‘Mr Robot’ Season 4 Episode 2 sees Elliot and his alter identity realize there is another one of them neither has met
If only it were that simple -- one organization responsible for all the ills of late capitalism and one person representing humanity's tryst with greed and power. In the voice of a tired Philip Price (Michael Cristofer), we hear how a "good salesman" -- our very own Zhi Zhang aka Whiterose (B. D. Wong) -- took over the world through Deus Group and its front organizations like E Corp after the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union.
In pretty realistic looking news footage, we saw Zhi Zhang hobnobbing with everyone from Putin to Obama and even being knighted by the Queen of England. Turns out, Zhang's Deus Group was behind all the major world events since 1989 that consolidated power and extracted money for the top one percent, its finger in every pie, from the World Economic Forum to the Gulf War and the Internet.
Funding hackers and terrorists along with getting the powerful and the rich to toe his line, Zhang is shown to be the mastermind behind it all. The scope is so humongous, it is ridiculous. But creator Sam Esmail has a reason to do this.
He is simplifying one end of the story, dealing with the macro real world, only to complicate the other end that deals with the micro, namely Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek). As we mentioned in last week's review, as much as Esmail inserts his concerns into the state of the world we live in, the story has always been about Elliot and his fractured psyche -- and we, as his "friends", are part of his fractured psyche.
Over four seasons, Elliot in his quest to "save the world" has been saving himself, reclaiming one piece at a time of his scattered self. In season 4, we finally see him working with Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) and being conscious of his child self.
In a surprise twist at the end of episode 2, we are introduced to "The Other One", a persona that neither Elliot or Mr. Robot is aware of but his child self (and his mama) know exists. It is the rabbit hole within the rabbit hole -- a strange Mandelbrot set.
But before this plot twist that comes right at the end, we have Elliot and Mr. Robot convincing Mr. Price to help them pull off their "heist" within eight days that will cripple the Deus Group financially and hopefully derail Whiterose's plan to ship his secret billion-dollar project to the Congo.
If Whiterose succeeds in transferring the project, Elliot, Darlene (Carly Chaikin) and Mr. Price become expendable. Elliot's gameplan involves getting Mr. Price to gather all the members of the Deus Group into one room so that Elliot can hack their phones.
Elliot/Mr. Robot's plan is to use Susan Jacob's (Sandrine Holt) access to E Corp's accounts to facilitate the hack and takeover of the group's main account in Cyprus National Bank. Mr. Price meets with Whiterose and tells him, he is resigning as E Corp's CEO, which means Whiterose now has to gather all the Deus members so they can agree on the next CEO.
Dom (Grace Gummer), meanwhile is being terrorized by Dark Army plant, Janice (Ashlie Atkinson), who kills her debriefing officer because Dom is only 99.9 percent sure he bought her cover story about Agent Santiago (Omar Metwally).
Janice tells her that next time she must try to be 100 percent sure. The "100%" emoticon has never looked more sinister. Susan Jacob, who Elliot wants to use to get into E Corp's accounts and transactions, is dead of course.
If you didn't remember Susan Jacob, the episode has a helpful flashback of that mad time when Darlene and F-Society took over her house and killed her when she came back early and caught them. Of course, this is not information that Elliot is privy to.
Just when he has got the ball rolling on his plan to take down Whiterose, Darlene calls to tell him their mother is dead. We see Elliot going into his practical, emotionless, logistics mode to deal with the inconvenience of his mother's death while trying to keep his operation against Whiterose going, racing against the clock to save himself and Darlene from Whiterose.
Darlene is on the other end of the spectrum -- emotional and needy -- angry her brother is ignoring her again. By the end, they have spoken about Angela (Portia Doubleday), Elliot has told her about going against Whiterose and Darlene has told him about killing Susan Jacob.
Back to working together, Darlene activates the GPS tracking on Elliot's phone that will let him know where she is at every moment (this is probably going to come in handy or backfire spectacularly in later episodes). Then, she drops the "I told you about Vera coming over" at the end of their conversation.
It is when Elliot and Mr. Robot realize they both don't know what she is talking about, which means there is "another one" of them. A fact confirmed in a surreal scene of Elliot's mom and his child self, talking about how the two are still not ready to meet "The Other One".
'Mr. Robot' airs on the USA Network Sundays at 10/9c.
