of phrase and as a literary reference that also serves as commentary on the societal decline in reading. But, might we also speculate if the plot will take us into a realm where some application of mirrors or doors will open an access gate to some other alternate or parallel universe? As we get closer to the end of Mr. Robot, we have to consider that every piece of dialogue is chosen with a great sense of economy and service to the story.
Season 4 – Episode 411 (eXit)
If Kurt Vonnegut’s suggestion that mirrors are potential portals to another universe, we’re definitely through the looking glass in this episode. But, before we take that trip, we’re back in Back to the Future territory once again.
Elliot takes a walk to the Washington Township Nuclear Power Plant. On his way, the Beach Boys are singing Heroes and Villains. This throwback piece of music could have easily been Mr. Sandman given the anachronistic feel to the scene as it’s being set up. Elliot walks under a graffiti-adorned Washington Township archway painted with the slogan, “A Nice Place to Live.” Next, Elliot walks past and glances over at a man sleeping on a bench, with a police officer leaning over him and waking him up. It’s an obvious visual reference to “Red the bum” in BTTF. Just as Elliot walks past the bench we can see a building in the distance with a clock tower reminiscent of the clock tower in BTTF. There’s then a wide shot of a billboard advertising the power plant. An illustration of a very 1950’s-looking family is depicted next to the billboard’s slogan, “Live with the power of tomorrow…Today!” The typestyles and lettering are a direct match to the billboard in BTTF advertising Lyon Estates, “Live in the home of tomorrow…Today!”
When Elliot gets to the surprisingly unguarded and unmanned nuclear power plant, he locates a terminal, launches his malware attack, and is soon confronted by “hamburger man” and a contingent of Dark Army soldiers who escort him into an oddly familiar room to meet with Whiterose. On his way in, we can clearly see that the clock on the wall in one of the corridors is at 11:16am. This is a time of day that holds significance as we journey forward. At the next corridor there’s another clock on the wall. While partially obscured by glare, it appears to read 11:16am. As Elliot walks the final corridor, there are photos on the wall of several theoretical physicists—Brian Greene and Hugh Everett to name two—with their faces obscured by jaggedly torn colored felt or construction paper. Next, Elliot enters a room that appears to be a modified reconstruction of the room where Whiterose met Angela. There’s a desk with an Apple Mac computer on it, instead of a Commodore 64 that was in Angela’s room; a book (Tolstoy’s Resurrection this time, instead of Lolita); a blue phone instead of a red phone; a fish tank, with Elliot’s pet fish Qwerty swimming around. Similar to Angela’s encounter, Whiterose suddenly enters the room. She and Elliot engage in an emotionally-charged philosophical discussion before Whiterose apparently ends her life—in typical Dark Army fashion—with a gun to her own head. We’ve been led to understand that Whiterose is showing Elliot what she showed Angela, specifically Whiterose’s project, and what it can do.
It appears that despite Elliot’s hack of the power plant to prevent the launch of Whiterose’s project, his attempt has failed, and the power plant is melting down. After a series of explosions, the screen goes red.
We next hear a cellphone alarm buzzing as a machine voice repeats, “This is your wakeup call.” The time on the phone display reads 11:16am. Up until this point in the episode, we only had the visual references to Back to the Future. From this point forward, we’re borrowing a plot twist straight out of Back to the Future. Call it an alternate timeline, parallel universe or multiverse. Whatever the case, there’s an alternate Elliot who is now CEO of Allsafe, and he’s about to marry a very-much-alive Angela Moss, who has a very-much-alive mother, Emily. New Elliot is also an only child—no sister Darlene—and he has a great relationship with his also alive father, Edward Alderson. Tyrell Wellick—who was presumed to have died previously—is now the head of FCORP (formerly ECORP in the prior reality). In this reality, Tyrell is the one who’s reluctant to work with Elliot, and Elliot is the one who wants to work with Tyrell. In a further reality flip, it’s Tyrell who’s wearing the hoodie and casual clothes, and new Elliot is the savvy stylish dresser with white shoes, sweater and collared shirt. No black hoodie to be found.
Something is definitely up with reality and timelines in this episode, and something is seriously twisting the nature of time. Let’s take a deeper look into the observable time anomalies:
- At 11:16am, Elliot walks into the strange room to meet Whiterose.
- At 11:16am, Elliot’s phone alarm wakes him up in the new/alternate reality.
- At 11:16am, An “earthquake” hits Washington Township and New York City.
- At 11:16am, Elliot gets an email from his dad while he’s on Skype with Angela.
- At 11:16am, Edward Alderson picks his phone up off the floor.
- At 11:16am, A tv news report quotes the earthquake happening at 7:30am (yet, we witnessed the earthquake happening at 11:16am).
There’s clearly a lot happening at 11:16am. As we’re trying to decipher what this land without time is all about, the episode ends with an apparent self-visitation paradox. Elliot returns home to his apartment to find another Elliot sitting at his computer desk. The Elliot at the desk is the Elliot we’ve come to know in the series, with his signature black pants and black hoodie. New Elliot says to old Elliot, “Who are you?”
With that—the episode ends, and we’re left with many, many questions.
Come back next month when we’ll cover the Mr. Robot series finale.
David La France
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