'Mr Robot' Season 4 Episode 8 sees a broken Elliot giving up before the finish line while Dom puts on her hero cape
Spoilers ahead for Mr Robot Season 4 Episode 8 'Request Timeout'
The mind blocks that Mr Robot (Christian Slater) had put in Elliot's (Rami Malek) mind were gone when the 'Proxy Authentication Required' ended last week. Vera (Elliot Villar) was dead, his henchmen still outside the building, clueless. Krista (Gloria Rueben), after getting Elliot to finally remember his childhood abuse at his father's hands, has to deal with a shell-shocked patient.
She drags him through the emergency fire escape out of the building, into a taxi and to a police station before he speaks his first words. His blame is directed towards himself for not having "fought harder". From the corner of his eyes, he sees his child alter, looking at him silently.
While Gloria steps in to report the crime and about killing Vera, he follows his child alter, who takes him to the Queen's Museum where he had hidden something when he ran away from home with Angela. It turns out to be the key to Elliot's old bedroom that his father had once used to get in. The child Elliot reminds the now-adult Elliot that he had always fought back to keep the monster out.
While Elliot roams the Queens Museum weighed down by the mental trauma of remembering the events that shaped him, his sister Darlene (Carly Chaikin) and Dom (Grace Gummer) are at the not-so-tender mercies of Janice (Ashlie Atkinson).
After Janice holds court, commenting on the special relationship between the two, she stabs Dom in the lung and threatens to kill her whole family if Darlene doesn't give up his brother. Faced with an impossible choice, Darlene chooses to give up on her brother and give Janice what she wants.
Only, Elliot's phone is still lying on the street, knocked out of his hand by Vera and company when they kidnapped him. So Janice has to return to Plan B -- to kill Dom's mother. A wrench is thrown in her plans when she realizes that Deegan McGuire (Alex Morf) has killed her henchmen and saved Dom's family.
The rescue provides Dom with the opening she is looking for and she shoots to kill, including Janice. As she lies in a puddle of her own blood, barely alive, she urges Darlene to go find Elliot and "finish them (Dark Army and Whiterose) off" once and for all.
Back at Al Safe HQ, Elliot taps slowly as he tries to write the code to hack the Deus members' phone. He invites "Mr Robot" back into his space and apologizes for taking a "timeout". His emotionless voice is back but as Mr Robot tells him in very clear terms that he is "not his father" and that he will always protect him, Elliot breaks down crying.
It is heartbreaking to hear Elliot says he created Mr Robot to be the dad that his father wasn't. But the statement comes as a relief to viewers who thought Christian Slater's Mr Robot was not coming back.
We have said before that Mr Robot's final season seems to be reintegrating Elliot's broken psyche. At the heart of it, this season seems to be about Elliot's journey to becoming whole again. But will this process be too much for him? With the Deus Group hack just hours away, Elliot sobs "I can't do it" as Mr Robot places a gentle hand on his shoulder for support. Hopefully, Darlene knows enough about her brother to know he'll be back at the Al Safe HQ for the hack and will be able to track him down in next week's episode.
In the sneak peek scenes from next week, Angela fans have found a reason to rejoice. Whiterose (BD Wong) asks Elliot on the phone about her. So there is a chance that she'll be back. Price never did look back to see his daughter's body when he walked away after the gunshot. Could Angela (Portia Doubleday) be alive? Given that Tyrell Wellick made an appearance (via an E Corp advertisement) in this week's episode, we wonder if Sam Esmail "killed" them off-screen just to bring them back for thrills and chills in the last few episodes.
Mr Robot's next episode airs on December 1 on USA Network at 10/9c.