Mr Robot recap: season two, episode 10 – pass the smelling salts!
With romance, assassins and plans for world domination, we’re finally seeing the big picture – not to mention the even bigger conspiracy. And what an ending
She’s well acquainted with the touch of the velvet hand
Jeepers H Creepers, that was some ending. It felt like a revelation had been coming from the very start, with Terry Colby probing at Philip Price’s motivations, the mystery of Vincent’s beating, the hunt for Tyrell Wellick and Elliot’s encounter with “Claudia Kincaid”. As we moved through the show, the sense of foreboding grew until there they were – two men riding pillion on a motorbike, submachine guns in hand. I don’t think Darlene and Cisco are getting up from this one.
Dom DiPierro had smelled something in the air. She was sceptical of her boss Agent Santiago’s plan to give a photofit of Cisco to the media. She thought it would alert the Dark Army. Santiago scoffed at this, just as he scoffed at her feeling that the attack on the FBI in China deserved greater investigation. The photofit hit the news and, in an hour, Cisco had been shot by an assassin.
Obviously, events suggest an even greater level of conspiracy. How did the assassins know where to go? Dom herself had only worked out the pair’s location seconds before the killers arrived. Were they listening in on the FBI’s own comms? Did they get a tip-off from Santiago? One thing we do know is that they were suicide attackers in the same mode as the Chinese assailants. It seems unlikely that Dom will let the issue drop again.
Lying with his eyes while his hands are busy
We’re now getting a clearer sense of the big story at work. Partly it’s about E Coins. Evil Corp’s own crypto-currency is becoming more prevalent as the banking system continues to struggle. To symbolise this, we see a long queue at an ATM (though surely transactions would take just as long regardless of how much money was available to you?) and Mr Robot notes that the E Coin price of Elliot’s new laptop is much more attractive than the dollar price. My knowledge of macro economics is not quite to Nobel Laureate standard, but I’d imagine that once you control the money supply that’s a pretty significant boost to your power, if being the most powerful man in the world is your thing.
That, coincidentally, is Price’s very ambition, as he reveals to Colby in front of a German map tracing the outline of Europe before the first world war. Specifically, Price is motivated by being the most powerful person in the room. And there are only one or two rooms where he does not feel that way. It’s unclear whether the Oval Office is included in this list. Certainly Price feels confident that he can, via Colby, persuade America’s ambassador to the United Nations to vote against his country’s interests and his president’s wishes by abstaining on a vote that would see China annex the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Yes, that came out of nowhere.
Annexing is usually something you do to a country next to you, or indeed the end of your house. But China’s influence in Africa, in the real world, is well documented and so while the leap may be a dramatic one, I’ll go with it. A lot of the rationale behind China’s diplomatic expansion into Africa has been about securing natural resources for Chinese industry. Congo is one of the world’s richest countries in terms of mineral resource (just a bit of a bugger it’s buried under all that rainforest). In Mr Robot, it seems, that hunger for resource is also consistent with WhiteRose’s ambitions, including her wish that the Washington Plant keep running for example. We may not yet know for what end, but there is a strategy emerging. The (great) game is afoot.
Mother Superior jump the gun
To put it mildly, we’re not used to seeing Elliot as a romantic lead. So to see him get clammy under the collar with not one but two women this week? Someone tell the sysadmin to pass me the smelling salts.
To be fair, I’m not entirely sure how much influence Joanna Wellick’s potent sexuality had on our hero. Yes he went on to establish the source of her deep breathing phone calls, but I think that was more to do with the glowering presence of Mr Sutherland than Wellick fixing Elliot with a lingering look. In fact, during their moment together I was expecting Elliot to give it the “Are you trying to seduce me Mrs Wellick?” treatment, but sadly, no dice.
Now that’s to one side, let’s concentrate on the childhood sweethearts finally acknowledging their feelings for each other with a fleeting kiss on the subway. Angela is a long way from the innocent woman we met at the beginning of season one. Elliot was never who we thought he was in the first place. Any romance between the pair seems unlikely therefore, but blow me down if I wasn’t cheering them on as they smooched. In a series where almost everything ends up corrupted (including the hard drives) it was nice to feel a flicker of innocent hope. Not that it seems likely to last. When Elliot steps off the carriage, Angela is confronted by a silent couple whose faces we don’t see. Such encounters don’t normally end well.
Order v Chaos rating: 8
I’m marking it down as the same as last week because, while there’s an ominous sense of things being on the verge of collapse, there’s no tangible evidence of things being worse. In fact, a pharmacy appears to be offering extended opening hours (to a sum total of four). Ok, it’s pretty bad, but I need to leave some room lest things get even worse.
Self harm index: green
The question is not so much what Mr Robot is doing to Elliot, but where is Mr Robot? He disappears in the computer store and doesn’t return, much to Elliot’s confusion. Angela warns Elliot not to “trick yourself into thinking you can work with him.” But the question seems to be more, can he work without him?
Questions for you to answer
Why annex the Congo when you could just go on crafting favourable trade deals without running the risk of war? Where does Angela go next? There’s no chance anyone’s survived this attack right? What was Mr Robot looking for at home? And, yes, where precisely is Tyrell Wellick?
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