‘Mr Robot’ Season 4 Episode 3 delves into Whiterose’s past and tragic love affair as Elliot connects with Olivia
Who or what we let in and allow ourselves to be vulnerable around, be it data or people, is the crux behind the third episode of Mr. Robot's fourth season. Elliot Alderson (Rami Malek) has been, since the beginning of the season been shutting everyone out (including us).
The only one he has allowed partial access to is Mr. Robot (Christian Slater), his alternate personality. The fact that he's throwing shade even at Mr. Robot, with as much sarcasm as he can muster in his weariness, whenever his alter wants to discuss anything besides their plan to take down Whiterose, is telling.
Darlene Alderson (Carly Chaikin) also finds herself shut out after she gives him the lead of one Olivia Cortez (Dominik García-Lorido) who was Susan Jacobs’s contact at Cyprus National Bank. To hack into Whiterose's accounts means accessing it through Olivia's personal laptop.
When Darlene volunteers to do it, Elliot stops her with brute force. That is when Darlene realizes that despite them bonding in the wake of their mother's death, he is still hell-bent of sealing himself off from her and the world.
Mr. Robot is concerned enough to wonder what to call someone like Elliot -- someone who had lost everyone, through fate and deliberate choice. It is a description that also, ironically, describes Elliot's archnemesis Whiterose aka Zhi Zhang, Chinese Minister of State Security.
We don't know a lot about Whiterose and the episode begins intriguingly, with a number of voices, including Elliot's asking "Who is Whiterose?" A brief flashback shows, in enough detail, what is driving Whiterose.
Surprisingly, it is not greed but love. We are taken back in time to when Zhang was an up-and-coming star in the Chinese bureaucracy, who is instrumental in signing a deal with the IBM suits to set up their plant in China.
Peng Chen (Eugene Shaw), her translator (and lover), is ecstatic because the deal means Zhang is one step closer to an ambassadorship in the U.S. where they can live "without lies". His words prompt Zhang to reveal her true identity as a trans woman wearing an "elegant" dress his mother once wore.
The reveal only serves to bring the two closer when Chen calls her "beautiful". The camera zooms in to the digital watch his lover is wearing and then zooms out to reveal that Zhang is now wearing the same watch (in 2015) as she tells her assistant that she will be wearing the dress (the same one she wore that night) when her project ships.
When her assistant tells her that her patience in these last few days was the key to success, Whiterose's brain stumbles upon a memory. She had sent her lover white roses (funeral flowers) as a joke on his wedding day to a woman.
In the flashback, Zhang tells her lover she has accepted the job as the Minister of State Security rather than the ambassadorship in the U.S. because she will have the power to "change the world for the better" while staying in China. When she asks her lover to be patient, he says that to ask for patience, meant "asking for surrender", before he kills himself, his blood staining the white roses Zhang got for him.
The fact that she is wearing her lover's watch, wants to wear the dress that is significant to this past relationship and has talked about "hacking time", it is time to wonder if the quantum "timey-whimey" stuff is Whiterose's project to restore/reset the timeline to before her lover committed suicide. (And why she is so blase about killing off people in the present timeline.) After all, a reboot would mean none of those deaths will be "real" anymore.
Vera (Elliot Villar) is also back, stuffing Christmas birds with cocaine for distribution. He sends his associate to snoop on Elliot because he wants to "partner" with him so that he can become "King of New York".
His associate sees the chance encounter between therapist Krista (Gloria Reuben) and Elliot, with Krista telling him to "leave her alone" because she is scared of him. Elliot is visibly hurt because Krista was the one who got him talking to Mr. Robot in the first place.
Krista will only regret taking Elliot on as her client in the past because Vera has now zeroed on to her as a potential source of information on Elliot to sway him to his side. In the meantime, Elliot is forced by Mr. Robot not to use blackmail but charm to get the authentication device Olivia has strung on her handbag.
The encounter leads to a connection and then sex (with a romantic soundtrack no less). Elliot's shell has cracked Olivia's vulnerability setting off a chain reaction within him.
But his insta-connection to her doesn't stop him from texting the authentication code to Darlene. In the morning, when he is on his way back to his "hacker HQ" in the abandoned Al Safe offices, he sees the Dark Army van trailing him and heads back home to find his apartment broken into.
It is Tyrell, who excitedly tells him he has been offered the "CEO" position in E Corp, giving him (and Elliot) the inside access they always wanted. Elliot unable to shut him up, hurriedly scrawls "They're listening", which means the Dark Army probably knows Elliot and Tyrell are in cahoots. And that's a big uh-oh.
'Mr. Robot' airs on the USA Network Sundays at 10/9c.
